High Tide Aquatics

Jim inspired me! (frag rack)

sfsuphysics

Supporting Member
Having recently moved my rocks around I inevitably made a ton of frags, I saved the "nicer" ones simply by putting them on a piece of coral skeleton on the bottom of the tank for the frag swap (or maybe I'll make a DBTC type deal), but that quite honestly was pissing me off simply due to all the corals and crap I liberated from Ocean Treasures :D Now I don't mind putting frags on the bottom of my tank that are eventually going to become part of my tank, but these other ones were just too much, hell I literally tossed out a ton of corals (the weedy ones.. and brown :D) that I finally made an executive decision about... granted I did feel a touch of guilt as I realize these are animals, but lets be honest who hasn't chopped a piece of a coral off and tossed it, or let anything die... yeah I felt bad, but in the greater scheme of things, I kill animals when I eat food (even if its indirectly).

So I wanted all those corals off the ground, I HATE frag racks, in the display tank, I think they look quite cheap and detract from it... but then again I don't keep my tank in an immaculate condition as it is, so why not. I thought about the stand by of egg crate on magnet, but remembered how algae covered those bastards always get, so I though.. hmmm JIM! A trip to tap plastics to get an acrylic rod, and one final trip to Ocean Treasures on Saturday (there's another huge DIY project from the stuff I got there :D) and I was set.

Some differences from Jim's method, 1 my acrylic rods are a bit thicker, that mostly is because I thought the thinner ones were too flimsy, it cost me all of $1.45 for a 6 foot long rod though. I also forgot about the tubing he uses to keep the rods from sliding through.. luckily I had thicker than 1/4" tubing so I was good to go! (that was luck though not a planned move :D)

So I grabbed an old magnet with a power head hinge on it I made way back when for the ghetto fabulous magnetic holder, slapped a piece of scrap acrylic I had on there, slathered the crap out of it with superglue (I made a couple cuts to make it fit around the magnet and actually hold if the superglue fails) and drilled 30 holes (I didn't plan it that way, it just happened). Also most of them I didn't glue to the top, these frags are quite large, so I decided most of them would be glued to the side, I'm curious to the growth pattern that will form, doubly so since this is the side of the tank and there definitely will be a concentration of light on one side mostly.

So here it is, with a handful of frags
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There's that powerhead hinge, strangely enough an airbubble got trapped, it'll help with the weight of the acrylic (think it was 3/8" stuff)
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And a few frags, not many species represented, Pink Jade acro, red acros, purple tipped acros (with brown body :|... these are the ones I want to see how they grow the most), and a single idaho grape just to see how that will grow on the peg
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How are you holding the frag rack? Think I see a Seio PH holding thing attached.
Planning on opening the GM San Francisco Chapter?
 
Thanks everyone

Jon: They're not really THAT long, maybe 1.5-2" ... when I do frags I don't do little nubs, I do minicolonies! :D Plus the acrylic is fairly thick that I put my stand on so a little bit through that (3/8") plus a little under, a little over, and ample flow room.. but its not like these are 4" long rods :D

Patrick: Teacher + Summer = Lots of free time :D I got a long honey-do list for the summer otherwise you'd see quite a bit more :D

Mario: The Seio powerhead holder is glued to a cheapy magnet (aquatraders) I used to use these to hold my powerheads (when I used the seios) but as the tank thickness got bigger these were not very useful for my largest powerheads. And no plans on open a SF GM, I'm not in the mindset to farm corals, I just wanted them out of the way, and I figure when the frag swap date comes rolling around I won't have to setup my frag tank again (which I always HATE doing, as everything loses color in it because I don't have a very good spare light).
 
Those Aquatraders magnets are good to use on frag racks, I've used a couple with egg-crate and like them OK. I have a couple of drip trays from old wet/dry filters already drilled that might serve the same purpose but nothing to dress it up as a Christmas tree (colorful little frags) yet.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Thanks everyone
Patrick: Teacher + Summer = Lots of free time :D I got a long honey-do list for the summer otherwise you'd see quite a bit more :D

I know how you feel. After comming back from my leave of absence from Devry i told them i'll stay until they find a new pharmacology teacher. Now im down to 1 job w/ 40 hrs a week and lovin it. I need to get off my butt and start gettin creative.
 
Well I made ANOTHER one.. this one larger, longer, and I used a drill press (oh soooooooooooooooooooo nice), unfortunately my tank looks like poo now because instead of a nice view I have a frag rack on the front and a smaller one on the side... oh well I keep telling myself only until the frag swap then it goes away.

Well I went over to Bryan's and chopped up a bunch of LPS frags with his handy dandy band saw, and rather than putting them all on the ground I decided to use the small rack for these, mostly because I knew bad stuff would happen if the lps and sps got near each other as I didn't want to mount the lps as they have nice flat bottoms anyways. So long story short, I moved all the older frags over to the new frag rack and noticed some pieces were encrusting quite nicely!

Most noticeable were the ones that I glued to the side of the rods, so much for snapping the rods off when I pack them!
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Here's a sneak peek of some of the LPS too, the acrylic sure did get dirty! For this I simply use the pegs as bumpers to keep the lps from falling off due to the current, or snails or something.
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here's the new larger frag base, completely with lots o' frags. I really hope people aren't tired of my stuff, because that's going to be half of the corals in the swap! (I kid, I kid! :D) Yeah the acrylic is dirty, because its a bit hard to keep clean so I'm not going to bother for the next month or so.
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Yeah the unfortunate thing is quite a few of the acros have colored up considerably, so there's going to be a lot of "purplish looking acro" on labels :D
 
As I found out last night one very nice thing about the acrylic frag rack is when you have to move your inventory from one tank to another you simply pick it up, carry it across the room, and plop it into the other tank.
 
houser said:
As I found out last night one very nice thing about the acrylic frag rack is when you have to move your inventory from one tank to another you simply pick it up, carry it across the room, and plop it into the other tank.

... and picking it up, and carrying it to the Frag swap? *hint hint* *wink wink* =P
 
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