ALL WIRE QUAIL CAGE - Build a commercial style quail cage at a fraction of the cost.

hi guys welcome to sternik's corner my name's terry and in this video i want to talk a little bit about the um all wire cages that i've been working on these cages are going to be used strictly in my uh my breeding projects uh the cage measures 36 inches wide and 20 inches deep it also has a divider down the center so you're getting two cages per tier the floor is a half inch by one inch coated hardware cloth um that also has an egg roll out tray on the front so all your eggs roll forward making collecting the eggs real simple this is going to be a multi-tiered setup um probably two or three cages high i haven't made up my mind yet most likely three but you can build it um as many tiers as you want following these uh these instructions uh you notice here the cage on the top has wire extended up past the top of the cage and what that is for is to guide your trays in uh when you're sliding your trays in and out also we're gonna have metal deflector shields which will deflect the manure into the tray and prevent the birds from pooping out the side of the cage or even out the back of the cage um as far as waters and feeders go i think i'm going to uh plumb the back side of the cages with half inch pvc and then just use two of the watering cup style waters per unit originally i was going to go with the nipples but i don't think i i want to do that as far as feeders go the feeder is going to be a trough style feeder on the front of the cage where the birds can just stick their heads through the wire and you know get out of the feeder feeder will also be able to lift up in case you have any eggs that don't quite roll all the way forward so let me go ahead and get set up here i want to show you the materials and whatnot that i used to put this thing together and go over some of the measurements and just the basic technique of assembling this unit okay so as far as material uh what you're gonna need is uh depending on how many cages you wanna build uh you're gonna need a roll of one inch by two inch um welded wire and you're also going to need a roll of a half inch by one inch coated hardware cloth and that will be for the floor i ordered 100 foot rolls of wire and i think i figured out that i could build 33 units out of 100 foot of wire so uh it's very cost effective to buy more wire because you're going to be able to get a lot more units out of it but basically we're going to start out by cutting out the tops of our cages which on the one inch by two inch wire you want to cut out a piece that measures 36 by 36 inches and what i use to cut the wire with is a uh angle grinder with a diamond blade on it you don't have to use an angle wire or angle grinder you can use a regular set of uh wire cutters or a pair of wire cutters your standard wire cutters might take you a little bit longer to uh to cut the wire but these will work just fine so what we're going to do is we're going to start out by making our bends on our wire and i found that to make the cleanest bends what i use if you don't have a metal break which i don't i just take a piece of 2x2 and stick it underneath the wire where i want it and uh then i take another two by two that's got uh holes drilled in it with screws in it and i clamp it down between these two pieces and that just gives you a nice straight edge to where you can make your your bends so the first bend that we're going to make you're going to count up five uh two inch spaces so it's going to be 10 inches up to your your first bend let me get my drill hooked up here and this 10 inch piece is going to be the face of our cages but basically just uh align your your wood and then run the screw down through it good okay what i use um is a rubber mallet and basically just go along the edge and slightly tap it down to where you start to get a bend [Applause] and then once you get a bend you can actually come and kind of push it down with your hand so so when you order this wire the uh one inch by two inch wire uh you wanna order a 36 inch tall roll uh less than that it's not going to give you as much floor space in the cage i guess you could get by with 24 they'll give you 10 for the front but it's only going to leave you 14 inches uh deep your your cage will be 14 inches deep so i would recommend going with the 36 inch that way you can get a 20 inch floor in there now you're probably saying well 20 inches and 10 inches is 30. what happens the extra six we do have to cut off uh some of the wire off the back side of the cage okay so there's the front of our cage and the top and like i say we're going to have to cut a little bit off the back of our cage so we're going to measure that and that's going to be 20 inches from this point back we're going to measure 20 inches and we're going to cut that off and it kind of helps to have a sharpie with you just makes it a little bit easier to mark where your cuts have to be [Applause] now on the bottom piece i've already got one uh bent cut out and bent and the bottom piece is also going to be uh 36 inches wide and 36 inches deep let's see what we've got here it's 26 and nine and then the one inch for the lip up front so it's 36 inches so 36 by 36 also on the bottom piece then when you go to make your bends on the on the bottom you're going to make one bend at nine inches and that will be the back side of the cage and then this bend up front uh it's it's probably i bent it right in the middle of two wires so it's actually it's an inch and a half i wanted a good lip on the front so the eggs uh when they roll forward you know they've got a stop up front okay so once you've got your uh your top piece cut out and your bottom piece cut out and bent uh to the measurements that you want them uh real quick i'll go over those measurements once again um on the top piece you're going to measure up 10 inches and make a bend and then you're going to have 20 inches from the front to the back of the cage so you will need to have trim off a little piece of that on the bottom of the cage you are going to have let me get my tape measure you are going to have a 10 inch on the back and then a inch and a half on the front lip for the egg roll out okay so basically uh we're just going to partially assemble this so we can get the rest of our pieces in what you want to do is take a j clip and just line up your top and your back pieces and just put a couple on there you don't have to you know put a whole bunch on right now just put a couple on there just to kind of hold things in place while you are getting the uh the rest of the cage pieces ready and uh ready for assembly okay i think i'll put one more on the far end okay now this front piece uh here this ten inch front piece it's going to come back five inches from the front so basically just count one two three four five actually it'll be five and a half inches because you have that extra half inch but you're not going to clamp this down the reason is we've got to lift that up in order for our egg rollouts to roll underneath that front piece so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to cut out these side pieces and i'll give you the measurements on those real quick they are going to be these side pieces are going to measure 20 inches by 12 inches so we'll have 20 inches by 12 inches i'm gonna go ahead and get those cut out and then we'll come back and uh show you how we put them on okay so we went ahead and cut out our both side pieces and our center pieces and again those those measure 20 inches by 12 inches tall um you want to make sure that you save that little leftover piece that you cut off here to get your 20 inches those can be used for when we go ahead and install our doors so what you want to do now is uh basically get this thing tacked into place uh just putting one of your j-clamps back here in this corner and what we need to do on this front piece is we need to raise this up a little bit so what you want to do is looking down here towards the bottom let me bring the camera in a little bit so i can show you because i want this this part has to be right or for your egg roll out so let me bring the camera in and okay so what we want to do when we clamp this front on is we want to lift this piece this uh top piece up high enough to where we've got room underneath there for the eggs to roll out so what i did was on this second one up i put a clamp right here that will allow it only to go up so high so we've got an inch and probably a half so we've got about an inch and a half clearance but what we need to do now is put a clamp up here at the top to hold that in place or it's just going to want to drop down again so let me go ahead and see if i can't get a clamp up top here i don't know if you guys can see that let me adjust that up a little bit what i'm gonna do is i'm going to lift this piece up and put a clamp right there and that will hold that up high enough see how that's held up down there i don't know if you can see it but we've got plenty of room for our eggs to roll out and then maybe a couple more on there just to hold it in place and what we'll do is we'll go back around uh once we've got the entire cage set up we'll go back around and clean up all our our rough edges and also clamp everything down okay so the next piece that we have to put in is our center divider and in order to do that we've got to either cut the center divider down to fit but what i found works actually better than cutting it because then you don't have anywhere to attach your clamps to your j-clamps is just mark the front and the back and what we're going to do is we're going to take our clamp our our wood pieces and we're going to clamp this in there and then we're going to bend that over flat and that will go up against the top so it gives us something to clamp to and the bottom we can obviously clamp right through the bottom of the cage so let me go ahead and get this bent up and then i'll show you what it looks like before we stick it inside the cage okay so i want to show you real quick what that looks like uh here's our mark let's see if i can find here here's our mark on the shallow end and then it comes up tray on their other end all i did was clamp this in and now what we'll do is take and bend that over just like we did the other pieces okay so there's what the center piece looks like uh before we put it in obviously it'll go in this way this being the front oh well you can see that this being the front side this being the back side so let me get the cage back up here and i'll show you real quick how we do that okay so what i want to do now is i want to measure from the outside edge of the cage i want to measure in 18 inches and i'm going to make a mark and that will show me where where my center divider needs to go now because this mark is going to land in between a one inch space you need need to move it over a half inch either way just so you've got something to to clamp your center divider to and basically the easiest way to do that is to take your center divider and we're just going to lift up on this front piece slide it in find our mark and that's another reason why you don't want to clamp everything down tight right away is you want to make sure that you have everything in position before you lock it down tight all right what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a clamp right here to hold that and then i can make a mark on the back side of the cage so i know where the back piece has to go and maybe one more just for just to hold it in place okay so we've got our center divider in um now we're ready to go ahead and put our last piece on this side and you're basically going to do it the exact same way you did this side so i'll get that done and then we've got a a piece we need to put in here we need to get our doors cut out but yeah that's basically pretty much it okay so i've got the uh the final outside wall on um i also went around and jay clamped um all the edges or most of them any i still got a few left to do and i went ahead and cut out one door opening uh so real quick i want to show you um the measurements that we use uh when cutting out the door openings uh basically just measure in four inches from the uh outside edge of it and you're going to cut two of these these pieces here that will give you a total of two four six inches tall for the door opening um then you're gonna come over nine i believe it's nine one two three four five six seven eight nine yep gonna come over nine inches and it's one two three four five six seven eight nine and we are going to cut these two and then go along the bottom and the top and cut out the remaining pieces for your door okay so we've got the openings for our door cut out what you need to do also is cut out your doors remember that piece that we had left over from cutting our sides those were basically like that we're going to save those and cut them for the door so those are going to be 10 inches wide let me take off an inch there and they will be two four six inches tall and what i do after i cut everything out i'll go back around with the the angle grinder and just kind of grind down some of those sharp points just so when you reach in the cage you're not going to get cut let's save that for the other door okay so once you've got your openings cut out you can go ahead and hang your door and hang your door basically just stick it inside the cage and uh bring it up even with this top rail that you cut out you're gonna have a one inch overlap on each side that'll keep the door from coming back this way and then basically just using uh couple of j-clips you're going to clamp that top rail in place and you don't want to clamp it real tight because you want it to be able to pivot on those uh j-clips and the door i probably got to put a couple more j clips on there but the door will basically return to the closed position and what i'll probably use is some type of a clamp down here to hold the door shut when i'm not in there so okay that's pretty much it for the assembly um you can see we've got our rails sticking up that's going to allow us to slide our manure tray in i do need to go around and tighten up this cage a little bit put some more clamps on there bend a little bit of the metal so it's a little bit straighter and it looks like i cut myself already uh so yeah let me get that tightened up and uh come back and we'll talk a little bit about how we're going to mount this thing inside the uh the framework um this looks like it's going to be a three-tier cage i got the top top tier here and these will be the the middle and the bottom tiers and yeah we're pretty much ready to go ahead and mount it in the framework and uh see how it does okay guys so i went ahead and mounted the cages in this uh temporary uh rack system that i built um the reason i say temporary is i'm going to tear it all apart and i'm going to epoxy and paint all this woodwork that's going to waterproof it and also keep it from absorbing smells um or any type of pests that could be get burrowed into the wood um when i mounted the cages what i used was an inch and a quarter fender washer and you can see it up here in the corner i've got uh one up here i still don't have one down here but there's there's one on the top one at the bottom and same on the back one at the top and one on the bottom um the only thing you want to make sure you do is when you're mounting your cages that you have enough of a slope so your eggs will roll forward i've got about uh an inch to an inch and a quarter of slope rolling forward in 20 inches so that should be more than enough to get the eggs to roll forward also what i did was i installed on this cage i got to do the other two manure deflectors around the outside of the cage and basically all that is is a four inch piece of roof roof flashing you can pick up a roll of roof flashing for like ten dollars at home depot and do all more than uh this setup anyhow uh but basically i cut it down to four inch strip and uh tie wired it all around the outside edge of the uh the cage and hopefully that'll keep any manure from the birds backing up to the wire and trying to poop out the cage um the water system is the same basic uh watering system that i've used on all my previous cages it's basically just the poultry watering cups i've got two cups per cage just in case one should fail it's got a backup and it'll be set up the same way five gallon bucket on top of the cage and it'll feed all these units from that one five gallon bucket the manure trays are the same standard automotive drip trays that i've used in my other cages and i've got some ordered right now the auto parts store was out of them but i've got them ordered now they should be here hopefully pretty soon but basically when i put the tray in i line it up with the the front of the cage below it and that allows it to hang out over the back about four inches and the top cage that tray is lined up it's about splitting this egg roll out so it should have plenty of room shouldn't have to worry about manure you know pooping off of the front of the cage and down into the feet or below it which i have had that problem before uh with some other cages um the egg roll outs i don't know if i mentioned this earlier but what i did was cut a piece of the flooring material and j clipped it along this side edge here and that's just to keep the eggs from you know rolling off the edge i imagine you could bend up that side and it would do the same thing but i got plenty of wire so i just cut out a piece and and clipped it in there the one other thing i did and this is just a test along this front edge i bought a piece of 3 16 steel doll and i j clipped it along this front edge of this cage here and that's just to kind of stiffen up that that front piece there uh you can see right here it's a little bit wobbly and it probably would be fine but i thought for three dollars for that little piece of dowel i'll just go ahead and clamp it in there and that'll you know tighten up the front of that cage pretty good okay guys so i hope that gave you a little better understanding of what's involved in building your own uh wire cages uh if you have any questions post them in the comments down below i try to get in there and answer questions as often as possible i do want to say though that by building your own cages you can save considerably over purchasing commercially produced cages i purchased two 100 foot rolls of wire one roll of 1 by 2 and one roll of half by one coated i think it cost me right around 375 dollars for both them rolls but i figured out that i could build 10 and a half of these complete units for that money so uh your cost savings is going to be enormous uh if you take the time to build your own cages so guys if you have any questions post them in the comments down below i try to get in there and answer them uh you know as much as possible if you're not already subscribed to the channel please do so it helps me out and you can get notified of any new and upcoming videos as long as you hit that notification bell um so guys i hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you on the next one

Channel: Coturnix Corner

Views: 1,353

Rating: 4.9398499 out of 5

Keywords: quail cage, wire quail cage, how to, coturnix quail, coturnix, coturnix corner, Wynola Ranch

Id: 1cHY20GWyHg

Length: 28min 43sec (1723 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021