pickerbp22 wrote:i put a post up like a week ago. asking people to stop replying to posts like that. if you're not going to try and help/ be nice about it. don't bother posting at all. no question is a stupid question. and negativity and sarcasm drives people away from this great site, and it drives their motivation to take care of their turts properly away. believe it or not it's belittling. not everyone knows how to do everything. people come here asking for help on the proper way to give their turtles a great/healthy life. isn't that good enough? when you don't give them a proper answer or be sarcastic about the question, and make the person look dumb, don't you think that person will be like "screw that website" and go along caring for their turtle the way they think is right. ( which usually isn't the proper way). It's better that people ask "stupid" questions, then not ask questions at all. Plain and simple its just not friendly.
I have to agree with pickerbp22 here. Instead of stating literally the obvious (get PVC and attach it ...), a better first post would have been asking the original poster for more information. If that had been my first post, I would never have come back to this board!
SchlothauerR - My basking area is made out of PVC pipe, the joints to fit the size pipe I got, and plexiglass as the basking area. It took a lot of troubleshooting when I built it, though. I can give you a bit of a step-by-step as to how I built it.
1) Buy necessary materials. Mine included - lengths of PVC pipe (I had already measured out what size I needed based on a sketch I made), piece of plexiglass, 8 joints, these little hook things that attach my plexiglass to my PVC, aquarium silicon, glass drops, and a paint stripper gun to melt the plexiglass into a ramp. We already had a hack saw.
2) Cut pieces. I measured out the PVC into the lengths and cut them with the hack saw. (Remember that I am living in an apartment, so if I had access to real equipment, I would have used more appropriate tools!) My husband is crazy strong, so he just attached it into a cube-shape using the joints, no glue needed. (And I don't have any sand in mine weighing it down, it stays down on it's own, don't know why, but it does!)
3) Cut the plexiglass into a shape you want, preferably with a ramp or if you have another idea for a ramp. If you have a ramp on the plexiglass, you need to use something like a paint stripper heat gun to melt the plexiglass at the hinge and bend it down. We tried it with a hair dryer, but it wasn't strong enough. I then glued glass drops all over the top of the basking area to give some grip to the surface. You can use river rocks or pebbles or whatever you want.
4) Attach the plexiglass to the PVC. I used these little U shaped hooks with aquarium silicon, some people drill small holes in the plexiglass and attach it with zip ties.
Really, it's a lot of planning, and a lot of troubleshooting as you go along. So just be ready for extra visits to the hardware store, and don't lock yourself in a small space with the aquarium silicon, it makes you dizzy!
Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 2:16 am 
