# slate background



## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

has anyone ever though about buying slate and renting a wet saw to cut the pieces in half, so you have two pieces from each with flat edges, to silicone to the glass then stack up. this would make it look like a real formation with the bedding of the slate being planer instead of vertical. i think it would look great, just not sure about the cost or time it would take


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## fmueller (Jan 11, 2004)

I think it would look sharp, but I am not sure how easy it would be to saw the already thin slate into two yet thinner pieces. You could definetely use the slate as is, because it doesn't need to be completely flat to be siliconed to glass. I've done that with thin sandstone pieces. See here for details.









_Before filling the tank with water._









_About 5 years after adding the water._


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## Mcdaphnia (Dec 16, 2003)

Slate has natural cleavage planes, so you can manually split it to make two rocks each with one flat side.

http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/vwdocs/v ... rock3.html


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## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

nonononono i mean cross cut, so that it sticks out from the glass, not flat against it like in the pic *fmueller* posted,

so that you're kind of looking at it like this


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## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

i guess it would be pretty easy to use a stone veneer like these 
http://www.southweststonesupply.com/coronado.htm


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## fmueller (Jan 11, 2004)

I've looked at the stone veneer stuff. It seems easy to work with, and would save a lot of weight. However, what I have seen so far looks real enough from afar. Like if you look from the street at a house that has siding made of this stuff, it looks like real rock. If you look at it very closely, you can see it's plastic. I'd love for somebody to put it in a tank for a few years and report back how it hold up, and what it looks like when overgrown with algae and plants :wink:


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## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

oh i was talking about real stone veneer, like those round rock ones are just round stone cut in half


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## fmueller (Jan 11, 2004)

Ah - I didn't even realize the stuff in the pictures was real rocks. When I've seen 'stone veneer' in the stores around here, it was invariably plastic. I wonder how much real stone veneer would cost, an if they sell it in quantities suitable for a fish tank. A number of landscaping stone yards around here (where I bought the rocks for my background) sell only by the ton. One ton is a lot of rocks. Even if you are making a background for an 8' tank, you need only a fraction of that!


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## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

true

i do have a lab at school where we cut rocks as thin as paper so that light can pass through it, i wonder if i just buy a bunch of rocks, if they will cut them in half for me, i hope silicone would work.

i'm only considering this because i have a lot of trouble making good looking rock formations in styrofoam, i'm sure i just need some practice


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## cjacob316 (Dec 4, 2008)

double post


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