Cali Kid Corals

Cement for aquascaping Q

xcaret

xcaret

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I bought a small container, Portland Cement, Hydraulic; is this the right stuff to try to sculpture some rock? I'm going to play with a little of it with some rubble just to get familiar on the how-to; this type of cement cures in a matter of minutes. I was thinking of mixing it with some dry reef sand to blend the texture with the rock so the gray color is not that obvious at the bonding areas.
 
The gray gets covered pretty quick. I'd ask @jestersix if that's the right type of cement. I think so though. I mix in some acrylic 660 or something like that with the water and cement to help it bond better or something like that too.
 
A few years back reading online, some people wrote about DIY rocks taking long, loooooong time to cure, guess it was the phase of experimenting mxing your own sand, crushed coral and cement to create "artificial live rock" structures.
Browsing here, I've seen some really nice rock work bearing jestersix's signature.
 
The Portland Hydraulic Cement is not the stuff you want - it will eventually break down in saltwater. I use MasterEmaco N427 with Acryl 660 mixed - this is the magic stuff. You can buy small quantities from Marc at Marco Rock online, he sells as EMarco 400...
 
The coralline does grow in pretty quick. This is the emarco stuff used to attached the Tonga to each other. All the rocks were pieced together and the swapout was done on 5/4. The left hand side is part of the formation that was changed on that day. The right side stuff is about a month older than that. Prior to it being covered in the coralline, there was a period of ~2 weeks when it was blinding white, but after that the algaes and other encrustation aged it pretty quickly.

coralline_cement_082917.jpg
 
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