Large rocks for large tanks

[plantbrain]

One of the main challenges for the scapers in the USA is finding good high grade rock, well, trying to find it for larger tanks, near impossible. It's just not highly valued here. This is good because this means a a nice rock will be cheap, bad because you have to spend a lot of time searching the massive amount of stone for a good rock.

I was out looking for rock today and found some larger stones that had some good appeal for the 200-400 Gallon tank size, such stones are incredibly hard to come by.

The tape measures are 2 meters x 1 meter wide. This is the client's tank foot print, another is 240 cm x 40cm, so if the client does not like these, I have a backup for another client and we will keep these stones for the annual rescaping I do for them.

Seiryu stones are tougher, Ohko are even harder than that.
I also found some very nice Black Utah lava at the right scale with awesome character, these can be made easily into Uzon stone that ADA has been promoting recently.
But they are about 20 cents a pound and local.
I bought 360 lbs of the seiryu stone.

This is a quick plop down for the scape idea that the client loosely wanted:


Black lava:

Top view




Once the sediment is in place, the sloping is pretty good with such stones, they provide much better retention than many other methods.
So some rather tall slopes can be achieved with these rocks.
Sediment can also better position the stones higher, lower, at the right types of angles, hide parts of the stone. I'll use super glue and rubber sheet for the bottom to protect the glass.
That can be cut off later once the tank is torn down and the rock is used for other scapes etc. Better than foam and light weight stuff that end up everywhere and shifts, once glued, it's not going anywhere.

 

[G H Nelson]

Great Stuff Tom.
One of those large stones would look great.... as a single feature in a smaller aquarium.
hoggie

 

[plantbrain]

Yes, but the scale will look dramatic in a 200 cm L x 100cm W x 60cm T tank. Which is where this set is going.

Black Lava is very similar to the ADA stone Amano is hocking these days.
Unzan stone is pretty much black lava.

 

[foxfish]

Hi Tom please show us the finished tank....

 

[plantbrain]

Hi Tom please show us the finished tank....

I will, it's for a client in Florida who's learned a lot, so he's certainly ready for this.
Finding and sourcing rock is one reason why we rarely see larger tanks done with it.
I'll be working more and more with stone in the coming few years.

I also have some insane driftwood plans for a piece I've spotted. It'll be for a big tank.

 

[plantbrain]

I should mosey out to see about some of the rock tomorrow and I'm focused more on the Lava rock for now.
ADA's "Unzan stone" is horrifically overpriced for what it is. I know in the UK, you lack much Lava, but, we have it coming out the volcano's not far from where I live along with all sorts of stone and deep river valley's cutting through the mountain strata.
It's not a lack of Geology here, it's a lack of someone going out and finding it for aesthetics.

 

[viktorlantos]

Great looking stones there, but i may would turn them to point upwards.

 

[plantbrain]

Great looking stones there, but i may would turn them to point upwards.

They'd be 60-90 cm tall and if one fell or got tipped, they'd break the tank(and it's a client's , not mine, and he might knock it over). Balancing them is not nearly at the same level as a dinky little 120 cm tank using a 10kg rock. Placing a 50-60 kg stone with poor balance upwards on a small area would be asking/begging for trouble.
It also is not how they would lay in a natural setting. Few stones look that way naturally. The client wanted a series of craggy ridges with some lower maintenance foreground type plants. Some of the rocks might be good more upright, but for photographic purposes, this is just what was laid out on the foot print for the tank.

I could provide safety and supports for such steeper angles, but the tank is not that tall that these rocks will be going into(about 50cm).
Additionally, the sediment and smaller support stones will use the bulk of the rocks longer, lengthwise character, but add height and slope as needed.
Many of the rocks will be relatively close to the surface in the final scape. I enjoy impossible looking rock positions. But........this often looks artificial as well. Getting it to look natural and impossible can be a hard balance to find.

Thanks for the comment, I'll play around quite a bit with various designs before we pour the soil in and plant.

I have some similar sized piece of Ohko stone in another client's tank I redid a couple of weeks ago. Not quite as big as these, but close. They wanted to keep the big piece of driftwood though, so it's hard to work around that with large stones and I could not set the tank up dry or remove fish etc. I also had a 3 hour window of time to do whatever I needed to get done, so there's a lot of constraints with clients. But over time, I can adjust and change things and after 1-2 years, they often want to redo things and I get another chance to redo it a better way.

Just the way it goes.

 

[plantbrain]

I got a pallet of the Black Lava, will post some tomorrow perhaps.
Also got another 350 kg worth of the seiryu larger sizes. One stone is 100cm x 20cm x 30cm maybe 75 kg alone.

Would make some nice landscaping garden stone for a rock garden.

 

[flygja]

20 cents a pound is cheap. ADA Yamaya/Ryu are sold at something like US$5 per kilo where I'm from! Hard to find big cheap rocks.

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
Like the rocks, they remind me of a great series of tanks on PlanetCatfish by a Norwegian Harvaard Stoere. Unfortunately un-planted, but this is one with L200.

I know in the UK, you lack much Lava, but, we have it coming out the volcano's not far from where I live

It is just where it is located, we actually have quite a lot of lava away from the S. of the UK. I went to Canna (Inner Hebrides) a couple of years ago, which is an all basalt island, and that basalt flow ("British Tertiary Volcanic Province") extends from W. Scotland (Eigg, some of Skye, Arran etc) right across N. Ireland (Antrim, Giant's Causeway etc) and across the Atlantic to Greenland (60,000,000 BP the Atlantic Ocean was just forming and W. Europe and N. America were still in contact <North Atlantic Igneous Province - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia>).

cheers Darrel

 

[plantbrain]

Darrel,
You folks should really take a look around your areas to source this and other materials. There's plenty of rock, but finding some you can take and are suited to your taste is quite another matter.

Most stone used for Japanese styles are NOT textured, but are smoother, like the example you show above. The ragged look? Much more a Chinese type styling.
The planted lava Unzan stone very much the bonsai equivalent of penjing(Chinese) Saikei(Japanese), hòn non bộ (Viet) or Forest planting. A quick search will show where much of the general ideas came from.
The bonsai folks here locally do this all the time.

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
I like both the smooth and ragged look. A lot of our naturally occurring rock outcrops will be smoothed off, mainly because it rains here all the time.

You get knobbly Sarsen sandstone on the Chalk downs locally, but I'm pretty sure it isn't exploited commercially any more. There are also out-crops of older quartzite that are naturally fairly rugged. <Sarsen Stones and Erratics of the Wessex Coast; Geology of the Wessex Coast Field Guides>, and at least one area of Silurian basalt (Moon's Hill Quarry, E. Mendips) that is quarried, but all for road stone.

Quarrying at Moon’s Hill has exposed a 300–400m thick sequence of andesites, rhyodacites, tuffs and agglomerates which are sandwiched between tuffaceous shales and mudstones. ....This igneous suite represents the sole example of Wenlock-aged volcanic rocks (other than bentonites) in England.

There must be more interesting non-calcareous rocks that are both quarried and available commercially (Whin-sill Dolerite?), but I'm not sure what or where. My suspicion would that nearly all the hard rock quarries are for aggregate.

cheers Darrel

 

[plantbrain]

I have big stones.
This 1st one is a bear to lift for me.
At least 200lbs, but the scale only goes to 300lbs with me on it, it's well over.

Not one of these is under 60-70 lbs and that's only a coupe, the rest are in the 100-150 lbs range.

 

[plantbrain]

BTW, this stuff is incredibly difficult to fragment or break.

Small pieces are bad enough, but a 20-30 cm thick piece?

 

[plantbrain]

The two rear pieces are in excess of 100lbs each. Not easy to move around, but easier to shape and trim, place, etc than the seiryu.
Easier to get taller vertical height.
This stone has plenty of natural variations that allow for planters without chisling etc, but it can be chiseled.
Nicer than I thought it would be actually.
I like working with this stone more than Seiryu.

 

[Mortis]

My god those rocks are awesome ! As well as all the many in the background ! Unfortunately its veryhard to find good aquascaping rocks here in India even though Im sure we probably have some great stuff out there. I picked up a nice set of lava rocks from around here some time ago but they are smoother, more rounded rather than the branchy rough type that you have above. They have a few small shallow holes in them [probably caused by rain ?]
You are right Tom, people dont really see any 'value' in rocks unless they contain an ore or something

Are those monsters from a rock quarry ? Are the rocks for landscaping or for something else ?

 

[plantbrain]

Any region in the north or the Southern Ghats likely have plenty of nice lava.
Dry desert like regions or vertical elevation helps. Flat over grown agricultural land, cities, not so good. .

 

[Mortis]

Yup I picked these up in the Western Ghats which border the Deccan Plateau that used to be a huge volcano (possibly the one that erupted killing of the dinosaurs). Are the Seiryu & Ryuoh stones a type of shale ? What about the really expensive Manten stones

 

[gmartins]

I can access all sorts of lava / basalt of all shapes, sizes, smooth or textured, red or black, with or without olivines, with or without volcanic glass, etc... here (azores)... the problem is that it's the only thing you'll find around here... and you know what they say, we always want what we don't have