Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello everyone,
I am going to build an enclosure and i had a few questions. What material works best to make a tank, wood, acrylic...? The tank is going ot be somewhere areound 48"X24"X18" Or i will make two seperate cages that are 24X24X24 and maybe make it two floors per enclosure if i got this way with 2 cages. To heat the tanks i was thinking about using Radiant heat panels. Or could i use heat tape? I was wondering if these were any good for Leopard Geckos...? I would provide them with plenty of hides furnishings. I think i would ultimatly like to have one big tank with 3 females in there no males for now. What wood should i use, and what should i use for the sliding doors in the front.
Thanks
Joey

dont do the square cages as they are hard to make a temp gradient. A RHP would be good for a custom cage that size.
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0.1 "Tremper" looking Albino Leopard gecko (Lex)
0.0.1 normal ball python (felix)
1.1 Feral cats that we adopted (Fuzzy, and Bear)

Hi Joey,

I thought I should give you a visual of what I meant by cage dimensions in my reply to your e-mail. Easier for me to post a picture here so I'll just post it. I'll answer your questions in another e-mail.

The cage in this picture is 49.5" long, 20" deep, and 27.5" tall.

The upper and lower lips that the glass track runs on are 6" each. They rest directly on the top and bottom of the cage which are both 3/4" thick, effectively making them 6 & 3/4" tall.

Since the cage is 27.5" tall the window opening, not including the thickness of the glass track, is now 14" tall.

Since this cage is for a Bearded Dragon taller upper and lower lips are required. The bottom lip due to all the substrate the dragon digs into the track, the upper lip to hide all the lights and heating elements necessary for a Bearded Dragon.

For a leopard gecko you could use 4" (or 4 & 3/4" upper and lower lips making a shorter cage acceptable.

But my point in all this is to show you that a cage with a really short window opening can look a bit awkward. Since you plan to build a nice stained-wood display cage I think your window opening should be a minimum of 14".

With the original height of 18" you listed the window opening could have been as little as 8.5" or even less if you factor in the height of the glass track.

Okay, I'm rambling. Here's the picture. Again, the dimensions of this cage are 49.5" x 20" x 27.5" with 6.75" upper and low lips. Will e-mail separately.

Hi Joey,

As per my most recent e-mail, here is that picture.

This is a picture of that oak laminated cage I built. Instead of making a face frame from real oak stock I instead used cut plywood for the upper and lower lips.

The glass track covered the exposed plywood edge of the lips. But I still had the exposed edges of the sides to deal with.

So I bought the oak molding with the leaf pattern routed in (hard to see the leaf pattern in this photo) and the four corner rosettes.

These were easily attached with glue and nails.

And here's the false-ceiling. This frame runs from the bottom of the upper lip to the top of the back panel. In this case this leaves an 8" area that is accessed from the back of the cage.

If you need any further explanation we can do it over e-mail.