Luxury Ant Farm: The mANTsion

Step 4 Make a cutout at the top of the windows

Once you decide which way you want the window to go (I put the fat end of mine at the bottom) the next step is to make a cutout in the top of the window. The cutout lets you feed get inside the ant farm while it's filled with sand so that you can preform some ant maintenance like replace their water and drop in food.

I used a combination of a router, a jig saw and spindle sander to do this.

I ran the top piece of the window past a straight bit on a router to cut a groove in the piece of wood. I then made increasingly deeper passes on the router until I notched away enough material where I could just go in with the spindle sander and clean things up. A small drum in the spindle sander makes really nice curves at the end of the cutout.

I repeated this process on the other window (creating half of an oval in each) so that when I put them together I would have one complete cutout.

You can use a jig saw to make a cutout in the top piece of the window just like the one I made with a router. Just make sure you clamp the window to a stable surface before you start making your cut. Draw a line with a straight edge so that you have something to guide you.

I found that the jig saw was by far the easiest and the fastest way to make the cutout.