Project:Cage for Pet Rats

ProjectInfoBox Cage for Pet Rats
Status:	ongoing
Initiator:	Micha
Software Used:	Fusion360

I'm creating a cage for our future pet rats. As they are apparently quite picky when it comes to their surroundings, the idea is to use wood that agrees with them and as little (poisonous) glue or metal as possible. As I'm rather inexperienced in woodworking, making this will be a challenge. Lucky for me that I don't just have to rely on DIY influencers (for example this very fun German one: Jonas Winkler) and AI (in this case, mostly perplexity.ai). There are also so many helpful and knowledgeable people in our CoMakingSpace! {TableOfContents}

Acknowlegements

For making this project possible at all, big thanks go out to Keno and Lukas. I'd have no wood and not even any basic skills without your support 🙏 I'm pretty sure this list will grow over the course of the project.

Planning

There are a lot of great pages out there on the internet describing what the best cage for pet rats should look like. They all have at least slightly different criteria, frequently contradicting each other. I won't go into the details of how I came up with how I wanted the cage to look. Rather, here's the process I used to plan what I want and what I need for that. It looks pretty straightforward when I write it down. It was way more roundabout in real life with me jumping back and forth between the steps and experimenting with tools.

1. Use [Fusion360] to model the cage. The measurements were driven by my family's research into what a good cage for rats should be like as well as the size of one central component: a removable plastic tray at the very bottom for (hopefully) easy cleaning. Luckily, I used a lot of parameters, so I was able to quickly change some fundametal measurement (like thickness of the boards, width of the ramps etc.).
2. Create an list of all boards required, in my case as a spreadsheet. Columns include the measurements of the individual boards, as well as the resulting volume of wood that's used for ordering boards later.
3. to-do: To get a better idea of all the material necessary, I plan to copy the file in fusion and lay out all the boards on one plane (via "Ausrichten", not sure what the English function name is). There is a better function for that but it's not part of the free personal license 🤑

Materials and Tools

• It's hard to get a hold of these sorts of quantities of beech wood! More info to come...
• I bought a couple of tools that I'll need at home to prepare the boards for transport to the space and to put everything together in its final location in the end. I hope YouTube and perplexity.ai have served me well in choosing good tools. More info to come...

Process

More to come...

Outcome

More to come...

Key Learnings

• Perplexity.ai is really helpful in searching for information on the internet and combining it to one meaningful narrative. Works really well in German, too. It's really, really terribly bad at creating precise graphics or images, though 😵‍💫

Definitely more to come...