nautical_nathaniel
Indecision may or may not be my problem.
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Reef Tank 365
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West Palm Beach Reefer
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To start things off, I will go over why I wanted to do this project. You see, I am limited on the space I have for my reefing hobby and I also want to get in to collecting high-end zoas and other corals to eventually be able to sale them as frags. Prior to this project, I only had an IM Nuvo 20 aquarium and a few acrylic frag racks.
I didn't like how the frag racks on the sides of the aquariums would skew the growth of the zoas to the side closest to the light and I also didn't want to put the racks on the front of the aquarium. It occurred to me one day that I could put them in the middle of the tank on the sand but that wouldn't work for very long before my pistol shrimp would be using the frags for burrow decorations but I still didn't want to give up on the sand bed idea...
I figured that I could move some stuff around an open up a pretty good amount of space:
So I went ahead and ordered some materials and went to planning:
I got in some of the new Stax Rocks sold by Two Little Fishies sourced through Marco Rocks as well as some standard egg crat/light diffuser in black:
I laid out the rocks and went to figuring out how I wanted put everything together:
I didn't have a whole lot of tools on hand for this project so I went to Harbor Freight and spent $22 on a cheap variable speed rotary tool. I figured if I burnt the motor up working on this it would be better to be out of $22 rather than $80 with an actual dremel
As I worked I quickly figured out that the tool tips that came with the rotary tool were not going to do much of anything to the rock so I had to go out and buy a set of actual Dremel cutting wheels. Dremel makes a diamond wheel that would have made this project much easier and quicker, but the wheel and the speed lock holder tip together were around $35 and I felt like I had already spent enough on something that may not work the way I needed it to:
I didn't like how the frag racks on the sides of the aquariums would skew the growth of the zoas to the side closest to the light and I also didn't want to put the racks on the front of the aquarium. It occurred to me one day that I could put them in the middle of the tank on the sand but that wouldn't work for very long before my pistol shrimp would be using the frags for burrow decorations but I still didn't want to give up on the sand bed idea...
I figured that I could move some stuff around an open up a pretty good amount of space:
So I went ahead and ordered some materials and went to planning:
I got in some of the new Stax Rocks sold by Two Little Fishies sourced through Marco Rocks as well as some standard egg crat/light diffuser in black:
I laid out the rocks and went to figuring out how I wanted put everything together:
I didn't have a whole lot of tools on hand for this project so I went to Harbor Freight and spent $22 on a cheap variable speed rotary tool. I figured if I burnt the motor up working on this it would be better to be out of $22 rather than $80 with an actual dremel
As I worked I quickly figured out that the tool tips that came with the rotary tool were not going to do much of anything to the rock so I had to go out and buy a set of actual Dremel cutting wheels. Dremel makes a diamond wheel that would have made this project much easier and quicker, but the wheel and the speed lock holder tip together were around $35 and I felt like I had already spent enough on something that may not work the way I needed it to: