Can you post a pic of your "homemade" rack?

[jcaustralia]

Awesome pics/cages JCAus!

thanks, the cage took alot longer but turned out real nice.

[joepythons]

put me down for the next shipping date girls... my attic is pretty small so i'll put the three boys up in my bedroom instead after all... that's where i keep all the BIG snakes!

and i can, of course, invite the belly dancing class over to entertain them while they are workin' don't want them to get bored stiff in there *clears throat* although we do need their work to be stiff... cause a flimsy rack is no good to anyone

O my the comments that this is going to bring :eek: .I will leave with no comment being made as i like this site to much

[stangs13]

O my the comments that this is going to bring :eek: .I will leave with no comment being made as i like this site to much

i know!!!!Its hard not to leave a comment.....

[recycling goddess]

that means two points for the girls and zero for the boys!

[Smulkin]

I thought I had posted my monstrosity in here already


Anyway here is phase 1 - there will be a couple more twin sections for the bigger bins - once that done all the extranneous supports and justtign 2x4s will be out of the picture - and the wooden riser at the bottom will be replaced with a nice continuous chunk of molding.

[recycling goddess]

so no lids with your's right? after the um... ah... situation with nate the other day (his ball python was sitting on top of her rack instead of inside her bin) - it got me to thinking that perhaps we NEED to build our rack with lids... so... a question to you... how do you get the bins to NOT move and how do you keep the snakes inside?

[Smulkin]

There are a couple of the shelves that wound up with a little more clearance than I had planned for. Plunking down one of those cheap brown rubber doorstops in front of the bin prevents any sort of forward movement. I thought about building little slider blocks on a pivot no wide than the thickness of the shelf that could "twist" down and keep the bin from being able to slide out.

Ditching the lids though was part and parcel of why I wanted to do this - the cleaning and maintenance time just dropped off majorly - even feeding is a much much quiker process - I am floored by the difference I did not expect it to be so significant - jut wanted to consolidate some of the footprint space we had been using down there.

[Evan Jamison]

how do you get the bins to NOT move and how do you keep the snakes inside?

The snakes cannot open a tub unless there is something for them to get leverage on (see below story)

The first racks I built I used melamine and routed channels for the heat tape. These are built very solid (read heavy as a horse), and the sterilite underbed tubs I used slide very easily. I never had a problem with an escapee for the first year of housing animals in it. One day after feeding I found one of my big girls (3300 grams) on the floor in the middle of the room. I thought i must have left the tub open or something and put her back in, making sure to slide the tub all the way in. The next morning, I found her out of her tub again!!! I knew it was not human error this time, and she got moved to a different rack. I believe she found out that if she crammed herself between the inside on the handle and the top and moved around enough, she could get the tub to slide out enough to escape. I have not had another snake escape from this rack since, but I'll bet if I put her back in, she would be out in a matter of hours. I have used Iris CB-70s in all the racks I've built since, as they have no lip inside the tub for leverage. All of these tubs slide VERY easily, and I have never had a snake escape from them.

Here are a few racks I built a couple years ago. All these pics are pretty old, but here's a one of the sterilite underbed storage tub rack. You can see the lip that she wedged herself into where the handle is.


and the rack she got moved to

That was my first time working with plastics, so the bottom has a nice lean to it Most of our animals are now housed in open air racks I've built similar to this one except with 10 CB-70s each.

Heat tape is run on sheet metal toward the back under each tub and I love how light they are!!!

-Evan

[Aric]

Heres a pic of my adult rack, I use 3" flexwatt run on top of sheet metal and the sterilite 1960 tubs. Not a very nice looking rack but it gets the job done.


p.s this is a very old pic, I took the pic right after I finished it.

[recycling goddess]

thank you thank you thank you!!!