Animal Trap Divider

IMPORTANT NOTE: Design needs further work and testing before I feel comfortable recommending it for real-world use. If you do choose to use it as-is, you do so at your own risk and I take no responsibility for angry animals breaking through it.

So what then, is the point of me sharing this project? Well to put it simply, I'm taking a break from working on it and think it has potential.

Some more backstory:

I was trying to TNR a local stray and her kittens and a friend with more experience suggested I get a divider for my trap, to help refill food bowls inside the trap more easily if needed.

So, I looked online at some options and they're not the most expensive things, but not cheap. $25-30 on average it seemed. It's not nothing, especially for people doing TNR work as volunteers.

With that in mind, I figured I'd try to design my own version, 3D printable for much cheaper! With cool features like being simple to construct, printable on a singe plate, and mod-able with room to expand upon the base divider with add-ons and customizations!

And well, I mostly got there! After 3 complete redesigns I have something that 'works'. At the very least, it achieves the initial goals. It can be printed on a single plate over roughly 24 hours, fits together simply and easily, and can easily be added upon by simply printing more parts or designing new ones to screw onto/into it. All this, for roughly $6 in filament!

Now, what remains? A few real showstoppers I'd say. First, it's pretty hard to consistently print all needed parts on a single plate without any significant print failures. I do what I can to spot them early and exclude the failed parts before resuming the print, but ultimately I usually have to reprint a few failed parts after the first plate, to get the complete set. Second, it's really not as strong as I'd like it to be and I don't have confidence in it holding back an angry animal. Sure I could print it out of something different than PETG, but the cost skyrockets with any heavy duty filament. There are also different ways the parts can be printed, such as slicing them into halves or fun orientations, but that significantly increases the assembly complexity and time to both print and put together.

At the end of the day, if you're interested in this project, feel free to iterate upon it and see how it can be made into a functional, reliable alternative to the standard metal dividers!

For your reference, the best results I've had so far amounted to:

• Printing with PETG in a nicely calibrated machine

  • Qidi Q1 Pro was what I used

• Using variable layer thickness for the slicing

  • I basically used the dynamic layer thickness tool in my slicer to automatically allow thicker layers were less detail was needed

  • Additionally, I roughly selected the male screw head layers and made them the thinnest possible

• Using a strong infill

  • I mostly stuck with the 3D honeyuucomb pattern, but with areas that don't require as much strength/are already strong, experimented with using faster patterns and lower infill % to speed up the print

  • Depending on the part and area on said part, infill % used was anywhere from 15-50.

• A decent number of perimeters

  • Especially for the male screw heads, infill % means way less than using a decent number of perimeters, such as 3-5, in terms of maximizing strength

• Printing orientation matters

  • Printed everything vertically, with male screw heads facing up and the female ends facing down

  • Printing things horizontally lead to stronger overall parts, but required more plate space and screw threading often got messed up

• Supports and brims

  • Only supports I used were on the female screw ends, as there's a lot of bridging required there for vertical printing

  • The larger parts didn't really require any brims, but the crossbars very much did

  • Even when 3-5 lines thick, brims on crossbars sometimes weren't enough to stop the bars from peeling off the plate at higher layers, messing up the prints for detached parts and sometimes even dragging them into other parts, messing those up too

• Individually named parts when slicing

  • For any changes I made to the parts in the slicers, I made them to an individual instance of a crossbar, bracket, or screw then duplicated the parts as needed to reach the required amount

  • The way my printer works, it treats all identically named models as the same, which means cancelling a failed one mid-print will cancel all its duplicates too

  • Getting around this required renaming models in the slicer to "bracket 1" - "bracket 24" and such to allow cancelling of individually failed part prints

See my notes files for helpful measurements!

As far as cage compatibility goes, I specifically modeled the divider to not only fit standard animal traps such as the Havahart ones, but also the 30FCD - Fat Cat Animal Trap!

Assembly is pretty straightforward:

1. Screw two sets of brackets together

2. Screw 12 sets of crossbars together

3. Screw the 12 joined crossbars into the flat, threaded holes on the brackets

For cage insertion:

• You can insert the divider vertically into the cage, from the top

• Ideally, you'd insert through a side, out the other side, and then fit the crossbars into the sockets of the other joined brackets before securing them from the other side with screws