How to build a spiny leaf insect enclosure

Kids love pets. So we had to have a pet... After ruling out high maintenance ones like cats & dogs, we settled for a turtle. To quickly realize a turtle requires a licence here, and a ton of gear. Fallback plan: the spiny leaf insect. OK, you can't teach him tricks, but it's cheap, low maintenance, and just scary enough.

Next step was to find a cage. Believe me or not, it's like AUD120 for a basic plastic reptile cage. Mmm, I smell the opportunity of a good little project here. So let's go and build it ourselves. We'll do a small wooden cage (25x30x40cm) enclosed with fly net. Like that:

I'm really not a woodwork expert, this cage is extremely basic & rough, so constructive comments are welcome.

Material

You need simple stuff:

• pine or timber wood for the edges. I used 20mm square section wood. 

• plywood for the top & floor, and for the bottom walls

• bits and pieces for the door, like hinges, a lot of small nails
• a strong stapler
• some flynet

Let's go!

1. First, saw all the pieces.

2. Build the floor, by nailing 2x21 and 2x26 pieces to the plywood bottom. I show on the diagram where you should put nails.

3. Build the main frame: nail plywood bottom walls to a 40cm edge, like this:

4. Repeat for the other edges till you've got something like that:

Attach it to the floor we did on step 1. Now the tricky steps: let's make a door and attach it.

5. Nail two 26 cm pieces horizontally to the front side, 10 cm from the bottom. That's gives a kind of frame where the door will fit.

6. Make the door: nail 2x20 and 2x26 pieces

7. Attach the door to the main frame with the hinges.

8. Screw in the rings so that the door can be kept closed.

9. Nail the top

10. Staple fly net all along the sides and the door (and obviously not on the frame behind the door...)

Et voila! OK it's very rough, it's not meant to be aesthetically pleasing, but more a simple project you can do with a 10yo kid.

Total budget: around 50 AUD, mostly for the wood, flynet, hinges & nails.

I wish I had taken pics of the ongoing construction, but I thought about explaining everything afterwards. Some improvements could be :

• paint it (although the paint might contain chemicals that might harm the insect? I don't know, frankly)
• nail the "bottom walls" and the top over the fly net  to make it look nicer.

Good luck, don't hesitate to post improvements. Maybe for a version 2.0?