Built Some Enclosures.

Built some enclosures using materials found around my neighborhood. Another fun part of building, is scavenging.

Here's the desert enclosure. I tried something new with a drying out method. I mixed 3 parts play sand, 1 part cocoa fiber (or peat or whatever) and I want to say 2 parts excavator clay. Not exact ratios, but you get it. Overall, I had 3.5 ziplock bags of moist substrate. I mixed all these materials thoroughly, and decided to speed the drying out process by baking it in an oven one layer at a time for a few hours. Oven preheated at 400 F, nothing got burnt, except the cocoa fiber may have gotten a bit toasted.

Materials from left to right: a little extra of excavator clay, a large ziploc bag of my mixture and the cookie sheet ready to go.

I packed it down super firm, and added maybe half a cup of water, packed it down more, then stuck it in the oven. If you use this method, keep in mind there's a chance you can scratch it up. Also, be sure to make poke slits or holes on the top, it'll help it dry faster in the oven. Finally when you're done letting it cool off, you just use a spatula and scrape it off and dump it in the enclosure (it'll crumble a little, but don't worry). When you're finished, pack it down well, and it should be good to go! Now you're ready for hides and decor. Overall, it took me 7-8 hours, maybe more. But it beats letting it dry out in the sun for three weeks.

And here's the final product.

Perfectly good burrow safe substrate. The leaves are from a yucca tree, which is native to it's natural environment. And the color of the rock also looks like it's from the environment as well. (Have you guessed what it is I'm getting yet?)

And I made some more yesterday. I used info from this video here, which I highly encourage people to watch when they have time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEdyu-jKymQ

Washed with HOT water for a few minutes


Baking at 350 F


Cooling off


Hot gluing hides


And 3 finished enclosures.






Well, that's it. Hope you like it. They will be much more beautiful with scorpions living inside it

very nice set up

i was distracted by the pink glue gun

I'm curious to see how well your pan baked substrate holds burrows and tunnels. My gut feeling tells me that once the substrate is moved into the enclosure and tamped down it will be rather fragile and easily collapsible, but I may be wrong. Please keep us posted.

shebeen wrote:

I'm curious to see how well your pan baked substrate holds burrows and tunnels. My gut feeling tells me that once the substrate is moved into the enclosure and tamped down it will be rather fragile and easily collapsible, but I may be wrong. Please keep us posted.

I added the substrate then smushed it down as hard as i can. Then, to test it I went to one of the corners and started to dig a little with my fingers and it stayed. So I filled it back up. But, if anything were to happen in the future such as collapsing burrows, I'll let you know. But basically the key is you get it in there and you push it down.

Look very good Patrick nice work!

Your Centroides?? will have fun in there



Joey

I think the stones in the second pic are very nice.