Matt LeBaron

I'm not sure if you're using Cura for your slicer but if you are under support settings check out enable support interface and then enable support roof and floor. You can set a thickness for instance I use 1 mm that will actually separate your supports a bit from the print itself and make them remove easier. also if you're using rafts I found that it's much easier to remove the raft right after the print finishes when it's still warm then waiting till later when it cools. Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

What is Paulb printing with his Photon? I have one as well as my FDM Ender but the resin used for the SLA/DLP 3D printers like the Photon is extremely toxic. Many of the resins have significant fumes and the resin itself requires gloves to handle since some peoples skin breaks out in fairly bad chemical burns to direct exposure. I don't it to seem like it's going to kill anyone but it demands some respect. Now once it has been cured I am not sure how reactive it is with water/air but I would not risk putting anything I printed with resin near my tank. The resin 3D printers can print things with a significantly better strength than just about anything you can do on a FDM printer though.

Reach out if you have any problems getting it printing. I'll be honest, FDM 3D printing is much more of an art than a science right now, you'll have to spend a bit of time getting your individual printer settings dialed in to get solid good looking prints and reliable printing but once you get everything set it becomes a lot easier. My Ender 3 has been going almost non stop for close to 2 years now, it's really been a work horse and has performed well.

PETG is the best, it is food safe so in turn is fish safe. PLA has not shown any negative side effects but it can slowly break down over time, that time would likely be something on the order of 5-10 years but people have not been using 3D printed stuff in reef tanks for that long to know. Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

My Ender 3 sees almost constant use but that is mostly because I am printing for my war gaming addiction. I did print covers for my MP40 and MP10 along with a seahorse feeder recently though. Printed them in PETG, which is a bit more difficult to print with than PLA but still worked.

Sorry that it's been a while but there are seahorses in the tank now and my Cardinal has some company. Tank is doing well, cycle is all finished up, all of the algae growth I had is gone and all of the corals I kept have recovered. My purple Gorg is still not 100% happy but the silver one is fine so hoping I'll see full polyp extension from the purple in the next couple of weeks. I got 2 pairs of seahorses, a Scissortail Dartfish, and a Royal Gramma from Seahorse Savvy and could not be happier. Both the seahorses and the fish were in excellent condition and were eating the same day I put them all in the tank. I was amazed because normally the Royal Gramma's are super timid and usually hide but this little guy was out, eating, and exploring, later the same day. There are the four seahorses, two started out black but are already turning a lighter color. Dartfish and Gramma have settled in well. I have been happy with the filter roller, on my second roll now and the first one was gross so it is removing a fair bit. Much easier to deal with than filter socks.

Not a fan, used this like 10 years ago when I was relatively new to the hobby and had a pair of seahorses in my 55G. Ended up having to take one of my seahorses to the vet to get a prescription of Diamox to treat gas bubble disease from using it along with killing off a bunch of brittle stars I had in the tank at the time which caused a minor crash. Luckily I didn't have any corals back then so water changes kept things survivable for my fish and seahorses but I won't touch the stuff any more.

We'll probably keep two pairs. That gives us the room to have some fish too. Right now we're thinking the Cardinal, a Royal Gramma, and the Firefish. May get some gobies or maybe a couple of Pajama Cardinals but that will be later.

We plan to keeping Erectus. We've kept both Erectus and Reidi in the past and had a preference towards Erectus, they just always seemed to have more personality but that could totally just be the individuals we ended up with. Current tank shot, sorry about how blue it is, took it in the evening when my LED's were edging towards more blue for their sunset mode. I have the 3D printed seahorse feeder in on the left side, I plan on zip tying some macro algae to the pipe coming down into it to help hide it a bit. 3D printed covers for the MP40 and MP10 are working well. My pipe organ is adapting fine to the mini cycle but the purple and silver Gorg are having problems adapting and are dying back a little bit. Refreshed the clean up crew who are working on the small algae outbreak and the Cardinal is doing great. I have a Firefish in quarantine who is also eating very well. Got some seagrasses from a member who was kind enough to spare some for me, bit of die off there but that is to be expected, once the rhizomes recover it'll re-sprout and start spreading. Few more weeks and the tank should be ready for seahorses.

Very sad news, she has been a staple of my visits to the Aquarium for just about as far back as I can remember.

Did a bunch of work this weekend. Got the new sump installed along with my Clarisea fleece roller and started re-working some of the plumbing, need to pickup one more 1" union today for the DT drain and I'll be all set to finish the plumbing and connect everything back together. Then I got all of the rock into the display along with an extra 60 pounds of sand over what I had previously since I needed at least 3 inches for the seagrass I will be adding, and maybe some gobies I'll get in the future. I 3D printed a cover for my MP40, which fits well so once I print one for the MP10 below it the tank should be seahorse safe at that point. Going to try and get everything plumbed together tonight because keeping three tanks heated properly is becoming an issue due to heater/controller failures. I only have one heater/controller I am confident about at this point and two setups (sump with frag tank and QT/hospital tank) that have live stock in them. The Jager heaters I have still work but one heats to 79 the other 78 degrees regardless of what I set them too, which makes me worry about whether they may break further and cook/freeze my fish. And then my Reef Angel controller has totally flaked out on me either turning the heaters on and not stopping or not turning them on at all depending on the internal error it gets. I have a new Inkbird controller that I switched over to the sump/frag tank this morning because the Reef Angel heated the water up to 80 yesterday and then let it drop down to 72 overnight. Hopefully everything stays alive today so I can get the DT plumbed into the sump/frag tank and then move my cardinal over into the display tank and then just heat everything through the Inkbird.

I would love to see a picture of it now, always interested to see what corals look like after a year or two in another tank. Seems like they always ends up looking a bit different, which is always interesting to me.

Did a mainly SPS tank for a few years but I started in the hobby with seahorses and not having them for a few years has been a disappointment. So I cleared out most of my SPS, moved what I wanted to keep along with my fish into my frag tank and I'm turning my 90G in wall tank back into a seahorse tank. I sold just about all of the corals in my tank, I only kept my gorgorians (which I've had since I had seahorses in this tank before 4ish years ago), most of my pipe organ coral, and then a few odds and ends that were left over when I sold my corals. Mostly pieces that fell to the bottom of the tank when I was pulling everything out, not sure how well they may do in the new setup but I'll give them a fighting chance at least. Here's everything stuffed into a very small space along with a coral banded shrimp and our "Highlander" Chromie. (He murdered off his 6 other friends within the first year we had him. There can be only one!) The Banggai Cardinal went into my hospital/quarantine tank so he could live in peace and since he'll be transitioning over to the new tank. (Let me know if any wants a Chromi or coral banded shrimp, free to a good home) Next was to start on new rock work. I ended up giving a significant portion of what I had away when I sold my colonies since a they were well encrusted. I wasn't bothered since I wanted to significantly change my rock work for the new tank. Ordered a bunch of Caribsea Life Rock since I liked the nice purple color it had along with some to make pillars. Some EMacro mortar and I had 5 rock pillars! I had an extra tank sitting around so I started curing 3 of the pillars along with my magnetic rock shelves while two other pillars will have to wait for now. Next thing I wanted to do was correct the errors (whether I knew it at the time or not) that I made when I set everything up last time. One of those was not sub dividing my sump into different chambers. No clue what I was thinking before but it was a bit mistake, so one new 40G breeder tank and a Fiji sump kit later I have a proper sump. I left the filter sock portion off because I am replacing my filter socks with a filter roller because I am honestly to lazy/forgetful to replace the filter socks as often as a should, which totally defeats the purpose. And then finally to empty just about everything out of the 90G to get it ready for new rockwork. That's it for now, I'll post an update later this weekend or on Monday since I plan to get the rock work and sand into it this weekend and if I can make enough salt water maybe even get some of the corals and the cardinal shifted back into the display.

I am backing the heck out of this thing. Anyone with seahorses should be super excited about this. Going on vacation, even away for a weekend requires that I find someone to feed at least twice a day and with the AF4 I'll be able to easily feed 3 times a day, which is much better for the health of the seahorses. It potentially even has applications in raising fry, which is darn near impossible if you can't feed often during the day. Even for my fish not having to deal with defrosting the food for them and feeding each day is a time saver I am looking forward too. The guy seems to have his act together and I figure that even if the whole thing falls apart he obvious has the 3D files since the prototype is 3D printed and worst case scenario I could see if he would release the files and I could just print the parts myself and assemble everything myself since it is controllable via a 1-10v signal as well. Also direct link to the Kickstarter in case anyone is interested: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/af4/the-af4-auto-frozen-fish-food-feeder/

This is a very interesting idea that I think I will give a try. I think ideally if I could find some of the bricks that have the hollow area's in the center it could be both a good growth area for bacteria and a refuge for the fish also. I think I will give them a good washing and boiling first though to be on the safe side.

Not sure but "Aussie" in front of a coral is a negative for me, in my experience they tend to be slow growing and very sensitive to anything less than absolutely perfect parameters. Other people's experience may vary but one big tip off for me that they don't tend to do well in aquariums is that I do not see many hobbyists selling frags of them. Usually you'll see people selling frags of more well established corals that have done well in and acclimated to existing in captivity whereas basically every "Aussie" coral I ever see from sale is fresh shipped in from (hopefully) Australia.

If you don't work in marketing perhaps you should.

You're going to have some pissed off people if these "grafts" eventually reject each other or one color ends up dominating the other. I for one would not be paying top dollar for this particular experiment, especially when these pictures are obviously so color corrected. Heck, the coraline algae in that picture looks brighter than the coral itself. I'd also at least want the corals to be healed enough to not still be showing the glue if I were going to drop $2K. Ah well whatever floats someone's boat I guess, that money will likely go a long way towards keeping these sellers in business, which at the end of the day is probably a good thing. And if these experiments do work out they'll eventually become more common and I would love to pick them up at a decent price after someone else determines whether it works out long term.

So I have cultured phyto in the past to raise brine shrimp and copepods. I just used a couple of 5G buckets, lights, and air pump and it was fairly straight forward. Raising the brine shrimp was easy, the copepods, not so much. Or well I guess it wasn't hard but it was hard to do in the numbers I needed at the time. I was able to raise some copepods but not very many for all of the effort involved and not enough to really meet my needs. (I was raising seahorses at the time) Not sure if I was doing something wrong or what the deal was but I just couldn't get the pods going in the numbers I needed. Now there are a bit more resources for doing this than there were 5+ years ago, more articles online and a better selection of fertilizer for the phyto and options for copepods to start a culture so you may have more luck with it now. One thing you need to be careful of is contamination, I lost several phyto cultures due to this, which while not 100% sure was likely some water from my DT getting into my cultures and some other organism basically winning out and killing it all. Luckily by that time I had plenty of phyto in bottles in my fridge so it was just a cause of cleaning everything really well and restarting but it is still something to be careful with.

Still have to wonder what it will look like when it grows beyond frag size. $2500 is a lot for not knowing what it will look like down the road.

I mean I was told it was Oregon tort but I didn't ask for breeding papers on it. To me it looked like Oregon tort, I mean it's definitely a tort, the growth pattern is correct for one so I never had any reason to question it. But I'm going to take this as a lesson learned and just sell any future corals as nameless, not worth the hassle otherwise and I'm not trying to "market" anything just sell off extras when I have to trim my corals down to not grow into each other. It is interesting to see littlelise1985's picture as that is very likely the same coral (AlanM didn't have two torts that I remember) but it looks very purple to me and definitely looks different than mine on the coloration front even though they're the same coral. I would be curious to see what would happen if you put a frag of mine next to littlelise1985's to see if they would grow into each other or attack each other as foreign entities. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they did grow into each other would the different pieces retain their different colors I wonder.

I'm with you on that. I'm just going to post a picture of the colonies and let people decide from there. This whole naming business is a pain in the ass and not worth it when I have colony shots I can just show.

Here's a close up with my crappy cell camera but it's good enough to see the color and growth pattern. This picture was taken under very white light, which is one reason I am a fan of this particular coral as I am not a huge fan of the blue look and it still looks awesome under a more normal balanced spectrum. The larger colony shot above was taken with my blues turned up a bit, not the straight blues I see a lot of people use but more than this picture. It looks like a tort to me but I'm by no means an expert on coral identification, I tend to pick out a few corals I really like and grow them out into large colonies and I am also generally a fan of Millepora's, which are very easy to identify.

Something to keep in mind is that the more "common" or "popular" corals are referred to in that way because they look good enough in almost any tank capable of supporting them for people to want them. Sure the red montipora or green slimer/green millepora are common but they look darn good in virtually every tank I have ever seen them in. (Including mine) I've never actually seen a large colony of many of the crazy expensive corals that you see around today because most people frag them as soon as possible. Do a search for Walt Disney Acropora and pop over to the image search, the largest walt disney acro you'll see is at best *maybe* 3-4 inches in diameter, which by my reckoning is a really small colony. I would be interested to see what a large colony of that would look like but I've never seen anyone grow one out. And honestly all of the pictures you'll see of the walt disney are always until heavy blue light, which makes just about any coral pop. My recommendation would be to find some corals you think you may like, get your tank stable enough and able to grow them out and see what they grow into. If you don't like how they look you can likely sell a large colony for enough to purchase a new frag and try again.

Yep that's it on the right there. Slow grower but still doing well. This thread has been an interesting lesson in how I am just going to stop using the designer names for things. Honestly it's all a bit silly since corals look different in different tanks, I'm actually kind of surprised that the tort I got from you has still basically retained its coloration and growth pattern in my tank as my experience over the years has been that corals change color in my tank fairly significantly. I have some smaller colonies in my tank where you can still pick out the original frag piece and their new growth pattern is very different in my tank vs what they came to me as.