- Hey, guys.
This is Cory from Aquarium Co-op.
Today, I'm gonna show you how to make
some caves out of flower pots.
So, we're going to take a normal flower pot,
and we're gonna show you how to drill a hole into it.
And we're gonna attach some plants to it
and things like that.
Stay tuned.
Here, we've got some caves.
This is a cichlid stone cave, something like that.
They're anywhere from six to 15 dollars,
depending on the size, stuff like that.
This is a cobalt cichlid cave.
You can buy them at a lot of independent retailers
and probably online, too.
These are probably eight bucks or something like that,
I don't know, 10.
And then we have a flower pot, you know?
You can just put it in an aquarium
and have a big opening like that.
But, typically for apistos and things like that,
they want a smaller hole.
And, so we're going to show you how to do that.
So, the first thing you want to do is soak your pot
overnight in a bucket, get 'em real wet.
That's gonna make the terracotta or the clay
easier to drill.
Next, your gonna need a hole saw.
And I own a kit, so I can choose lots of the sizes.
I can see here, I've actually done one of this size
and made a pretty large hole,
and that's what is over here in the fish room
for this cave right here.
And you see how that one went right through.
It was easy.
So, this time, we're gonna do a real small one.
And I'm gonna show you what that process is like,
and then we're gonna use some Super Glue Gel,
which you've probably seen in another video.
And we're gonna attach some plants.
I've got some bucephalandra and some anubias
that we're gonna attach.
So we're gonna make two of these today.
All right, so I've chosen my hole saw I wanna use.
I've got my cordless drill here.
This is 1 and 1/8, and what you really want,
to make this easy,
is you want the drill bit to be inside of here.
It's the pilot bit.
You can get them that don't have that,
but it's really gonna want to jump around.
As you're trying to get the hole started on here,
it's gonna want to move around a lot.
So, the other thing I recommend
is having a bucket of water like this
because this bit will get hot, and it'll actually
start creating steam if we don't keep it cool.
It's like drilling glass or anything like that.
So, what we're gonna do is
we're gonna pick a spot on here,
and then I'm gonna drill it.
And I'm gonna, you know,
I've got the tripod here and the camera
kinda at a weird angle.
This will be much harder to do showing on a camera
than it would be without having to work with equipment,
so, whatever you see here,
it's gonna be easier for you to do.
But, we're basically, we've got the water level
just so it comes up to the rim of this pot here.
So this water is gonna cool the bit as we drill.
It's gonna help carry away some of the terracotta
that we're cutting away,
and we're just gonna get started here.
So, we're gonna get the pilot bit going,
and I'm gonna hold it here.
(drill whirrs slowly)
So we're drilling.
I would say, go at a slow pace,
definitely while you're getting the pilot bit through it.
You don't want to crack it,
and you also don't want to jump around and make it look bad.
So, I'll stop here and show you what we've done so far,
and kinda clean it up.
So far, all there is
is a little notch here.
All right, so we've made it through.
And you can see there the first layer kind of dug in,
and what's gonna happen
is, when you're drilling, it's always gonna
basically drill heavier on one side than the other
because this pot is tapered,
and so it's our job to kinda even that out
as we start going through it,
so, once I kinda get this line in,
I'm going to rock it to the other side,
so it cuts on this side, and then we're pretty locked in,
and it should go relatively quick.
But back in the water it goes.
We attach the old drill bit to it,
and actually it's getting low enough
that this could be a problem,
so I might have to do it out of the water for the video,
and just use a shorter tub next time I'm doing it.
You can really hear the grinding now that we're grinding it
all the way around.
And you can watch it grind it through.
And we definitely wanna just keep it nice and wet.
It's kinda drilling through tile, almost,
you definitely want to use lots of water.
And if you see any steam or anything like that,
the bit's getting way too hot,
and you don't want that, so,
it's just a slow and steady process.
And we'll give you a look from what's going on
on the inside here.
So you can see the pilot bit is through it, you know,
and it's a slow grind through,
it's not a race, but being that it's wet,
it does grind through pretty quick.
And, yeah, it's a slow and steady,
shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes
at most from start to finish.
Also, when you keep getting it wet, you're clearing out
what you've ground out, basically.
So you can see here,
we are now, let me get it angled right for the camera here.
You can see my hand through it,
and you can see on the top part here,
we've actually come all the way through.
We're through up here, but we're not on the bottom
or the top, whatever way you're looking at it.
So, when we're drilling it, we're going to apply
more pressure to this side than this side.
Otherwise, it's gonna want to crack out,
and we would rather cut our way through it
than break our way through it.
So, back in it goes, and we're just gonna lean heavier
towards the side that hasn't cut through yet.
Even though we're almost through, we still wanna get it wet.
And, just like that, we're through.
Let's set the drill down here.
Clean up our hole.
Yeah, so we have a pretty nice hole here.
I would say, if I wasn't having to do it on a camera,
it would be even a nicer hole,
but it's not sharp by any means.
That's the nice thing,
'cause we ground our way through easily.
so we shouldn't have any problem.
Nice size hole for, maybe, apistos or some smaller africans,
that type of thing.
Plecos can use this as well.
But now we want to do the second part
of our project here.
We don't need the water that we've made anymore.
We're going to attach a plant, so let me grab that.
All right.
So I'm gonna attach,
I'll do this potted anubias barteri,
'cause that's what I've got right here.
Take it out of the pot.
This one's been neglected in a tank, a breeder tank,
for a long time, but it'll get a better life
now that it's gonna be attached to a pot
and a little closer to light and not neglected.
So, we're pulling all the rockwool off.
As kind of a refresher,
if you've watched the video on how to do this,
the goal is to get all this excess stuff off.
so that we can get the roots,
or the rhizome, actually, is what we really want,
and attach that.
This takes, you know, a little bit of time here.
And if you have scissors, you can cut the roots down.
The roots are kinda long on this one,
so I'm just gonna pull them off here.
And these will grow back, but it makes it easier
to attach without all the roots in the way.
Let's see, I'll clean my hand here.
So now we've got very short roots,
you know, for the size of plant it is.
And we're gonna dry off with this towel.
Also gonna dry,
I'm gonna attach to the top of this...
top of this pot here.
So the nice thing is, a lot of these pots
already come with a hole,
and some species will like it with some light coming in,
some don't.
The other thing is, you can kind of glue a plant on here
and get it so the roots want to go down there,
so that eventually, you've kinda got
all these roots coming down,
so when the fish go in, they feel a lot safer
'cause there's roots in here, and it's like
it's a real nice hide for 'em.
But yeah, so we've got this dry and this dry.
Super Glue Gel, we wanna use gel,
not just regular Super Glue 'cause it's too watery,
we wanna use the actual gel.
And we're just going to...
put some on our pot here.
Yeah, so there's a lot of glue right there.
I mean, not crazy amount, but definitely if it was
normal Super Glue, it would be too watery.
All right, so that's that.
Now my goal is to make it stay in there.
I'm gonna try and put some of this into the hole.
So that it will grow.
And then, the rest of it, just hold it.
All we gotta do is hold it against the glue there.
And if we look at it here, it's kinda leaning to the side.
It's gonna train itself to stand up
once it's orientated with some light on it after
a week or two, 'cause this was in a,
in the basket, it was laying over in the tank,
and so it was oriented this way, you know,
so this pot, as we put it on here,
same orientation, it will right itself.
And the glue, still wet,
but it's already holding.
Use something besides your finger to make sure
you've got a good handle on that.
But, while that's drying, we can do the next one.
So, it's been about five minutes now.
I just put the cave in.
Glue's dried.
These are some apistogramma panduro.
I got 'em from Ted Judy.
I also got some of these in the store.
But, yeah, she's already checked it out a couple of times.
And, yeah, they've already build this one up
and haven't laid eggs yet,
but I'm hoping it'll take to one of these ones
that have plants and stuff on it.
Here she comes, maybe she'll come visit it.
They never like it when I'm videoing them.
They prefer the privacy, obviously.
And then we've got the one where we've placed buce,
right here.
This has got claro plecos, LDA08, the dwarf bristlenose.
Yeah, so I'm hoping they're gonna use that cave as well.
I wish I had some well-established ones,
but since I'm setting up the new fish room, I don't,
but these caves do look quite well, or quite good
when they're covered in plants,
so they don't nearly as stark as they do right now,
but they are great for a breeding room
or a fish room, and they're super easy and down and dirty,
so you can get 'em done quick.
But, yeah, 'til next time,
you know, leave any comments
of stuff you guys wanna see,
otherwise, I'll just keep filming
what I'm doing for my fish room.
Off, and off she goes.