Aquascaping

T

Tinyfish

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I need to aquascape one of my 58g tanks. I have watched the presentation on the subject. What I don't remember is about how to make the holes in the live rock for the PVC pipe to go through it. The other thing is about the selection and placement of each individual rock. All I can think of to help me is to lay all the rock on the floor at once and try different pieces together by hand before drilling the holes.

What if I make a mistake and don't like the rock placement? Can I drill more holes?

What size of PVC piping should I be using?
 
Acrylic Rods is my choice as it is stiff and thin. Depends on the rock type, some you need to use a mason drill bit and I have also used a wood hole bit on reals soft rock to make holes for frag plugs. Drilling more holes is not a issue as they will crust over and not be seen and can be used to hold frags. you can use putty to temp hold the pieces before you drill to make sure you like the look.
 
acrylic rods. I think the real rock is hard to drill thru, the Marco rocks are pretty easy. Titus did a beautiful job drilling & landscaping his rock. Maybe he'll pop in & give you some advice. I just did a couple rocks (I've since removed the rods) , so I can still move most of my rock as I need to redecorate & remodel!
 
If you are not making some elaborate setup where you are putting corals all around an object or trying to make a specific shape. I would just go old school and just stack the rock without all the extra effort.
 
Get some nice tonga branch and slab rock, nice big pieces. That's what I did, even use a piece of holey rock.
 
I use superglue gel. It bonds like you wouldn't believe. They sell big tubes of it at craft stores. And when I say bond I mean it. I tack a few places to play around but when I figure it out and apply a fair amount it's solid as a.... Well yeah a rock.
 
I had a very specific look I wanted so I used a combination of different methods including good old zip ties to keep from having rock slides. I bought a masonry drill bit but ended up using Marco Rocks mortar for most of the pieces I put together. I liked filling-in gaps with the mortar so the rock looked like a natural piece even though I was combining different types of rock.

You can get a big piece of cardboard or mark the floor off with some masking tape to replicate the footprint of your tank and mess around with placement and all that good stuff outside the tank which makes it a lot easier . . . assuming you are working with dry rock. If you have any idea of what you want it to look like in your mind or based of photos you can then cut and piece things together until you get the look you want.
 
I also did all Marco rocks work acrylic rods. Worked like a dream. I used a piece of egg crate underneath the sand and rock to zip tie the rock to so that it could lean without falling over. While you're drilling you might as well drill the top of the structure all over so that you can mount your corals with the pegging technique if you like.
 
You can get acrylic rods at Home Depot. I used the ones that have a red reflector on top that are used to mark driveways, electric boxes, etc
 
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