Building a Tank Topper

At some point in your gerbil-keeping-career you may decide you would like to build a topper for your Gerbils, or perhaps you have bought a bigger species like a Jird and they need more space than you have, or they enjoy climbing.

To begin with you need to have a plan of action. No use trying to go into this without much thought, otherwise you may become stuck or find it much more difficult than you should.

Now, measure the size of your tank... You need to know the dimensions of the topper. How high are you going to make it? Is it going to be very high with levels, or just a basic topper with no extra levels? How many animals are you going to have in it? Is it for breeding? Are they animals old, will they be able to cope with loads of levels and jumping? How safe will it be? You need to be sure if they were to fall it would not be too far that it could injure them.

Next you need to make sure you have all the materials you need, these are:

Tank
Wood lengths
W ire mesh
Pencil
Paper
Tape measure
Saw
Hammer
Sand paper
Nails
Wood glue
U-shaped pins or nail gun
Scissors
Metal file
L-shaped brackets
Hinges
Latch
Screwdriver/drill

Our tank is 36''x 15'' x 12'', so we need 4 x 36'' and 4 x 12''. For the height, we decided to make it 10'', so you also need 4 x 10''. Then you need to remember that there is a door, now this is best left until you have the frame put together, then you can measure how large the door lengths need to be.

The width of wood we used were:

Bottom Frame - 2cm x 4.5cm x 90cm

Top Frame - 2cm x 3cm x 90cm

Door - 2cm x 2cm x 84cm (this length depends upon how well you construct the topper and so it best left being cut until everything is finished)

Legs - 3cm x 3cm x 25.5cm

Now, we literally made two photo frames which were then stuck together using the legs. This seemed to make it much easier. However you can also cut joints, like dove tailed joints, these are designed to make the joint much more reliable and sturdy... But as this is a basic frame, and will not be sustaining much weight, we did not feel it required any sort of fancy joint - plus it can make things much more difficult. Unless you have the tools to make things easier.

Our lengths of wood were cut at our local hardware shop, which have a cutting service, I also got them to mitre the corners for us so everything was ready and just needed to be glued and nailed together. Gluing and nailing should make the joint pretty sturdy!

The two photo frame shapes are glued together and then nailed, once these are dry the legs of the frame are screwed on using L-shaped brackets.

Now, the frame is measured for the door. We decided to have a door that dropped down, rather than two doors that swing open. The area inside is measured and then the frame for the door is made. This was made very simply and the pieces of wood nailed together. Hinges are nailed onto the door and the frame, and then latches added to keep the door from falling open or being pushed open..

The next step is to cut the wire mesh to fit, then file it down as the metal can be very sharp and I do not want to cut myself whenever we remove the topper for cleaning etc. The mesh is then nailed to the wood using U-shaped pins.

And now the frame is done, you may wish to add in levels of your own, or things for your pet to climb on/in/chew. You may also want to make some sort of bridge for them to climb up to the topper level as well as for them to climb back down.