Hamster Wheel Stand
A wheel is an essential piece of furniture for any domesticated small rodent. Day or night, a wheel offers an infinite length of track space given a finite amount of room typical of housing such a creature. Given the necessity of such an object, whose purpose around which the rodent’s life orbits, you wouldn’t think they’d break so damn easily. Behold, for this is what happens to a cheap plastic given repeated turbulence.
How the wheel normally hangs now that the plastic has cracked and is broken.
This is how it's supposed to hang.
Close up of the broken piece.
When first purchased, the wheel was easy to set up. You screw the wheel onto the disc with the ball bearings, and then you fit the wire stand into the two holes on the back of the disc. Simple? Yes. Perfect? If you think the jumping and banging of the wire stand on a glass cage is “soothing” at 2:30 in the ante meridiem, then yes. For those of us fortunate to have another room with shelf space, there’s that option. For the rest of us, it’s a matter of securing the wheel in place to accommodate a deceptively heavy rodent with a spring in it’s step. So, naturally, this is the permanent solution I devised.
Short of supplies and high on ingenuity, I fashioned together wall mounting adhesive, wooden blocks, cardboard, and a bolt to create a sort of vice on the edge of the glass.
Little did I know, the bending and flexing of the wheel and it’s entireties reduced the stress on it’s plastic parts. With my modifications, the structure became more rigid, and the stress eventually tore the plastic. This would have been a non-issue if the rip didn’t allow the wheel to bend under the weight of a surprisingly dense syrian hamster, forcing the wheel to tap the glass so fervently in the wee hours of the morning. Defeated, I was faced with the task of constructing something more permanent and more polished; something that would hang sturdy from the top and wouldn’t create any noise; something that could have it’s height adjusted; something that’s easily removable and cleanable.
And this is what I came up with.
The front view of the wheel, hanging from the top of the cage.
The pin on the side allows for adjustable height. Notice the room now available under the wheel.
Two rubber feet on the bottom provide grip and prop the wheel up and out just enough.
Using some leftover aluminum and epoxy, I was able to achieve all of these goals. In place, the wheel was near silent, turning faster without the unnecessary bouncing up and down with each foot fall of the rodent. Total construction time: about a day. And too keep the bottom from scratching the glass, I pasted on two rubber feet to the bottom.
All of the supplies used for construction of the new wheel stand.
Gluing together all of the pieces after they have been cut and drilled.
Magnets were used to keep pressure where a vice couldn't fit.
Finished product without the wheel and wheel cap screwed on.