Fragging Corals

[surf&turf]

Check out the way this guy frags colonies. http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2117166&highlight=fraging

[matt bills]

dont hit the glass

[smallreef]

OMG... umm I would be to scared to put that hammer in the water to begin with.. and then to just WHACK my corals??? NOOOOO

[Der ABT]

his stuff is nuts, just nuts, the angels, tangs,anthias wrasse's too nice...ugh....i think id cry breaking up corals that big.

 

Funny how he decided to stay away from LED's due to cost vs t5s/MH...

 

Glad i can watch video's on my phone now.

[GraffitiSpotCorals]

I just cussed out my corals... Lots of hand jestures and pointing. They are probly a little upset actually... Now I feel bad.

[surf&turf]

OMG... umm I would be to scared to put that hammer in the water to begin with.. and then to just WHACK my corals??? NOOOOO

 

I was saying the same thing, nnnooooo, don't hit them with a hammer.

[zygote2k]

those are real frags- not like those miniscule ones that they sell around here.

[Origami]

Looks like a really efficient way to work on a large coral. What a tank, though. Beautiful.

[flooddc]

It's "wisdom" or maybe the guy have "guts". See all the gray hairs on the guy? Maybe it's wisdom!

[Incredible Corals]

His TOTM article is insane. He says most of the sps started out as small frags and they are huge colonies within 16 months based on all the pics. How people get growth like that on hard dense acros!

[ErikS]

Looks like a really efficient way to work on a large coral. What a tank, though. Beautiful.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I will admit I was a bit taken aback the first time I saw such fragging - when Lee used a huge screwdriver & hammer to give me some frags.

 

Seems effective, like brick & tile the hammer allows you to control the crack line......more than once I've used bone cutters & had some "oops" didn't expect that

 

What I want to know is why a bump "frags" coral you don't want while those that you do want seem impossible?

[Origami]

I wish that my corals were large enough to "bump frag" right now.

 

After the big tank crash last year, I neglected my tank - basically just doing what I had to to stabilize and keep the fish and few surviving corals going. (I had a basement project to finish, so the tank's problems weren't at the top of the list, unfortunately.) It wasn't until a month or so ago that I got around to removing a large, acro skeleton on one side of the tank, before re-doing the rock work. (I'm back to frags again, now.) Bone cutters just weren't going to cut it (no pun intended... well, maybe), so I thought to use a regular, 12-ounce claw hammer sort of like the guy in the video, but for demolition, not fragging. I was in and out of the tank in 5 minutes, having broken the old, now brown, coral skeleton off at the base in a half dozen large pieces. Eventually, I bleached it and will use it later on in my calcium reactor.

 

When trying to use the bone cutters / heavy duty wire cutters to cut through a 3/4" skelton, you're squeezing pretty hard and it's easy to twist, moving the rock around and disrupting rock work. With the hammer, the rock hardly moved at all and the skeleton fractured easily.

 

This guy's approach is a little more precise looking than the effort I was making. But it certainly looked like it was working well.

[ErikS]

When trying to use the bone cutters / heavy duty wire cutters to cut through a 3/4" skelton, you're squeezing pretty hard and it's easy to twist, moving the rock around and disrupting rock work. With the hammer, the rock hardly moved at all and the skeleton fractured easily.

I just did that a couple months ago trimming a big monti......"I'll just make one more cut....." SNAP the entire colony broke off the base = roh, ro scooby now what am I going to do?

[OldReefer]

I was just cleaning a hammer up to do something like this. I have colonies that are way to big to trim with bone cutters. It looks like it works pretty good.