Woven Fire Hose Strip Ball

If you grew up around palm trees maybe you spent some time making and playing with little balls woven from their leaves. They're fun little trinkets for the beach and now also a popular paper craft, but we've got a job to do and animals depending on us to stave off boredom. We can't work with that Pinteresty garbage, we need to work with zoo-tough materials. Thank god we have fire hose.

Ugly Fire Hose Ball

Here's my first attempt at a fire hose ball using the tab and slot technique to join the pieces. It's pretty wonky looking but there's some good bones in there. Think of the construction as two "U's" joined by tabs. Normally a pill-shaped fire hose ball like this would be made of six pieces of hose with nuts and bolts to hold it all together. Again that's more weight and cost with the additional problem of trying to hide those metal bits behind layers of hose so your animals aren't hurting themselves on the hardware.

Seamless Fire Hose Scratching Posts



Today let's make a seamless fire hose scratching post. A lot of you have made them with rope coiled around a log for big cats but eventually you have the same problem as the sisal wrapped ones you get for your house cats. They scratch on the posts at a certain height until it becomes a frayed mess and you have to cut off the whole length of rope, even if there's good stuff left, because you don't want your kitties catching a claw on any metal hardware you'd use to do patch repairs. Rope costs money whereas fire hose can be free if you create a relationship with the local fire district or organizations like Hose2Habitat.

Edgeless Fire Hose Hammock

As proud as I am about my new hammock design, it does have a weakness in that there are two ends that are just rows of open hose asking to be chewed on and messed with by the animals. Here's a way to fully frame the outside of the hammock with more hose to make it "edgeless" with an almost continuous seam around the perimeter. You could make a brand new hammock or even utilize your current one as the center piece.

Looking at the layout above you can see the central portion is pretty much the same all the other hammocks posted about in the blog so I'll focus on making the frame.

Hanging Perches Without Fasteners

Yes, this is about more fire hose. I find it to be a really versatile material to work with. It works as straps, it works as a flat tube, it keeps its shape, it holds weight, and it can keep these properties as we cut it up. In the way that a pig can become ham, bacon, baby back ribs, and Spiderpig, fire hose can become anything we need it to be.

What I really like is that because of all its unique properties I can use to to make things without fasteners. If you notice in all my fire hose posts so far there's no zip ties, no nuts and bolts, no screws, no tape, nothing to worry about failing and falling off and being ingested by the very animals we're trying to take care of.

Jacketed Fire Hose Hammock 2.0

Look at this beautiful hammock made by a keeper at Binghamton Zoo using my directions. And look at the free-styling she did with the design!

Six runners! Four full-width tabs! Jacketed fire hose! Soft for butts and no bolts or nuts.

She did say that she may end up using some hardware to secure things and that's cool, too. We discussed maybe just doing the ends, or screwing them down to lengths of wood which would still be a lot lighter than a full on traditional hammock.

I was always concerned that the jacketed fire hose would be too flexible for this style of hammock because there's only one layer of rubber on the inside and then the polypropylene or nylon fabric "jacket" on the outside, but Jess proved me wrong. I had to make one myself, except I used rubber tabs because I've got so much laying around and they do provide more lateral strength.

How To Tie Zip Ties When You Have No Friends

Zip ties. Everybody uses them. With work orders piling up, what exhibit isn't held together by zip ties, duct tape, and Gorilla glue? But sometimes your coworkers are busy, you intern didn't show up for work, your curator is all thumbs, and your wallabies are looking at you dumbly as you curse your luck in having to walk back and forth through the gate to mount a stupid piece of wire mesh so kids don't feed them garbage food. And also garbage. You know, #zookeeperproblems. But hey! You can do this yourself so screw them all!