Artistic terarium

What lives in that terrarium?

That is awesome!!!!!!! Very very cool!!!

Red :)

I haven't figured out what to house in this tank yet,
For the moment I have a baby R. leachianus in it but it will soon outgrow this tank.
I just made the tank for fun to see if if would work. Then I tried selling it at an reptile-expo in Sweden but no one would buy it so I brought it back home and descided to keep it.

Wow, that's awesome. Nice work 5/5 Do you have any others that you've built yourself? If so...Post! Post! Post!

Thanx for the kind words all. :o)
Well.. I have one other, but it's not finished yet.
The one I'm working on now is a small tank I'm building for a reptile park in Oslo.
It's a small tank made out of aluminum.
When finished it will look like a box with spiderlegs. It's for the black widow in the reptile park in Oslo.
I ran out of wielding gas and haven't had the chance to get more yet..
Once I'm finished wielding it I'll send it to my best friend who is a car-painter, he said that he would pick out and paint it in an awsome color for me. :oD
I'll post pics as soon as it's finished but it may still take a month before that happens.

I also built another wierd one a couple of months ago. Aslo a small tank. It was a culindrical, vertical orientated tank with hinged doors and venting in the top. I made it out of piece of PVC pipe, aluminum and silicone. It didn't look very nice tho.. The PVC pipe was orange.. :o§ maybe If I had pained it.. nah..
I'm going to build that one over again in a larger scale and make some improvements and post pics then.
I also have some other ideas but they are too complex to build, I don't have all the tools they require yet.
One day I hope to build a droplet-shaped hanging terarium with a beautiful stance. It would be a glassfiber/aluminum tank. Once finished it will will look like a chome-aluminum droplet hanging by an elegant tentacle-looking stance whitch has a cool car-paint color. The tank itself would be around 20-30 gallons (80+liter).. lol. ^_^
Dream on obeligz... this won't happen in the nearest future... ^_^

I love your imagination. I can't believe that no one bought it. How much were you asking for it? Are there alot of people doing things like this in Sweden, or Europe in general? Never seen anything like it. Bravo

Hehe.
Well.. I was asking around 420 USD (including lighting % plants) for it. That's a fairly stiff price for a 21 gal tank. That's less than a weeks pay in Scandinavia whereas I spent more than half that in materials, lighting and plants in adition to alot of time building it (most of the time scratching my head trying to solve problems).
I guess I could push the price down to maybe 350-370 USD if I start a small "mass production" (atleast 10 per year) but still..
Do you think that there's a market for this?
Would you pay 370 plus shipping for a 21 gal tank like this?
On a side note I could increase the size without raising the cost substantially but.. dunno..
What do you think?
I have other ideas too that are a bit more "income friendly" but I don't want to sink down to making cheap cages for a living, in that case I'd rather stay a construction worker. If I start building terariums for a living I want to have atløeast a strong gut feeling that it will work out. I guess I'm a coward but my mom's firm went bankrupt once and... well.. I don't want to go down that road..

Uh.. ^_^
I for got to answer your other question.. The differences between american and european tanks that I've noticed is that americans tend to favor more sterile and easy to clean tanks with fake plants while europeans tend to favor dirt as substrate, more lighting and live plants for eveything else than snakes, monitors and iguanas.
In Scandinavia it is also very uncommon to use screened cages because of the cold winters, they make it impossible to keep high humidity during winter when the air inside homes is ultra-dry.

That is a kind of high for a 21 gallon habitat. Not too bad though with the lights, and plants included. I'm sure there is a market for things like this in american herpetoculture, or herpetoculture in general. I like your avant gard approach to the whole cage design thing. Maybe you should design a few diffrent models, and see if you can get some orders. I'm always trying to come up with wacky terraria, but have a bad problem with not finishing what I start. I'm familar with a slotted, bendable plywood, I use it often customizing boat interiors, (custom upholstery is my niche) is this what you made this with, or did you bend the sheet yourself?

Thanx. ^_^
I'll try that.
I know what you mean tho..
I have the same bad habit of not finishing things up. ;op
For this tank I bent the plywood myself. birch plywood is teh most flexible I've found so far. It's more expensive than pine but it also looks better. 4mm (0.157 inch) birch plywoon can be bendedaround an axis that is 15cm (6 inches), you can bend it a bit further but then you risk breaking it and the tension in the woon may become a problem at a later point.
If you have the means to soak the plywood in water so that it is totally soaked I think taht you can bend it a little further but then you have to be careful because yyou will be given no warning to when it breaks, it suddenly just snaps in two.
If you boil the wood I *think* you can bend it even a bit further but I don't know if that applies to all types of glue in these plyboards..
Don't take my word for it tho, I haven't tried boiling plyboards... yet. ^_^
If you descide to try it out send me a note on you findings.
The interesting part would be if it was possible, through different procedures, to make 4mm pine-plywood bend around an an axis of 20 cm (20 inches) that would reduce the price of the structure quite a bit.

That is one kick-ass Terra/Vivarium. WOW!!! That's tight son! But I'm mystified about how drainage works. I don't see any false bottom or the sort. Won't that make the terra/Vivarium sterile?

that my freind is cool, i have been keeping reptiles for a long time, and this cage is the most original thing i have ever seen!!!!

All i can say is WOW! thats so inventive, and id love to see pics of the spider one too! Im sure there would be a market for creative tanks (or you could start one!) as long as you market them propperly, maybe start up a website and price it all in US dollars or Euros, and make sure you can ship worldwide and you will have a great little buisness! ;) I'd buy it!

Wow, thanks for kind words. :o)
The spider tank will look great but I have a little problem inventing a safe door mechanism. The spider tank will be housing a black widow spider in the Oslo reptile park so I want to be sure the tank is safe.. ;o)
I will start a website, eventually. It just that all my friends tell me that there's no future in this, my tanks are too expensive they say, and the market too small. I also suck in economy and marketing is really not one of my strong sides eighther..
But hey, if you want a tank I would love to build one for you. ^_^

Hey...i was wondering if you would be able to e-mail me with a description on how you built that...i would love to try my hand at a cage like that. Amazing cage man...good luck in the future.

Well.. I lost the cage plans some time ago. There really isn't much to this tank exept it's difficult to put it toghether. A pair of extra hands come in very handy when building this tank.
Do the math and cut the sides og teh tank out of 10mm plywood.
Nextcheck the circumference of teh sides and cut out a 4mm polywood that is as wide as you want the tank and as long as 2 thirds of the circumference. Glue and screw the thin plywood around the sides with small screws. Add sliding doors and ventillation and you're almost there. ^_^
Im my tank I made a chrome polished aluminium reflector on the inside and built the ligting into the tank.
I also wanted to hang the tank from the ceiling instead of putting it on a stance so i attached 2 wires to it. If you want to do the same make sure you find the center of gravity (after you add the sunstrate and glass) before you start drilling holes and attaching wires. ;o)

BTW. This tank is now commercially available. I recently started my own firm so I am now able to export this tank.
For price inquery send e-mail to obeligz@c2i.net
please note how big you want the tank to be, what extras you want (built in ligting, hinged instead of sliding doors, more exclusive types of wood or aluminium etc).