Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Should I get the Sterilite 32qt.
Clearview Model # 1756
23" X 16" X 6" tall

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"What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For what happens to the beasts,
soon happens to men.
All things are connected."

-Chief Seattle (Duwamish Tribe)

Animal Plastics Sterilite #1756 unit.

Rack Size..52Hx18Wx24D

Shelves.....7 Shelves High

Tubs......Sterilite Box 1756(32qt)

Tub Size..23½x17x6(32qt)

Heat...........167Watts

Shipping...$55 (48 States)

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"What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For what happens to the beasts,
soon happens to men.
All things are connected."

-Chief Seattle (Duwamish Tribe)

First off, The top one is a Vision rack...but I'm sure you all know that.

The Vision rack holds more, but doesn't keep the cages dark.

The Animal plastic rack is cheaper...but only holds 7 snakes.

I really am torn. I'm LEANING towards the Vision...but I've heard really good things about both.
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"What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For what happens to the beasts,
soon happens to men.
All things are connected."

-Chief Seattle (Duwamish Tribe)

i have a few balls and i feel the same way about the vision rack. the single reason im confused about buying it is that i currently have my bp's in a animal plastic type rack where its dark inside plus i have a hide for each one. with vision theres no sides and thats where im not sure if my bps will go off feed in them or not feel secure like they do in the closed type sides. but other wise i hear only good things about the vision.

I got two racks for lets say around $1500, tubs, heat, wheels. I got one Vision adult Ball rack, that will house 11 adult Balls, and one Baby rack that will hold 60 babies. I am not sold on the heat cable, really like the heat tape of the Freedom Breeders, but the cable will use one or two plugs vs. a plug for every shelf on other racks. It took my wife and I about 2 hrs to put up both racks, we still have not put the heat on them. They seem sturdy enough with the bolts in the top, makes a big difference. Bottom line, it was the price. I think I got a good deal. I will be adding to my adult Freedom Breeder rack too, making two units of 6 or 7 shelves vs. one way too tall unit.

Dave

And spend the extra cash on snakes.
You know you can't afford it anyways dude... so listen to uncle Evan here, and put a little elbow grease in to a nice home made rack.
Shoot me a message and I will send you the plans.

This was going to be when tax returns come in...

and I am not very handy...at all. I can't build one of those pre-cut birdhouse kits without it looking weird. Haha.
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"What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For what happens to the beasts,
soon happens to men.
All things are connected."

-Chief Seattle (Duwamish Tribe)

Did you get kicked out of boyscouts/woodshop?
lol
j/k
They really are not that difficult to build.
And it's amazing how much cheaper they are.
I don't even make the cuts.. I have home depot do it for me... pay the guy $5 and they enjoy it... gves them something to do.

I forgot that home depot does that.
Haha.

Sounds like a plan.

Did you seal yours?
Can you stain them? I know it's not about the looks, but I'd like to make it look like something other then just plywood.
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"What is man without the beasts?
If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from great loneliness of spirit.
For what happens to the beasts,
soon happens to men.
All things are connected."

-Chief Seattle (Duwamish Tribe)

dude send me the plans the only reason im apprehensive i dont know how you keep your heats up??

buy a rack designed for snakes, I would never want a rack with lids on the boxes. You have to take the box completely out of the rack to feed, water, or just to check on the snake in general.
Go with the Vision, I have a 60 tub hatchling rack completely filled, every snake in it is pounding rats. I will be adding more Vision CB-70 racks for my adults. I also have Boaphile racks, but I like the Vision much better. It comes on wheels and you can adjust the amount of heat cord on each level and alot of the racks can hold multiple size tubs.

I agree to a point but to think a well made wood/melamine rack isn't an option is crazy. All my racks are made of melamine and built by a good friend of mine that has a cabinet shop. All my shelves are built to within 1/16" tolerance, better than most commercial bought racks. Granted they are heavy as anyone would want but they are very good racks and I'm sure my snakes eat, shed, breed, and just overal live just as good as yours without me having to spend almost 1k per 10 snakes. Overal I have about $200 per rack of 18 tubs and that's including thermo, tubs, heat tape and the rack itself. This is a rack that is built around 32qt tubs with lids off. If space get's tight for hatchlings, 2 12qt tubs fit sideways w/lids where one 32qt tub would fit. Yes it's a pain to have to remove the tub to feed but I like it as you are forced to completely inspect the tub each time you want to look at your beautiful babies.

Granted the new vision racks do look and function wonderfully but for a small breeder building up his/her collection it makes more sense to spend the extra money on snakes as long as they can provide escape-proof caging that meets or exceeds their needs.
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Josh & Krysty Hutto
J&K Reptiles

Various Ball Pythons:::

1.0 striped vanilla
1.2 Citrus Ghost and hets
1.2 Albino and hets
2.3 het Pied
1.1 Pastel (male has additional gene going on with him)
a bunch of female holdbacks and several rescue normal males

0.1 columbian boa, she's a feeding monster, controls my
over production of rats, lol
0.1 brazilian rainbow boa, another rat eating monster
1.1 corns

a BAD dog is MADE not bred, support the American Pit Bull Terrier as the greatest breed of dogs on Earth!!!!!

The plastic racks will out last melamine, spend the money the first time and get it right. If King of Spades buys a Vision rack, it will last him the rest of his life.

Is handy? My husband and I made a couple of these racks out of expanded PVC, they're great and weren't very hard to make.
I left the lids on these boxes cause I'm keeping corns and kings in them and they will try to squeeze out even the smallest gap but when I make a bigger cb70 version for my balls I'll do it no lids and a back and partial sides to hold in the heat and keep it dark.
It cost just under $400 to make 2 of these racks and they hold a 16 x 24" tub. I also made them 9 high cause I'm not that tall and I have to get up on something to see into the top 2 bins on the Visions.

Cheryl

Cheryl,
I looked up expanded PVC online, since my husband & I had never heard of it - looks perfect for racks!

What I was wondering though, is where did you get your materials for your racks? I've found places I can order from online, but I am a little leary of that. Do you know of any stores that carry expanded PVC on hand, or is it something you have to place an order for?

Thanks,
~Rebecca
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0.1 Dumeril's Boa '04 (Courtney)
0.2 American Pit Bull Terriers (40lb darling lap dogs:Brandy&Mara)
1.2 Ball Pythons
[1.0 '05 Orange Hypo (Specter)]
[0.1 '05 Het Hypo (Sylvia)]
[0.1 '03 Normal (Sue)]

n/p

It comes in 4x8 ft sheets like plywood does. I used 1/4" (6mm) for the shelves and 3/4" (19mm) for the side supports. The place I got it from cut it for me. I had the shelves cut to exact size and the 3/4" cut into 2" strips and cut the lengths ourselves.

This is really cool stuff! We were trying to think of other things we could build with it!

Here's some more pics of the building of the rack. You'll notice we just marked where the shelves will be postioned on these. That's because I was planning on using tubs with lids When I do the larger cb70 size I plan to use the tubs plus a sheet of posterboard as spacers so there will be minimal clearance.

The first pic is me gluing 3/4" strips to the shelves. I used lots of cleaner first and then heavy weight PVC cement. If you lay the 3/4" strip about 3/4" in on the shelf you can swipe both the shelf surface and the edge of the side piece in 2 passes and then just stand up the side strip, holding it in place for a minute or so.

In the middle pic you're seeing the bottom of the rack. Look closely at the inside corners of the bottom, we glued scrap pieces of the 3/4" in the corners for extra support. That is also where we attached the wheels once the sides supports were screwed in place.

The last pic is the shelves with side strips all stacked up.

THe vision racks are nice, but way beyond my price range. Also, I am leary about not having lids as all it takes is one careless moment of not pushing the container all the way back in and you have escaped snakes. at least with a lid in a tight rack, even if the lid isn't completely on, there may not be any chance a snake can squeeze out. Maybe kings or corns could do it, but less change for a ball python. Also, if something should happen and the rack system falls over (some kid decides to climb it, for instance) you won't have X number of snakes loose (course change the lids can pop off anyway...)).

However, that said, if I had the spare money to buy vision racks, I would go for them. Less work for me to get it up and I don't have to pull the containers out all the way to clean/feed/etc. which means less bending. If I ever win the lottery, I plan to buy vision racks, or perhaps the plastic racks, the solid sides do look nice. Also good place to mount rheostats etc.

Overall, since I have also read good things about these racks, the best thing to do is buy what you like and can comfortably afford. Building your own deffinitely will be cheaper and with care, wooden racks can last 10-20 years. Plywood can be painted or stained, just air dry completely (at least 24 hours after the last coat, or longer, if you can still smell fumes from it) before putting the snakes into the rack. Water damage probably is your number one risk with wooden racks, especialy malamine (which bubbles and expands when wet. Plywood does too, though tends to warp or ripple, depending on how much water gets into it). TO me spending $600 US plus shipping (and taxes, and exchange difference between the US dollar and Canadian Dollar, unless I find a local retailer) amounts to alot of money (probably around $1000 after all is considered) then having to spend another $100 or so on tubs....building wooden racks even once every 10 years, is cheaper. It will cost me about $100-$200 to build a wooden rack, depending on how fancy I want to get. Plus cost of heating and tubs. Even if it comes out to about $350, still can build three racks or more, for the price of one Vision.

Again, if money wasn't an issue, I would most likely go for a Vision rack style or the reptile plastics one. Mostly because it will save me the trouble of going to Home Depot, getting the cuts done, figure out how to put everything together without having board suddenly a half inch too short because i forgot to take in account thickness of the wood when measuring size of sections I needed, or whatever. Lugging the wood from the store to my car, my car to my apartment, then finding room to build it, etc. PRobably hitting a billion snags along the way...Yeah, if i ahd the money, will get somebody better at carpentry and cage building to do it all for me...and delivery it, leaving the only thing I have to do is slide in the tubs and plug in the rheostat.

Sorry for the long ramble...
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PHLdyPayne

I would NEVER want a lidless rack.
I have worked with them, and they are a real pain, with snakes flying out as soon as you open them, and humidity issues.
never again!
It's my personal experience that lidless are more trouble and work then it's worth.

I seen some and they looked to be the best around and run about a grand cheeper then FB ers..they even have a built in cup holder.I have seen these racks and they are the best.IMO.I think they even come with helix and a 4 inch heat strip instead of the 3in......Check it out

Greg VanZweden
http://www.vanzwedenreptiles.com/

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Forever Trust in what we are,and nothing else Matters

When we started out collecting for breeding we built our own racks and they worked fine - but with space being limited in our new house we had to buy some racks that would hold more snakes in less space and the visions are wonderful - if I had to do it all over again I would have done it right and bought the visions to begin with. The difference between a well built homemade rack and the vision racks really is night and day.

I would go with the CB 70 rack - if you want you can set it up to use the smaller tubs and then use the CB70 size as your snakes grow or you can do a mixture of tub sizes in the same rack. You can even keep your hatchlings in the same rack as your adults.

It's about time someone designed a versitale rack that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. The visions run 2-3 times less than some of the fancier models but is a well designed quality rack!
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Tosha

"Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus"

But you get all the same things with the Animal plastics racks for a lot less money and I feel the snakes are happier in the darker rack...

I would and have gone with the animal plastics racks, but I totally agree that it isn't worth the time and effort to build your own, let alone finding all those get away snakes.
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when life hands you lemons, make super lemons, bumblebees, etc...

Tasha,

I have never bought a rack system, because I come from generations of contractors.

I don't understand why a homemade rack would take up much more space than a vision??

my racks are a few inches wider than the tubs laided down touching each other, how much smaller can a rack be.
If the shelves on a bought rack were 1/8" thick, and even if you used 3/4" shelves on you homemade rack, on a ten level rack thats a 6.25" height difference from material. thats negligable to me when your talking several hundreds of $'s difference in price.

I totally agree there is a tremendous weight difference but I don't see why there would be any negligable space consuming differences.

As stated I have never bought racks, so this is JMO.

TomChambers

Also, I have never had a snake escape in the last 6-plus years since I built my ball racks.

I'm sorry I wasn't implying that there was a space difference between homemade racks and commercial racks that are built the same.

Our issue was that we started out with a small collection of animals they all fit in 2 8-high CB-70 enclosed melemine racks. Then we ended up getting some more snakes and built more racks and by the time we had to move we had 3 adult racks - 2 juvie racks and a hatchling rack all too heavy for anyone to really want to move even if they had fit into the new house. What fit in those 6 racks that took up almost a whole room now fits in 3 Vision racks with some extra spaces.

Plus our homeowners insurance on the new house wouldn't cover us unless we switched to a commercially made rack.
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Tosha

"Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus"

I see what your saying.

I use hardwood LP, it looks great with just polyurethane(and is good with humidity/water), and if I ever move, I'll just take them apart.

TomChambers

We have made almost all of our racks. I house 90% of our collection in homemade melamin racking systems, all are ran with heat tape and helix systems. I have never had an animal exscape, or any other problems with these racks. I guess it is all in how they are made. We also have plastic racks, which i also like. I swear by Herp Enclosures, they are the only plastic racking i will use. I have used others in the past but nothing holds a candle to them. I have seen Visions at Daytona and used Freedoms but i dont personally care for either. With our homemade racks they cost about $100 for 5 spots. I can make 3 racks for the price of one plastic, Yes plastics last forever, but i can throW the melamin rack away 3 times and still be under the cost of a plastic, dont get me wrong i love plastics too but melamin also works if you need a cheaper way out. And in one day we can make close to 8 racks, they really dont take long to make, and that is with us cutting the wood. Like i said our whole collection is in melamin racks with no lids and we have close to 800 snakes and we have never had a problem in the years we have been in buisness.
Just my opinion and what we use..
Matt and Kim
N.A.R.C