Hi all 
I'm back after a little under a year. I was planning on getting a hamster, but ended up getting rats instead. I've loved rats for a long time, and I had a trio of males about 10 years ago. Now I have 4 males, and they live in a large 4' x 4' cage that I built for them from scratch. Earlier this year, Martin's Cages stopped selling cages and I was stuck with a very basic, fairly small cage, with 3 males in it. They were becoming unhappy, so I built the new cage for them. After that I welcomed a new baby into my mischief and now there are 4 Here are some photos.
Their new cage. I built it from powder-coated welded wire mesh. I purchased the mesh at Tractor Supply and had it powder-coated by a friend of my dad's. It is held together with small black zip-ties. The bottom is a custom metal litter pan I ordered from Bass Equipment, and inside of that is a 5" deep acrylic pan so they can dig in the wood shavings that make up the bottom floor (no wire on the bottom, just the acrylic). Roughly, the entire project ran me about $300 with materials, tools, and powder coating.
