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So you grab the edge thats bridging the gap between the edge of the enclosure and the door and pull it that way?
if youve got a 6' sliding door your pushing if from the side furthest away from where your opening is so your 6' from where the monitors going to get trapped etc and i dont know how you close a door but a hold the handle nearest the edge to be closed i dont close it from the hinge.
Both systems have caused tail loss in varanids because humans are involved the odd hatchling has been crushed by both sytems to.
Hinged doors if youve got a small opening you dont have to take the door of to make adjustments as the gap is the full size of the opening,
There also cheaper to install/free in some cases,
i used to keep argus's and sand has ended up in those runner systems due to them piling all the sand up against the doors open the door sand falls in to the tracks the deeper runners on those doors made it more difficult to get it out to.
So you grab the edge thats bridging the gap between the edge of the enclosure and the door and pull it that way?
No, not the edge. There's either a handle there (note the handle near the edge of the glass at the start of this video)...
(Wayne, please do your stuff. One day also please explain how I can get the youtube link to work. In the meantime, I'll put extra links). Dog tame monitor - YouTube
...or I just use my hand to slide the glass over (start of this video)
Either way, I'm always nearest the opening, where I can keep an eye on things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by varanus_mad
if youve got a 6' sliding door your pushing if from the side furthest away from where your opening is
No, I'd never do that with 6' doors and I can't imagine why you would.
Quote:
Originally Posted by varanus_mad
i dont know how you close a door but a hold the handle nearest the edge to be closed i dont close it from the hinge.
No one does and that was exactly my point. I don't know why you feel the need to resort to a straw man argument, for here's an exact quote of what I had said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by crocdoc
With hinged doors, on the other hand, your hands (and attention) are at the part of the door furthest from the hinge, whereas it's the scissoring action right near the hinge that will most likely cause tail loss.
Tail tips get caught near hinges, whereas your hands (and attention) are at the other end of the door. Any kid that's ever had their fingers caught in a door or car door knows that it's not the opening end that causes the problem - we're all too busy focusing on that - it's when someone else closes a door and one's fingers are poking through the gap near the hinges. That's how tail tips get lost, too. The other thing to mention when discussing this is that with a sliding door you have one edge to worry about - the leading edge of the glass. With a hinged door, the instant it is open you have four edges to worry about. The hinge end of the door, where things can get trapped up against the door jamb, the upper and lower edges of the door, where things can get scissored against the door frame and the leading edge of the door (where your attention is going to be, as the handle is usually at that end, so that's the least worrisome end).
Quote:
Originally Posted by varanus_mad
Hinged doors if youve got a small opening you dont have to take the door of to make adjustments as the gap is the full size of the opening,
I'd rather have really large windows so I can see my monitors (and they can see out), rather than restrict the openings to tiny doors just to accomodate hinges rather than sliding doors. If I had hinged doors the size of these glass panels, opening the doors to throw food in or to do a bit of spot cleaning would create a huge opening through which my lace monitors could come flying out (especially when being fed).
If I had small doors, it would make it tricky to do maintenance. Not only would it restrict movement, but I'd be leaning the top half of my body through a small gap, so should the monitors act up I'd be in trouble trying to get out of their way in time. There's also the other issue with hinged vs sliding doors that hasn't been brought up yet: the amount of space required to swing the door open. If I had doors the size of the sliding glass panels in the enclosure shown above, I'd have to rearrange my living area so that there was always a 2m space in front of the enclosure, just so the doors could be swung open. The very table I am sitting at as I type this would have to be gone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by varanus_mad
i used to keep argus's and sand has ended up in those runner systems due to them piling all the sand up against the doors open the door sand falls in to the tracks the deeper runners on those doors made it more difficult to get it out to.
A high litter dam is always recommended so that substrate doesn't push up against windows (the litter dam in the above enclosure is almost at hip level on me), but if you have a look at the track system we're talking about at the beginning of this thread, the glass doesn't run in the tracks, anyway, so it doesn't make a difference. I probably have to vacuum substrate out from between the tracks (remember that the glass doesn't run in the gulleys, but up on the struts) once every few weeks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by varanus_mad
Both systems have caused tail loss in varanids because humans are involved the odd hatchling has been crushed by both sytems to.
I can't imagine how you'd crush a hatchling with a sliding door if you close it while standing near the opening. Coincidentally, though, the only hatchling I've ever come close to crushing was at the only normal hinged door in my home - my front door! I had some hatchlings escape once and as I was leaving one day I was closing the front door and felt a bit of resistance. Luckily I didn't push it hard, but chose to see what was stopping the door from shutting, for there was a hatchling up in the gap between the edge of the door and the door jamb, on the hinge side of the door. If I had closed the door firmly it would have been crushed and it was invisible from the handle end of the door.
That enclosure is stunning. I would love to have that in my living room...
I thought the same thing
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Thanks, but it IS my living room, unfortunately! Lol. There's not much left for me. I should post an updated photograph, as the basking light arrangement has changed and I have much larger, chunkier climbing logs in there now (fresh new ones, as of a few weeks ago).
Thanks, but it IS my living room, unfortunately! Lol. There's not much left for me.
Well since you're obviously displeased with it, I suppose I could take it off your hands... I suppose you had better send the monitors over as well... LOL
Yes, I did make that background myself. If you look really closely, you can see my blood, sweat and tears (mostly tears) embedded into the mock rock. The technique I used is not something I recommend for others to follow.
Challenge 1: I wanted a vertical cliff face which the monitors could easily climb up, with horizontal basking platforms at the top and numerous resting shelves at different heights, so the monitors could choose from several options in a vertical thermal gradient (because the basking lights are at the top, the enclosure always ranges from hot at the top to cooler down below). The cliff face had to fit onto the flat back walls of the enclosure, without taking up any floor space (the cliffs start a metre or so off the ground) and square up in the two corners. Finding a natural rock formation to these exact dimensions would take forever, so I couldn't just go take a mould from a real rock.
Challenge 2: To save on time and expense, I wanted to make only one mould and pull two cliffs from it, so the cliff face had to look as good (and as believable) upside down as right side up.
I carved a model rock, out of dense polyurethane foam, with the number of basking shelves etc that I wanted, basing it on local sandstone landforms which I had photographed over the preceding weeks. For texture, I mixed sand and crushed rock with plaster and worked it into cracks and onto edges. When it had the rock look I was after (in everything but colour), I painted on several layers of latex, some with cloth embedded for structural strength, to make a mould. I then constructed a support mould (aka 'mother' mould) out of fibreglass, in multiple parts that could be disassembled and reassembled, held together with bolts on specially made flanges where the pieces meet. This is usually necessary when making a mould that has overhangs.
I removed the fibreglass mother mould, peeled the latex mould off the model and then broke the model up into tiny pieces (the reason for this will come later).
I reassembled the mother mould, laid the latex mould into it and painted in silicon mould release. I then poured crushed rock and sand into the broken edges of the cliffs before painting/splattering/spraying in a pigmented mixture of polyurethane elastomer, mixed with crushed slate powder, sand and crushed rock. When a reasonable thickness was obtained, I backed it with a couple of layers of elastomer soaked glass fibre matting. When that was cured, I put in some wood struts to support the largest of the shelves, threw in the broken bits of my original 'model' rock and then filled in the back with two part polyurethane foam. I fixed the whole thing to the back panels of the enclosure and screwed the wooden struts to the back wall panels. When the enclosure was constructed, the whole back panels, mock rock and all, were popped into place and screwed to the side walls, then the edges of the mock rock were sealed to the side walls with silicon.
Don't try this at home, trust me. I'm glad I did it and I love the enclosure (you have to see it in person to get a feel for scale - the monitor on the basking shelve on the upper right was around 1.4m - just under five feet - in length when that photograph was taken), but if I had to do it again I'd probably rethink my techniques. One of the reasons I did it the way I did is that I liked the realistic look of mock rock cast from moulds and wanted to learn some moulding and casting techniques, so I didn't really mind doing it the most labour intensive way as it was part of the process.
If I were to do it again, I would either do two 'one off' rocks carved out of polyurethane and then coated (less realistic, but quicker and easier) or I would take many individual moulds of natural rocks, cast them in either polyurethane or polyester and then assemble them in situ and glue them together with more polyurethane or polyester.
Overall, it's held up really well. It's had full monitor wear and tear for over 10 years, now, although every now and then (roughly every two to three years) I have to do small repair jobs to a couple of high traffic areas, especially cliff edges or the vertical wall above the cliff, where the monitors will often claw away or hang on with their full weight.
Like so (he was sleeping like this, but when I opened the enclosure to take a photograph he woke up):
The amount of dedication there amazes me, thank you for all the detail. I certainly will be attempting this one day, but only after I have a lot more experience under my belt.. I have never even built any sort of background before. Was this the first time you ever made a background?
I was about to say that it was the first I'd ever made but then remembered an enclosure I put together when I was a teen, using fibreglass. So it was my second. I researched this one a fair bit before attempting it.
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