New homemade live rock ideas and pics

Finally got pics of the live rock we made last week, my friend Jason originally told me about making our own live rock, then I saw the post on 3reef about making it as well. The way that Jason showed me how to make it is (in my opinion) a lot less labor intensive, there was no drilling involved! The mix consisted of crushed oyster shell, white cement, sand, some perlite(yes the type the goes in your garden) and the "magic ingredient of porousity" rock salt, Jason had this great idea to put salt pellets in the mix, which melt out of the rock as soon as you soak it. The best kind, we found, were the large salt pellets that are used for water softner systems, they are a lot larger than standard rock salt...
We were able to get as many foam shipping containers as we wanted from the LFS, which are used as forming boxes, they have about 3-5 inches of sand in the bottom, we wet the sand down lightly, then formed our caves and rocks in the sand. Mixed the mixture and layered it in, by taking small handfuls of wet sand, and placing it between layers of mixture, it creates caves and crevices that are perfect hiding places!
Well I could talk about it for hours...I am really excited!! Best part is it costs about .25cents a pound to make, here in Alaska it is 12.99lb for rock, so had to come up with alternative.
Here is a picture, I will post a couple different ones..

 

Here is another pic.

 

And last one... keep in mind, this is about 2.5lbs, some of the bigger ones are bigger and a lot more intricate then this litte one, you can see the small round pockets in the rock where the salt pellets were....

 

Some pics of some DIY rock I made last summer.

My mix consisted of portland cement, crushed oyster shell, and crushed coral. Also, it has taken longer than the normal 8 weeks to cure. I'm still waiting on some of the larger pieces to finish curing.

 

Cool stuff guys.
Marty looks like you went for Portland white cement eh? Cool. 8)

Love the rock salt idea. Have I said that already? ;D
Got any more pics?

 

I am going over today to take some pics of some of the other pieces, this one is one of the smaller pieces, some of them are 3 times as big as this, but not too big! yes we used the white cement...costs about three times as much, but the rock is white...

 

Cool. Are you going to give the masonary drill bit technique a try?

 

Finally got some more pics.... I don't think I am going to use the masonary bit trick...I seem to be getting the porous look with the large salt pellets, and making the large caves using sand is working really good too... the U-shaped rock here was made by Jason, and I made the smaller one with the caves... the caves are made by putting a layer of mix horizontally, then pile wet sand across the mix vertically... not sure if that makes sense? then place the mix over the sand making sure to tie it into the original mix.... then when it has set and is in the water the sand washes out and the caves are formed... works very well... the white cement and perilite make it nice and white...like coral.
enjoy

 

more pics..

 

and more...they are hard to see, but you can see the impression the large salt pellets left after they dissolved, will try to get some pics in the light so you can see how well they stand out..