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!

Acknowlegements

For making this project possible at all, big thanks go out to Keno, Jakob, Moritz, Volker 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 a 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 get a better idea of all the material necessary, I copied the file in Fusion and laid out all the boards on one plane (via "Ausrichten", not sure what the English function name is, and move). Now I'll still have to arrange things in a way that helps me sort them into the type of boards I can buy. There is a much better function but it's not part of the free personal license 🤑In the end, I didn't really use this file.

Materials and Tools

• Beechwood: It's hard to get a hold of these sorts of quantities of beech wood. Many timber dealers seem to carry only spruce or fir wood. I did find some at Holz Baumann in Mannheim. They even delivered to my home address. Which is important when when the boards are 3.35m long.
• Jigsaw and vacuum: To split up these long boards for transport to the space, I needed some battery-powered tools (I don't have power in my garage where the boards were delivered). In the end, I chose a jigsaw and vacuum by Bosch diy (green series) because I already have several other tools with these batteries.
• Clamps: I need to clamp together some very wide pieces. For example, the back of the cage is over 1m wide and 1.5m long. I can't really transport such a big piece, so I need to do this at home. It would be best to use body clamps but they are quite expensive.
  • Thankfully Lukas and Volker introduced me to the joys of pipe clamps. So I just had to buy several pieces of waterpipe.
  • I also borrowed a number of normal clamps. You can never have enough of them, it seems.

Process

1. Buy wood and have it delivered (see above).
2. Measure whether moisture is in good range.
3. Roughtly shorten long boards for transport. Make sure to consider what sort of boards you need. I needed to shorten some to a good 1.5m and some to a good 1m.
4. Roughly trim boards a bit with the Chop Saw. Leave enough material to later do so precisely.
5. Rip boards lengthwise (Sliding Table Saw). Make sure to place the hollow side facing up! For boards as crooked as mine, ripping them should make the resulting glue-up more stable.
6. Joint and plane (Jointer-Planer):
   • With the grain,
   • Start with a wide face,
   • Inverted U-shape,
   • Support for long boards?
   • If hands slip: use lubrication (e.g., Silbergleit), hand lotion, press rather steeply?, dampen hands. Maybe pr88?
7. Sort and label, align precisely.
8. Mark and mill domino slots with a loose fit (Domino Joiner).
9. Trim boards precisely (Chop Saw). (this is not precise enough for a single good edge after gluing).
10. Glue and clamp. Don't put glue on the dominos. Wipe off excess glue with a damp cloth.
11. Use a chisel to remove excess glue from the bottom side after it's dried.

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 😵‍💫 And it will give you unsafe advice (wearing gloves because of slippery hands is a very bad idea when using the jointer).
• There is a steep learning curve around processing natural wood, in general. Everything is much slower than expected. Taking baby steps really helps get things right (for example, gluing two boards together instead of four at a time).
• My hands are very slippery on hardwood. It's very hard for me to use the planer. The solution? This hand protection cream: pr88
• When using Dominos, hammer them in well! And if it's not relevant for the joint, don't put glue on them as that will make them swell.

Definitely more to come...