A snag to the aquarium with their own hands

When you start a new aquarium, you always want to fill it with some decorative elements. For this purpose, there are many ready-made items - artificial plants , towers, grottos , castles, "sunk" sailboats, pirate chests. But there is an opportunity not to buy artificial jewelry, but to make them personally from wood, which is full in the surrounding forest or near the river. For example, why not start making driftwood for an aquarium with your own hands. At the same time, you will spend a minimum of funds and will be able to make the design of the underwater world completely unrepeatable.

How to make a snag for an aquarium with your own hands?

1. We take a clean washed aquarium and put it on the table.
2. For the sake of safety, put a couple of sheets of paper on the bottom.
3. In addition, we will use useful workpieces, a screwdriver, a piece of sandpaper, a sharp knife and a brush for metal.
4. It is better to take the original kind of a branch from a dry tree. A living plant is not suitable for this purpose, it will release resin and other organics into the water, which can badly affect plants and fish. We check how convenient they are placed in the vessel, we cut off excess sections.
5. Further in our business, how to make a snag for the aquarium with your own hands, it's time for the dirtiest processes. We leave the reservoir to the side. Using a flat screwdriver, remove the bark, cleaning carefully the preform to the bare wood.
6. We process the tree with a brush to completely get rid of the remains of the bark and better display the texture of the material.
7. The next item, how to prepare a snag for the aquarium with your own hands, is its disinfection. For this purpose, the prepared pieces of wood should be subjected to boiling. Take a bucket or another large container, fill it with water and turn on the stove.
8. Sometimes long branches do not fit in a saucepan, then periodically boil one side of them, and then another. Some fans cut the driftwood into pieces, and then collect the composition in the aquarium with a fishing line. The treatment time is not less than 5-6 hours, but for the guarantee, you can boil the stock for several days to remove all harmful substances from the material.
9. For greater confidence in the process of making driftwood in the aquarium with their own hands, it is possible to add salt or manganese to the water. But freshwater inhabitants will not like it if they feel the taste of chemicals. In this case, it is necessary in the end to thoroughly wash out the leftovers of reagents from wood by repeated boiling. It is better to conduct treatment with pure water for two or three days than long and persistently remove the ingested sodium chloride from the tree.
10. After boiling, the billets are soaked for about 7 days, periodically changing the liquid. The tree will at first color the water, but eventually it passes.
11. The crabs in the aquarium, which we have prepared with our own hands, are ready. So that after immersion in water our decorative objects do not float, they are fixed for the first time with stones. You see that the process of processing wood is not a difficult matter and it is possible even for a novice aquarist.