I decided to try a technique called "live framing" for my 110g tank that involved hanging live rock on a PVC frame. The technique was featured in a Saltwater Aquarium USA magazine a few years ago, and it seemed like a good idea for a tall tank like a 110. I took some pictures of it in my photobucket account while I was building:
In Progress Build Pics.
Also here's a couple of recent pics. The corals in
this pic have been removed before i took
this one in preparation for sale.
Also, here's a
pic or
two of some closer shots of the matured dry rock. It took about a year for the rock to purple up..... I had a phosphate problem that resulted in a major turf algae issue for a long time...took the addition of a GFO reactor to really drive the problem down to what you see here.
This process is nice, but very time-consuming and requires a lot of planning. The benefits of it include the ability to remove individual rocks from the frame, and the ability to use true "live rock" as well as base rock like tufa. You can see I used a combination of both in building this. One of the downsides is seeing more of the PVC than you may want to.... even though it colors up pretty quickly, it's still obvious that it isn't natural.
The next project I tried was an idea I came up with involving the foam that people use for back walls with the live frames seen above. Instead of individually hanging each rock on a PVC frame, I foamed the rock in against the pvc tubes. This gave me the advantage of being able to hide the pvc completely, and the foam between the rock can be carved to look like rock as well. You can see an example of the foam-frame technique in my
seahorse tank thread, and also in
these two
pics of a new setup in my cousin's tank. His two columns were different; I showed some of the pvc so I could cut caves out of the tubes which his fish love.
I like the foam-framing idea a little more, but it has some drawbacks - you have to use base rock for the whole column because it has to be exposed to air while the foam dries. Also, you can't just remove one rock if you wanted to - they're pretty glued in there once the foam is cured.
