@sia_josephine
The Adventures of Sia, Zuko & Richard Parker
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Building my cat wheel...

I've created this page to share my little journey on my cat wheel I made. I have a cat wheel made by One Fast Cat but I do not like the quality of the wheel so I started researching alternatives. On YouTube I came across a video of how to build one. I showed my Dad and he said it would be too big of an undertaking, so I became extra determined and had my husband buy a jigsaw and plywood for me the next day. It took a week to get everything cut and assembled and I surprised my Dad when he came over for a visit. Unfortunately, the plan for the base is not designed very well. The wheel just slides back and forth and rubs on the sides when it rolls. I had followed a comment in the video where somebody suggested adding garage door rollers in a vertical position. It wasn't working for me at all. Fortunately, my Dad owned tool companies for decades and is an amazing engineer. He was very excited to see my wheel and very surprised. I asked if he knew how I could get it to turn better and he said better garage door rollers with bearings, a stronger threaded rod (with these nuts and Hex Cap Nuts) along with support blocks under it, and extreme precision with the garage door rollers. He took the base home and went shopping for me. When he fixed it up and brought it back over, it was spinning sooo much better.

I'll share the additional products I used that weren't in the original design as well as what I would have done differently.

What I changed:

Tools I used, Ryobi is affordable and they work well so I got a few of those:

Here is a list of the things I added:

What I would have done differently:

The plans:

Note: Some of the links on this page are Amazon affiliate links.