Making A Cat Playground

we have these two cats cinnamon and waffles we've been thinking it would be nice to build a climbing play structure for them in our craft room on the french cleat system so i took some measurements and did a drawing of the walls with the french cleats i tried to measure the cats really this was more just to chase them around with the tape measure the thought i had for part of the system was to make a series of hexagon shapes now i've seen this design online this isn't a new idea i needed a way for the cats to be able to climb from the floor up towards the ceiling so i thought that system would be nice as they can go between the different hexagons and move their way up at least that's the hope i really hope they can figure this out so my first thought was to make a ring of pieces that i would then cut holes in for the cats to move through but this seemed like it was going to take a lot of wood and maybe a better way to do it would be to make a ring at the front and the back of the hexagon then build a floor and a ceiling and this seemed like it would use a lot less wood to do the same function so i worked on making the rings for the front and the back and i came up with kind of a labor-intensive way to cut those pieces the strips that i wanted to make the rings out of wouldn't quite fit on my wedgie sled and that sled wouldn't quite go to the 30 degrees that i needed between the segments of the six-sided ring so i attached a piece to my sled at 30 degrees then realize that i couldn't cut the pieces i was going to need in that configuration so what i ended up doing was pre-cutting each segment on the radial arm saw with a less accurate cut then re-cut all of the ends on the sled on the table saw to get a much more accurate cut and this gave me a ring that would go together with nice tight joints all the way around and once everything was set up this didn't take very long it was more a matter of figuring out the process i used biscuits at the joints as the surface area for the glue was kind of small between the segments and the rings are kind of big and the biscuits will help hold the segments flush i could put glue on two ends of three of the segments and that would get all six joints then i use my band clamp to clamp everything together on this first one i just used the band and i didn't use the little corner pieces that i used in later rings i also found it helped to hold the ring up just a little bit so the band would be centered vertically on the ring the ring's a little thinner than the band and i let the two rings dry overnight i thought it would be nice to cut a circle out of the inner hole on the ring so this is more decorative than anything but it makes the outside of the ring a hexagon to fit with the other hexagons and the inside will be a circle and it just seemed like it'd be nice if those two edges were different the ring that will be along the wall i made some bumps where the cleat will go now that the rings are made i need to cut some dados into the interfaces of each of the two rings i want to put my dado stack on this saw i've never tried to do that and what that'll mean is to make a new throat plate this saw has a huge throat plate i'm hoping my 10 inch dado will will actually come up high enough to be above the table this this saws a direct drive saw which makes it super accurate which is really nice but it means you need a really big diameter blade for it to actually be big enough to come up above the surface of the cable so i found a piece of the same wood that i can use to make a new throw plate my first thought was to cut it all out on the cnc machine but thinking about it i really could just do it with the table saw and the dissander so i cut my piece of wood into the same size as the existing thread plate and i rounded the corners down on a disk sander and i added the two finger holes and with some shaping i got it to fit it doesn't quite fit at this point so the original throat plate is kind of interesting in that it doesn't have any adjustment screws for the height the throat plate has just been ground to sit perfectly in the table saw what i figured out is that the four corners are all at slightly different heights it's just that the original throat plate is ground to perfectly work with those different heights so i added four screws at the corners of my throat plate and this will allow me to adjust those four corners i think it'd be interesting if i were to make this on the cnc to measure the original throw plate and cut those heights perfectly into the wood throw plate i could put my dado set in and it did seem to just come up above the height of the table i don't really have this saw set up with a fence so i made a quick fence out of a 2x4 i jointed two of the faces so i would have a nice straight edge and this is also needed to hold the throat plate down while i bring the dado set up and cut the hole in the throw plate and i decided i needed a sacrificial fence on my 2x4 fence so i added another piece to the fence and this will give me something for the dado set to cut into as i have it set up wider than what i need to cut and this fence i just have to set up with a square and then clamp to the table it's a little harder to set up but it works just fine [Music] [Applause] so all of this is to be able to cut a dado at the top and the bottom of the inside of the two rings then at the midpoint of the rings parallel to the other two datas i need a short dado in the ring so i use the radial arm saw for this and i cut pieces for the floor and the ceiling and two short pieces for the midpoint platform then it's just a matter of gluing everything together and it went together nicely and i attached the cleat to the back you can see how the cleat works with the little bumps that i made on the ring on the back it's not super necessary but it gives me a place to put the cleat i brought the first hexagon in to see if the cats liked it and they seemed a little indifferent with a treat and a little coaxing we could get them to jump onto the hexagon so i have this one done and the cat seemed to tolerate it at least at least they're not afraid of it and the idea now is to make some more of these so i can make a system so the cats can can hopefully climb climb through that maze on the wall and this one i don't really see anything i want to change with it so i think i'll make four more just like this and all the tools that i use to make this i've left set up so making the parts for the other four should go fairly quickly there's just going to be a lot of parts to make i ripped some more strips and i cut the segments again so i had four more i wanted to make that's eight rings times six for the number of segments i glued those segments up you can see i'm using the little corner pieces now that seemed a little better one of the rings at one point just wasn't going together it was just it was really odd and i pulled it all apart and wiped the glue off and then figured out that one of the segments i hadn't cut to the shorter length so it was slightly longer it was making the joints not go together and i let those dry overnight and i can re-cut the inside of the rings i set up some stops on the table some of these hold downs are actually sort of registration points so i could throw each ring down quickly and just run the g-code and have it cut and i did a quick sand of the inside and with the dado all set up it was easy to cut the dados and i cut the floors and ceilings and the little center pieces i rounded over the inside of the midpoint piece and you can see how they go together it's actually really simple and there's all five of them so the plan had been to sand off the little extra bit of the floors and ceilings on the disk sander and make them flush with the hexagon and this worked but it was taking a little while to sand off what was sticking out so i decided to angle the table saw to 60 degrees and cut off what i could sort of quickly then sand the rest of it off to be flush this meant there was a lot less work on the dissander and it might have been slightly faster i got finished on a sunny day so i could put finish on outside and i just sprayed on lacquer it doesn't need a super durable finish and something that's really safe i made the cleats that go on the back and i attached those i set my square to the distance from the top that the cleat would go so they would all be in the same location i could drill a hole from the back and add screws from the back then i could put everything in place it really only works if you start at the bottom and work your way up if you start at the top and put try and put ones underneath you have to lift the hexagon that's above to get the cleat in place then we showed the cats cinnamon seemed a little more enthusiastic she liked playing with her mouse waffles wasn't so excited about it cinnamon doesn't seem to have any fear of heights so the idea is to have this be the piece that allows them to go from the floor up to the top and what i'd like to do in the future is to build some bridges around the room and possibly some square boxes that work similarly to the hexagon give places for the cats to sit up high we also had some carpet samples that i found just by chance fit perfectly in the width of the hexagon i may have to stick these down so they don't move around we'll see if they work this way uh [Music] thanks for watching

Channel: frank howarth

Views: 177,937

Keywords: frank howarth, frank makes, Woodworking, craft, craft making, DIY, wood shop, CNC, CNC woodworking, cinematography, making a cat wall, how to make a cat wall, making a cat playground, cat playground, reclaimed wood, using reclaimed wood, Honeycomb

Id: 3W-ETfHJU2k

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022