Aquascaping is much harder than it looks

Just so you know its perfectly fine if the rock touches air You would actually be fine to leave it out for up to an hour in most cases (assuming there is no coral).
Easiest way to do it is to pull all of it out of the tank, and do it on the floor in front of the tank. Once it's done, assemble it in the tank. Makes the work a lot easier.

 

really!? i thought it would be bad for the rock to touch air, when moving the rock under the brace i kinda freaked out for a second because a little bit of rock touched air. I thought it was bad for the rock. lol gah i wish i would have known that earlier

 

It's only "bad" if left out for a while. It won't have any material impact if taken out for a little bit. It is much easier to aquascape when you can take some of the rock out. You can also try to set up a small tank to temporarily hold the rock. I used an extra 10 gallon tank laying around. The water really shouldn't be clouding up to where you can't see the rock, unless of course you are really moving the sand around. If there is a lot of detritus coming off of the rock, you may want to look into more flow so that it doesn't settle and it gets picked up by the filtration.

 

yea the water was like mud. I plan to get the maxijett mods for more flow as i know theres not enough. But that will have to wait for when i get my credit card down

 

Flow is very important.

If the water was like mud from re-doing your aquascape - and not having any fish until yesterday - that's not good. I could redo my entire tank and it would be a bit cloudy from sand disturbance but there's hardly any detritus on the rocks.

 

yea, i don't plan to get any corals for a while, thankfully so all i have to worry about is the fish, and that's also why i wanted to re-do my aquascape now so i wouldn't have to worry about the corals

 

also check out my other thread, you can see what i did

 

My scape collapsed last month.. it was a wall like yours.. now it's nice and stable.. what a pain.. i think I almost cried when it collapsed. Took me two hours to rearrange!! Woke my girlfriend up.. her eyes bugged out of her head.. "What happened!?" then she passed back out instantly..lol head slammed back into the pillow. This was 2 am..

 

If you need to, you can break up some of the big pieces to make several smaller pieces.

 

Oh man that is scary. I've been thinking about epoxing the rocks especially because of earthquakes. It stays up when my house shakes when trains go buy. But if we have a big earthquake I'm screwed