Reptile & Amphibian Forums

does birch make a good cage building material? I love the way it looks, but dont want to waste 40$ a sheet if it won't work
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1.0 Black Rat
0.0.1 Normal Corn
0.1 Leucistic Texas Rat
1.1 blue beauty

heres one of the cages i have built using Birch , then applied a dark red Mohagany stain to it . Birch can have all the looks of Cherry with the right stain applied to it so i say yes .It is worth the costs of the wood

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Buisnesses come and go everyday, what keeps you here is how you treated the customer the day before....
Check out the new website at www.junglehabitats.com

Very nice cages. Great to see more people from NC on here. I am in Greenville NC!!!

>>heres one of the cages i have built using Birch , then applied a dark red Mohagany stain to it . Birch can have all the looks of Cherry with the right stain applied to it so i say yes .It is worth the costs of the wood
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>>Buisnesses come and go everyday, what keeps you here is how you treated the customer the day before....
>>Check out the new website at www.junglehabitats.com
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Thomas Jones
aligatorhunter@earthlink.net

No one is to be trusted

Here is a picture of a birch plywood cage built with considerably less skill than what you saw in JungleHabitats' post.

I also used a mahogany stain and got a very cherry-like finish after three coats. The cage looks much better than the crappy picture suggests.

I'd recommend going with a dark stain simply because it's getting hard to find edge tape and/or birch stock that matches birch-laminated plywood. With a dark stain those differences are more likley to disapear. They did nicely in this cage.

I was going to use a real wood face frame with this cage and a lighter stain but could not find any birch that matched. The maple stock was closer in appearance, actually. In the end I decided to keep things simple and used inexpensive birch edge tape to cover the cut plywood edges. The wood was leftover from another project and in pretty bad shape so a fancy face frame seemed out of order.

Hey Chris ,

One thing i failed to mention of the cage i pitured here in this post , while the Main case is birch the front face of it is made w/ popular. Popular if you go through the boards you will find the heart of this wood has a "green tint" to it thats why usally when i use it i go with a dark stain.This in turn changes the charateristics of the wood and gives the cherry look.

At home depots / lowes you wont find any other type usally then Birch /oak & Golden Virola plywoods and while they have even less in the way of solid stock that being just popular.The combonation of both those woods with darker stains will give you a very "rich & hearty" looking finished product.

Nice cage you built there also good job.
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Buisnesses come and go everyday, what keeps you here is how you treated the customer the day before....
Check out the new website at www.junglehabitats.com

Great advice. There's a lot of good quality Poplar out there nowadays. I never thought to try it with Birch laminated plywood.