I designed these covers to go over a few household objects I had lying around so I could turn them into pet-safe ant traps on the cheap. These objects included:

• IKEA KALAS bowl (sometimes described as a children's bowl)
• The lid to a bottle of peanuts
• The cap to a 1.75L bottle of booze
• An old 14-16oz soup can

I plan on adding more items later, including covers for a milk bottle cap, and a tuna fish/cat food can. The covers feature eight notches to hold rubber bands in place so the lids can't be accidentally removed. The designs were meant to be economical and quick to print.

I recommend printing with ABS or PETG if you plan on putting these in windows or areas with a lot of direct sunlight.

Print Settings

Printer Brand:

Creality

Printer: 

Ender 3

Rafts:

No

Supports: 

No

Resolution:

0.28

Infill: 

10%

Filament: Inland ABS White

Notes:

The infill is pretty irrelevant. Add rafts if you need to, I didn't.

Post-Printing =============

Add Rubber Bands if Necessary

Since my cats min-max'd their points into CHA, INT, and DEX I got concerned about them being too curious for their own good and knocking the lids off the covers. Hence the rubber bands.

How I Designed This ===================

The Idea

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic my landlord was not quite able to rapidly address the ants that had shown up around the apartment complex, as they have in the past. Being the cheap bastard I am I decided to DIY my response.

The trick is, though, I have cats. Cats that, as alluded to earlier, are too curious and smart for their own good. So I needed a way to keep them out of the poison. Again, going the DIY route, I opted to print a simple and economical cover. I could have*just* used rubber bands, but I was concerned about them dipping their paws in between them, and/or using too many rubber bands to allow the ants in the trap.

Measuring

First step was obviously measuring all the vessels. I opted for the ones listed above because they were readily available. Unfortunately being a cheap bastard, as mentioned before, my measuring tool was a $6 Tool Cache caliper I picked up from a bargain bin at Fleet Farm that always seems to be on the verge of falling apart and is of questionable accuracy. So I added 1mm of slop to all my sizes.

Tinkering

I created the outer ring in TinkerCAD by creating a cylindrical "hole" that was roughly the diameter of the vessel, and then centered it up with a 3mm tall cylinder that was 2mm in diameter wider, to create the perimeter. I repeated the process for each of the octagonal rings, maintaining a 10mm distance between them to allow for larger carpenter ants to get in.

I went with an octagonal pattern because it was easier to produce the cross-bars in an 8-pointed pattern than 6.

After that it was just reducing the size of the ring, and eliminating octagonal rings. For the booze cap I reduced the thickness of the webbing, to optimize the ratio of open-space to webbing.

Additional Information

The Poison

You can use any poison you want, really, but the one I settled on was stuff I already had lying around.

• Three parts sugar
• One part Borax (sodium borate,not boric acid)
• Enough water to form a paste or goo.

It's a simple, effective poison because it doesn't kill the ants immediately, it allows them to bring some of the poison back to the colony and feed other workers, and for other ants to return and do the same. This allows you to affect alarge number of ants. It takes 3-7 days to take full effect, so some patience is required.

TinkerCAD links

If you wish to work with these in TinkerCAD, the links are below. Simply ungroup the pieces to modify them.

• IKEA KALAS bowl cover
• Soup can cover
• Peanut lid cover
• Booze cap cover

Category: Pets