Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Any body out there have any techniques of creating faux rock formations, bowls, waterfalls etc. I have checked out the tutorial on Treemonitors.com and that was great for cement, is there anyone who knows of other sites or methods. Would like to here from chris harper and or matt campbell. Any input or links would be great.

thanks in advance

Chris

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Chris, my wife Mary
a dog, two cats, two birds, six snakes
oh and three kids

Well, the cement method is what I use, and if done properly can be maed to look and actually "feel" just like real rock. However, it depends on how much money and patients your willing to put into other methods. If your familar with using fiberglass, u could do that, just make a clay form of whatever yuor trying to make, lay the layers of fiberglass over it, slap your resin ( spelt wrong I think, but I'm half asleep right now ) and then your hardener stuff, and just keep repeating that process till you get it as thick as you need it to be and voila! It's a pain to clean up or off of things you don't want it to be on when working with it, and can be exspensive on the larger sized projects to use, one of the reason why I use concrete/mesh method. Do a DIY fiberglassing search online, good luck!!

what???clay? okay, try a latex skin or such but first study rocks, geology books are great then buy a trowle, and plastic cement.
we hand pack our stone work or buy panels. handpacking is easy for smaller vivariums and you can still get much better results that that monitor site for many reasons.
if you use a top coat sealer, expect it to fail in the first year and if it's eat, a possible dr bill. use a pigment in your vivarium mortar or cement and wash with an acid stain or vinegar
and seal with a penitrating NO-VOC sealer like ours or other brand. this type of sealer will soak in, not set on top.
also, to get the rock contour, either like i said, make molds or
just start creating. artifial stonework is fun, easy and if you learn a bit faster them most, you can create anything. the problem most face is imbedding natural hardscape like roots in it to get a more real effect.

home

Deven, the person above me was asking for different options besides using concrete. The clay was ment to used as a positive mold, ment to lay the fiberglass over it, giving the fiberglass something to form to while it was hardening, it's messy work but the end results are light weight and very strong if you do it right. Thanks for your additional info on concrete work, I've been using a similar technique to the one you mentioned, minus a few steps and adding additional ones.

Chris,

Sorry, I didn't reply to this sooner - I just happened to look into the post and saw that you were calling on me and Chris Harper in particular. Anyway, I've done a good bit of searching myself on this topic. A few sites to look at for good how-to info are:

Zoopoxy/Polygem epoxies
http://www.polygem.com/zoo/zoopoxy.php

Bob/Odiatriad site regarding faux rock construction with concrete
http://www.treemonitors.com/diyfauxrock.html

Additionally, just doing a Google search for fake rock along with other keywords such as pond, aquarium, fiberglass, concrete, etc. can net you a lot of results.
This site isn't entirely realistic, but you can apply the techniques to a better laid out rock design
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/diy_aquarium_background.php
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Matt Campbell
25 years herp keeping experience
Full-time zookeeper
Personal collection - 21 snakes (9 genera), 20 lizards (4 genera), 6 chelonians (2 genera)