Foam, Silicone, Peat DiY Tutorial

Materials needed: 

• Canned Spray Foam Insulation
• Silicone Sealant Caulk
• Caulk Gun
• DRY Sphagnum Peatmoss or Dirt
• Gloves/Eyeglasses

The canned spray insulation foam works as a structural glue that binds the various replica rocks, real rocks, tree roots, sticks, whatever you want in your build together, and to the glass of your tank. 

It starts off as a sticky foam spray that expands and cures using the moisture in the air to form a solid foam. 

You attach the plastic spray straw to the top and flip the can upside down and slowly spray out the foam, filling the voids and spaces between the pieces that will make up your background. You can spray directly onto glass and it will hold onto it when cured.

Allow the foam to cure fully and look over the spots you missed and add more foam so you don't have any undesired cavities or holes your animals can hide behind. 

Once the foam has had the chance to fully cure you can use a sharp blade or other tool to cut the foam into shapes or remove excess material that spilled out between cracks.

Now you can begin the application of the silicone caulk material onto the exposed white foam. Use the caulk gun to pump out the gel like silicone adhesive and apply it to the foam coating it all over using a gloved hand. Go in small batches at a time. When you have done a small area, before it cures, dump onto it your dry peat or dirt or other material of choice. Then press down and leave it while you do another small area.

Allow the silicone adhesive to cure. After it is cured it will hold onto your dry peat/material when you dust it off or use a shop vacuum to suck out of the excess. It's like glue and glitter from kids crafts back in the day. Wherever the glue was the dirt will have stuck and you'll have a dirt wall looking background. 

After you have shaken off the excess or sucked it out or washed it off with a hose, your background will now be done. You will  likely have missed some spots but they will be easy to see and so long as the background is dry you can add more to it using the same technique.

Most people use this method to make backgrounds inside their tank and use the foam right up against the glass. You can do that or you can do all of this onto a piece of rigid foam and then drop that into your tank. I find it a lot easier to make these outside of the tank and then later drop them in. 

Also there is no limit to the size of this method so you can make big tanks/displays this way.

This method of background construction does have a few limitations. Because of the foam isn't super strong against clawed animals it wont work for things like tegu's or bearded dragons without using a different foam covering material. For strong animals you'll want to use the epoxy putty covering method. Also this silicone will hold onto the dirt in wet tanks but not submerged or tanks with waterfalls on them. For those areas you'll want to use the liquid bark method I talk about in a different tutorial. The good thing about this method is you can source all of the materials as your local hardware store but the back draw is it wont work in all cases/uses for all reptiles.