Crested Gecko Tank

I decided that I NEEDED to own Crested Geckos after my friend Joel Friesch showed them to me. They looked so cool and ‘designed’ with their symmetrical crests and spiked eyebrows.  But they will need a home,….a home like NO OTHER!    ugh, here we go…..

I wanted to make it look like overgrown ruins, some kind of long forgotten temple. So I started designing a temple wall with a crested gecko relief, and ended up with something a little more ‘snakey’ than gecko, but I liked it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I bought a tank from ExoTerra large enough to accommodate the design and features I wanted. Then started the fun part, cutting and fitting the walls and shapes using styrene ‘eggcrate’ diffusing panels for ceiling lighting. It’s great to work with, you can clip it apart with side cutters and the tabs formed after clipping fit into the open cells of the un-clipped panel. It’s hard to explain, but make sense once you see it, kind of like a model kit crossed with legos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was time to start on the back wall. I transferred the relief pattern (blue shapes in image below) onto a sheet of 1/8″ acrylic, and cut them out on the band saw. Then I cut a separate sheet of acrylic for the background (red). The shapes were glued to the background sheet using MEK, and then the finished assembly was cut into a jigsaw puzzle of separate ‘blocks’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After everything was glued into place, I cut two sections of PVC pipe and scored them with an Exacto knife and Dremel Tool to have the appropriate stacked, cracked stone column look. Then the whole backdrop was painted and aged, and placed into the tank.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next step was to mark the areas on the sides of the tank I would need to cover so only the finished portions would be visible. With a sharpie, I outlined the areas to mask using the assembled background structure as a guide. Then removed everything out of the tank and covered (painted for lack of a better term, but more like smearing slime) the inside of the glass tank sides with black silicone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then it was time to start decorating with pieces of driftwood to create the surrounding ‘jungle’. Some of this was just seeing what would fit, and where and some of it was dictated by wanting to direct water flows, etc.  (Did I mention it was going to have a running waterfall, and fog? oh, but of course! anything to over-complicate things!). I used expandable foam to glue some of the pieces of wood together to get the right shapes, and then went in and ‘sculpted’ the foam to blend the pieces.

Then it was back to the nasty black silicone to cover all of the exposed foam, but wait, there’s more! Before the silicone cured and was still tacky, a layer of coconut fiber was added and worked into the silicone to cover the black glossy surface with a more organic ‘dirt’.  I was so happy when this step was complete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once everything had cured, and was dry. The tank was filled with water, the pumps, heater, and yes, the fog machine was installed. Then plants were added.

 

After a week or two of having plants die, mold grow on everything, brown funky water, etc. The tank finally settled down and started to work and thrive. Then the family moved in! Velky, Mali, and Seventy. They all seemed to enjoy their new home (or at least tolerate it) and each found it’s own personal hiding spot.

….And they began a happy life of filling my beautiful tank with poo.

They now are happily owned and cared for by my good friend, Shelley Campbell.
(I’ll post some current pictures of them soon).

-Blair