Foamback reef tank

Here is part of the live rock that I used, remember that you need lots and lots of small pieces, maybe 2x3 in order to cover a large area and to make it look realistic. I ended up busting most of this LR into small chunks using a hammer and screwdriver.



Again, being organized is KEY TO MAKING THIS PROJECT WORK, YOU DON'T HAVE MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES TO APPLY LR AND DUST WITH SAND.
Here is the busted up LR, I already have a good idea where each piece is going to go and tried to lay them out in a logical order.



Once you apply the foam and I mean IMMEDIATELY, then you want to dust the entire area of foam with some fine sand or crushed coral, this will give you more of a rough surface and make it more natural looking, otherwise the foam will continue to expand and leaves a very smooth, rounded surface.


Now I'm just about ready to start the foam process, got my live rock pieces on the right and bowl of sand to dust the foam with on the left. The other thing you have to do is lay the tank on it's back in order to do the back wall. This allows you to position the live rock pieces wherever you want without them wanting to slide down the wall, once your done, you have to let it sit for atleast 1 hour.

 

Wow,....I actually thought this would turn out to be another disaster, but it's really easy to use the foam and the results are pretty freaking amazing.

I'm jumping the gun a little bit by posting this picture out of sequence, but it's almost done.

Still have to finish the platform under the overflow and finish the bottom of the tank, should take me about another 45 minutes..

The key to applying the foam is to work in small areas, maybe 8"sq, apply the foam, let it expand, dust with sand then lay the LR where you want it and let it sit, the foam will expand around the LR and will need to be trimmed, that a little later in this thread, but for now it looks pretty good, once it dries I carve and remove about 40% of the foam.
The glass on the back of the tank looks like it's speckled, thats just sand from me dusting the foam, once it's tilted up it'll clean up.

 

Pictures don't do this project justice..There are tons of ledges and areas to stuff coral frags, along with about a dozen caves. The overflow I thought was going to be impossible to hide, but you simple don't even realize it's stuffed in there due to the way I designed the foam-scaping. There is a lot of depth to the rockwork, but the pictures make it look flat. Here are some higher resolution images, you can see how the sand sticks to the foam, helps to hide it and will also make it easier for coarline algae to cover the foam.

Just about finished, only have a small area to cover with foam, then let it all dry and then I'll start carving and sculpting the background.

 

Part of what I learned was the 1st phase is to get your basic background installed, then detail the background, remove excess foam, correct any gaps or flaws in the foam. 2nd phase is to them go back over the foam-scaping with larger more interesting pieces of liverock, using the foam you simply glue them into place and you start to build up the visual depth of foam-scaping. Tomorrow I trim all the excess foam and will start adding the next round of live rock.

 

For anybody whos thinking about doig a project like this, it's a heck of a lot easier to do than it looks. I'm still kinda in shock at how well this looks (not being arrogant) Just follow the basic directions and you can't really go wrong, if an area gets messed up, you simply let it dry for 24hours then cut the area out with a serrated knife and then start over.

There is almost noway to mess this up, kinda fun....try it on a small project. Heck you don't even have to use a real aquarium, you could do a test using a carboard box.....

My little brain is spinning with ideas, I've got 2 nano's that are in need of an ExtremeFoam Makeover

Did some shopping around and as usual True Value hardware has the best price for this kinda stuff.

 

Time to start trimming excess foam and do the detail work.
1st was the overflow, The foam tends to keep expanding overnight, to trimthe foam use a serrated knife or saw blade, very easy to cut. One of the things I've found is that to keep it looking natural, cut away as much as spossible with a knife and then use your fingers to pinch out small areas, this makes the surface much more rough and textured.

Here is the top of the overflow box, one mistake I made was placing some of the LR over the slots for the overflow, I'm not going to worry too much about it as I can probably use a saw and cut slots thru the LR as most LR is very porous and soft. I had already removed the top portion and cut the overflow slots before these pictures were taken



Here is the top part after cutting away with serrated knife


This is really amazing, you honestly can't see the overflow box from the front of the tank and unless you were looking for one, you wouldn't think there was anything there. Using the gridwork I built the area up underneath the overflow box so that it was totally open and had several caves



Here is the area underneath the overflow, you can see all the caves, still have a lot of detail work to do and some more foam to apply.

 

Here is what happened overnight, this little bubble grew and grew. Took all of 5 seconds to remove


This sections is directly underneath the above pic and you can see this area expanded as well


Here is the section that I cut away using a regular knife


Forgot to take a "Full" before shot of this area, but here it is after I trimmed the bubble and cleaned up the side.

 

I have read about this method on other forums. You are doing a very good job. One of your future challenges will be to keep the floor section from floating up...

 

Here is another area that has a very cool piece of LR thats flat and shaped like a bowl, it's about 6"x5" to give you some perspective. The foam had expanded so much that it reduced the surface area of this piece of LR to almost nothing.



Here it is after a massive trimming, you can see that now I have a really nice ledge to place some SPS frags.


Here is all the foam pieces that I removed from just the above, figure that by the time I'm done it should be about 4-5x this amount that I'll remove.

 

Thats one of the parts I forgot to mention, I glued some zipties to the bottom of the tank and then looped them thru the gridwork, used a total of 9. Plus the foam that I sprayed on the bottom floor gridwork actually adhered to the glass. It's not going anywhere..lol