Fun Day Building A Hamster Cage

I spent part of the day yesterday building a bigger cage for my girlfriend’s hamster, Chubbo. His old cage was quite small and did not fit a wheel, so after some research it was decided that he will get a home built cage made from a big plastic bin and some wire mesh. The design is quite simple: a big hole cut in the lid and covered with some of the mesh. The actual bin part is unmodified, although you could do more improvements by adding a few more breathing holes for summer or a door. This is quite easy to accomplish, so I recommend every hamster (or other critter) owner to try building one. Even I managed to finish the complete product you see in the picture above (well, we are still waiting for the new Wodent Wheel to arrive to complete it) in two hours. It allows your pet to have a large home for just a small price (~$30-$40). There are a few good tutorials on the web on how to accomplish this,

• How to make a Hamster cage.
• Bin Cage Instructions
• Make A Homemade Hamster Bin Type Cage

Since I prefer theory over practice, I had a bit of trouble with some of the building. Here are a few tips that I found out about as I went along:

• Layout the mesh first and use that to mark the holes for the screws.
• Measure twice, cut once. I just barely cut the mesh to the right size, although I planned for several centimeters of “safety space”.
• Cut the mesh wire by wire. Cutting several wires at a time will just bend them and damage it.
• It is OK if some of the wires on the sides are bent, just use some duck tape to cover them at the end.