Need advice about aquascaping with LR...

[swordfish]

I have had roughly three rough, contigously shaped pieces of LR (total of 15 pounds) in my (thus far) fish-only 7 bow since I established the tank. No corals yet. The thing is that I just never could get those three LR pieces to look quite, well, right. The rock placement most of you have looks so much better than mine, as though in my tank there is just something more to be desired. Since these tanks are all about beauty, I need some advice.

 

I have decided that I can do without roughly 5 pounds of the rock, to start with. A day ago I laid one of the rocks on some clean sidewalk and used a chisel and hammer to pretty easily break it in twain. I am going to get rid of one of those chunks. The tank can do without it and I need the real estate. I also plan on breaking up the remaining three pieces into a few smaller ones, thusmore than making up for the lost surface area of that one chunk and giving me some options as far as arrangement goes. But how do I arrange them?

 

Should I have one central, large chunk in the middle and then a few smaller chunks of rock around it? Should I break them all into equally sized pieces and then stack them however? I have found, looking at most of y'all's tanks (I am from Texas) that it seems most pleasing to the eye when the rock is piled no higher than half the inside height of the tank, allowing the eye to become "lost" in the background color above the rock, sort of. If you have any design philosophy or guidelines that work for you, please share it with me!

 

Oh, and if you live in Austin or San Marcos, please get in touch with me at swordfish@grXXXandecom.net. Remove the X'x before sending.

 

Jeff

[EdgeKrusher]

Well You're off to a good start. Breaking them up, specailly for a 7g minibow is a good idea. but you should have several larger peices to prop the smaller ones on. do all this before you fill with sand. that way the rocks wont shift when the sand does, and it will. just my 2 cents.

[seabass]

I also found that 10 lbs for a MiniBow 7 is about right; especially if you want room for your fish to swim. I agree that you can break up your pieces, but don’t get carried away.:| I'll sometimes chip off an edge that is preventing me from putting a piece where I want it. I don’t know that anyone is perfectly satisfied with how their rocks fit together, but that helps make your tank unique.

 

There is no right way to aquascape except that you need to make it stable or the rock will tumble. There are epoxy products that can also be used if necessary, but that will prevent rearranging them later. Keep the larger rocks toward the bottom for stability and give yourself enough room to clean the glass.

 

Once you are basically satisfied, try to leave it alone (which can be hard to do). Also remember that many of your corals will come on rocks, some might be relatively large. I find that everything I put in my tank looks huge compared to how it looked at the LFS.

[offsprg01]

i didn't in my 5.5 and about half of the glass was alwasy covered by algae that my clean up crew couldn't get to and neither could i.

 

so when i moved over to a 10 gallon i made sure to leave enough room all the way round for my mini mag to fit. (about 1.5 to 2 inches) also keeps the rocks from scratching the glass.

 

design wise, i;d make sure to have caves and overhangs. that seems to look best imho.

[EdgeKrusher]

Defenitly have caves. Your fish or shrimp need someplace to chill out once in a while. And shrimp love to hang upside down in a cave. I had to use the epoxy stuff in my tank for some of my rockwork. It's ok doesn't bond verywell IMO. but it at least forms a more solid base to support the rock. But whatever you choose, once you have it set up, don't touch it, but make sure everything is as solidly in place as you can get it.