Hi all
There have been lots and lots and lots of threads about fake rocks, lately, so, I thought I would toss this up real quick...
We started off with a hare-brained idea of mine, of using insulating foam sheets as the basis for a building material. It's lightweight, and rigid, but, can be semi-difficult to attach branches to... And, of course, water could be a big issue... So, fiberglass... Worked pretty well, except for the minor detail that the foam crushes pretty easily when attaching the branches, and we ended up encasing the whole thing in a thin shell of wood. All in all, it worked out pretty well, though the fiberglassing was butt-ugly...
So, we decided to paint the fiberglass and pretty it up a bit. 2 cans of Krylon camo paint (I liked the idea of ultra-flat finish) and we had a dull khaki/drab green motteld background that worked pretty well, though everything looked pretty grey in there, especially with the driftwood and the *grey* rat snake inside... Time to play...
Decided to try the fake rock approach, just monkeying around with the spray foam to give some shapes and textures... We dumped most of a can of Great Stuff in there and got corners nicely sealed, as well as some blobs on the walls. Just before the stuff dried, I stood the terrarium up and the foam sagged, creating an almost cave-like water-sculpted drippy look... Wasn't intentional, but, we liked it...
Step whichever, get dirty with tile grout. We skipped the gloves and went straight for the get grubby with the hands (the stuff washes off easily) and had a blast... Tile grout got slapped all over the interior, completely coating everything but the screen at the top and the brances, which were still glued into place. We also used the grout to smooth over areas where snake poop could collect & make cleaning a nightmare. That was allowed to set for a week. before we worried about any futher steps.
Once the grout cured, fully, we started with the painting (after masking off the branches, door tracks, screen, and outer wood shell). We decided on a contrasting color of primer to act as an undercoat for the rock. The rust-red primer made by rustoleum worked nicely for us. Once that dried (for the most part, it was dry in about 40 minutes) we added the first can of Fleck-Stone green granite. That dried for a goodish while. We left it for the afternoon, while we went and got a second can, having discovered that the first can was nowhere near adequate for what we wanted to do; it was dry when we got back, so, we sprayed the second can.
That sat overnight before we slapped on the tile grout sealer. The stuff we got is a silicon emulsion in water. It makes everything look really pale until it dries... This is OK... Let it look pale; when it dries, it's nice and clear. It's low-odor, and we're now waiting out this week for curing before we stick slinky-girl back in there...
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Justin, Julie and the menagerie...
www.baskingwonders.com
