Cardboard Cat Scratcher!

Hi all!, this little instructable is about making a cat scratcher unit from cardboard. Ofcourse i'm not original or unique with this porject (maybe even with this design). But it was a nice excersize to do a little thing out of the ordinary.

I hope you can enjoy it! I'm not having plans of this on my website but there are other plans or products to be found there:

www.seamm.nl

So this project is perfect to do with scrap materials. And everybody has a leftover cardboard box and two planks of wood.

My pieces of wood were from an disassembled ikea cubboard (after a while Ikea cubboards will disassble themselves if used correctly :p).

The two boards were in my case made out of two parts. I glued them together and reinforced this with small dowels. This is strong enough.

In my Ikea planks there were already holes from of for dowels so easy peasy.

The assembled wooden boards were then cut to length and width.

To make the whole thing look better I wanted to have it some curves. So the side piece of the two boards was collected and I made a simple wavy line with a pencil. You can't really do this wrong because it's your design. You don't have to make perfect curves.

To make the curves I put my jigsaw (topside down) in a big vice. You could clamp it to your worksurface with glue clamps or anything. If you have a bandsaw that would be a quicker choice.

After the curves were made, I used some sandpaper to smoothen the cut surface out.

This is the most expected step of them all :p and in the project this took the most time. In my case it took me 30 to 45 minutes to cut all the cardboard.

I used the wavy side piece as a template to cut the cardboard. This won't be as precise as a dedicated cardboard die and press process but it will work. All my pieces were a bit different, it gave a playfull effect after assembly.

The two wood pieces were attached to each other with 5 thin screws. This object will not suffer any high material stresses so that is plenty strong :p.

The cardboard will be mainly held in place with toothpicks and glue. This is a convenient way of keeping everything in place.

Two small holes were drilled to keep the toothpick in position and small dots of glue were divided on the surfaces. At that point I pushed the cardboard shapes on the toothpicks.

Sometimes a toothpick breaks but I put one next to it and then it was solved.

When all the carboard pieces were assembled they were a bit wider than the base piece. I used clamps to squeeze it all together. after curing of the glue the whole assembly stayed in place so that worked out with no hassle.

So lets find out if our little cat can enjoy the new 'toy'.

At first he was looking interested, smelling it and checking it out but after a while he got bored so he turned to his food and favorite blanket.

Oh well... one cannot please everybody. Eventually i had fun with this small project and maybe he likes it after a little while. So for me there is no problem there.

I hope you like this simple instructable!