The Wheel or Saucer?

What a strange question you may ask? It is indeed an odd question to ask but one that I had to make in the last couple of months. As previously explained I have ten degu's and these animals need and love their exercise. Get them out the cage and they will run off happily and these animals know how to move!
So I had the choice between a Flying Saucer Wheel or a normal one that you see everywhere.

Flying Saucer

The flying saucer is a wheel that spins at a tilt. Of course the issue with these wheels is that they are plastic and so can be chewed and possibly detroyed. So you have to look at price. Getting a wheel like this being plastic you can get for less then £10 from an amazing shop on ebay. A metal one will set you back at least £80 and because of how they are made they are not easy to make yourself unless you work with metal and you know what you are doing!

The other option was a wheel. As you may have seen in the last blog post that in one of the photos a plastic wheel is visible. That wheel lasted exactly one day before they had chewed it so it no longer worked or stayed together. The wheel was useless and costs a little less then £10 per wheel. So I had to look at something else that maybe somewhat more useful and so I came across a guy called John Hopewell who makes cages and other bits. He makes metal wheels that can be easily attached to any cage.

John Hopewell Wheels

Now these come in two sizes as you can see. The smaller one costing £45 and the larger £55. Now these seem like fair prices possibly. However when looked in to it we found that actually it wouldn't be that hard to make a wheel like this for not much at all. So because of that I dismissed the idea of waiting for the large wheel in stock and then I would have to order at least 3 of them which would end up costing £165! I spend a lot of money on my animals but that for 3 wheels seems silly.

So I now had a choice to make, should I make a metal wheel or try out the flying saucers? Now I looked at various reviews and read many about how it is much better for an animal to not arch it's back while running and so I worked out how large a wheel I would have to make and whether if I put it in the smaller cages, would I fit anything but the wheel in them?

It was decided thanks to a company called Wundapets who I found on ebay that I would buy one flying saucer, see if the animals could use it okay and if so try all three cages before buying anymore. The saucer when it arrived in it's box was in two parts. The base and the saucer. The saucer attaches to the base by sliding on to the base. The photos below should show what I mean.

The two parts

How they fit together

Apologies about the photo quality, taken with my iphone and the light in here is appalling! As you can see the base on this one is chewed but the wheel still fit's perfectly and it works with hardly any noise. The animals of course find ways of creating noise by pushing it in to the side of the cage or something similar. I currently now own three of these, two of which are in the boys cage to stop arguments! I haven't tested the saucer out with Saphira and Houdini yet as they never took any interest in the wheel they use to have, other then to eat it. So the other two cages are being fitted out with saucers for now and they will get one at a later date.

When it comes down to wheels or saucers? I would choose saucers all the way. They come in three different sizes so you can get them for any small animal. They take up a bit of space but two animals can run on it at any time once they have worked out how and it causes less fights then the wheels did! It has also been nearly two months since the first saucer was bought and it is still in perfect working order! They are cheap enough to replace if need by but seem to last so much longer then the wheels ever did anyway.

Personally I would recommend everyone scrapping their wheels and getting saucers instead. If you know how to mess with metal then this would be a good way of making a lot of money! These are becoming more popular and anyone who can make metal saucers would defiantly get the customers.