Waterbox 130.4 Build Thread

[CRD23]

Looking great. Will be tracking this thread. I am setting up my first saltwater tank a 40 G breeder in my Home Office. Right behind where I sit. Would love to see anything home office specific.

 

[techytechguy]

So I did the aquasacape finally after being lazy for many months.

I was lucky one day to walk in to the local fish store and find real reef rock that is so hard to get these days. Probably someone had broken down their tank and sold the rock to the LFS. Crazy thing is that they were selling it for the same price as the mined or man-made rock ... $2.99 per pound. Needless to say, I scooped up all of it. It is so porous and so cool to see how it slowly grew in a reef over decades. There are real clams and other critters embedded in the rock.

So, I used most of that reef rock, some flat base pieces and some mined macro rock to make the scape. It is a HNSA (i know everyone hates that) but made sure to make tons of little caves and nooks for the fish to hide in. I used a mixture of BRS technique with epoxy and then strengthened and covered it with crushed macro rock powder and super thin superglue.

Here are the two videos for your reference.




Get lots of epoxy from two little fishies and the thin glue from gluemasters (blue bottle), some thicker glue and glue accelerator (I use this to temporarily hold the joint while I apply epoxy). For crushing the rock to make the powder, I tried the hammer and mortar and pestle but that is a lot of work. I sacrificed one of the bullet blender jar and bought a replacement one for my wife later ($14 on amazon). A lot of syringes for squirting the thin glue. I used the lid of the box that Waterbox aquarium came in as a base which also gave me the size. I stuck a wood dowel in there to set the max height.

It took me a week to build it slowly allowing the epoxy to solidify in steps overnight. Now it is really strong. I can lift it, flip it, etc and it doesn't break. Even when it broke a couple of times during the build, it broke from the porous reef rock, not the epoxy joints.

 

[Daniel@R2R]

So I did the aquasacape finally after being lazy for many months.

I was lucky one day to walk in to the local fish store and find real reef rock that is so hard to get these days. Probably someone had broken down their tank and sold the rock to the LFS. Crazy thing is that they were selling it for the same price as the mined or man-made rock ... $2.99 per pound. Needless to say, I scooped up all of it. It is so porous and so cool to see how it slowly grew in a reef over decades. There are real clams and other critters embedded in the rock.

So, I used most of that reef rock, some flat base pieces and some mined macro rock to make the scape. It is a HNSA (i know everyone hates that) but made sure to make tons of little caves and nooks for the fish to hide in. I used a mixture of BRS technique with epoxy and then strengthened and covered it with crushed macro rock powder and super thin superglue.

Here are the two videos for your reference.




Get lots of epoxy from two little fishies and the thin glue from gluemasters (blue bottle), some thicker glue and glue accelerator (I use this to temporarily hold the joint while I apply epoxy). For crushing the rock to make the powder, I tried the hammer and mortar and pestle but that is a lot of work. I sacrificed one of the bullet blender jar and bought a replacement one for my wife later ($14 on amazon). A lot of syringes for squirting the thin glue. I used the lid of the box that Waterbox aquarium came in as a base which also gave me the size. I stuck a wood dowel in there to set the max height.

It took me a week to build it slowly allowing the epoxy to solidify in steps overnight. Now it is really strong. I can lift it, flip it, etc and it doesn't break. Even when it broke a couple of times during the build, it broke from the porous reef rock, not the epoxy joints.

Looking good!