Originally Posted by Bronco300
that is awesome! i love your rocks, i think i have to try this too! lol...what kind of sand did you use? then just mix it with cement and water and presto...whew, so easy...did you have to set it in any mold, i could really tell if you had one in your pics...sorry to pester, but i love the look you have, and it would be great to be able to mold your own rocks, and they seem to be doing great.
and did you find your little fishy friend online somewhere? i have been wanting one of those, i think they look great :joy: thanks!!
i use two kindsof sand. regular playsand and reef sand.
when making the first rocks i was really paranoid and used only reef sand, but then after a few years i tried play sand. the only thing i do different is with the play sand i let it cure for 8 or more weeks. i cure my rocks by placing them in a large container of fresh water and i change out the water twice a week for the first 3 weeks and then once a week after that. in the final weeks i take the water that i get from doing the water changes on our tanks and use that to help seed it. we also begin lighting the rocks as well to start the coralline growing.
as for mold no i never used a mold before. if you look if the first picks you can see that i take a container and fill it with sand. i wet the sand and mold out what i want then poor the portland/sand mix into it. i then pack sand on top of it. and mold more cement over the top of that in the form i want. then in the second pic you can see i brushed away all the sand and then packed it on again to do the 3rd level.. kinda hard to explain but there is NOTHING complicated. its very basic. to make hole you do the same thing but we make a tunnel in the sand first. i have the added bonus that my wife is an artist and does sculpting so she has the abbility to mold great shapes. another trick we have is if you look at our 6th pick you will see what looks like coraline. that is nothing more then white portalnd cement and dark purple Ritz clothing dye.we use white portland because it takes the color better. we make the rocks out of the normal portland and then mix up small batches of white. we add dye to the white until it matches the coraline color we are looking for. then we put it on the rocks we made in patches to give it a more natural look until the real coraline starts to grow. an odd observation we made is that the real coralline grew first on the dyed parts of the rock. we also noticed that the coralline grew much faster on the home made rock then it did the natural rock.
