Jay Bagley
Well-Known Member
Sheldon has been living in a tortoise table for the first three plus years of his life. Until joining the forum, I was pretty happy with the setup and thought I was doing everything right. I learned with my first post that a tortoise table is not the way to go, and I want humidity and a closed chamber. Thank you guys for setting me straight. So I had my Dad build one for me, he's the guy in the first picture. I am horrible at building anything. Since Sheldon only grew 1 lb with my ex-wife in two and a half years, I asked my dad to build me 8x4x30 in high. It ended up only being about three and a half foot wide (all good). I figured with those dimensions with what he had grown with her I would be totally good. But in hindsight, he has grown seven pounds with me in the last 8 months. So I probably would have gone a lot lot bigger. We just got this one done, and we're already drawing up plans for the next one. And that'll give me an excuse to get another tortoise. This one has two 100w che's mounted on both ends, a 65 watt flood bulb for basking in the middle, two 48 in T8 fixtures that each hold two 6500 k bulbs, and another T-5 48 in fixture that holds a Zoo Med 10.0 high output bulb. The che'swill be on a zilla thermostat, and all the other lights will be on timers coming on at 7 a.m. and going off at 7 p.m. . The holes that we drilled for the electrical, I ended up plugging with some leftover rubber from my work, we just cut it one size bigger than the hole that seems to plug it up pretty good. There's three small shelves built inside one on each end and one in the middle. I'm going to put the AcuRite thermometers, one on each shelf to keep track of the temperature and humidity. I'll be getting the substrate and everything ready tomorrow, I'll probably run it for a day or two to get the temperatures and everything dialed in, once that is done I will put Sheldon in it and update my post with some more pictures. I just wanted to thanks to everybody who posted pictures of their builds, cuz I printed off a lot of their images and gave them to my Dad to go off of.