Introduction: Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter

Cats are a finicky animal. Ours likes to eat, but more often than not only likes to eat part of his crunchy food.

Bites into one, leaves the rest and onto another.

My wife insists that he only likes the full crunchies and has me sort out all the unnibbled food before any top-ups. The cat I am sure is just happy with the attention as it does not matter to him. I can pick the bowl up and shake it and he is just as likely to come back and start eating again as he would be if I set a bowl of fresh unchrunched food in front of him.

Though there is probably some merit in giving him a fresh bowl - and so until recently, I reluctantly sorted them out.

But now all that has changed! Now I can use the revolutionary Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter to make the grueling task a joy!

Supplies

3d Printer

PLA

2.5 hours

(Model size: 139.24mm × 122.55mm × 24.00mmFilament: 14.08m / 33.87cm³Estimated print time: 2.5 hours)

Step 1: Building a Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter

Using sketchup I created a 3d printable filter with holes just slightly smaller than an uncrunched crunchy. The food we feed him is approximately 13mm X 13mm (or 1/2" X 1/2" if you would rather) so I made the holes 12mm across (or just under 1/2" if that's your thing) so an uncrunched crunchy would not fall through. The decision to use hexagons instead of circles came about when at 2 in the morning I just found it easier and didn't want to spend anymore time trying to find out why not all my circles would push/pull. I used 100% infill because my printer tends to like that better. Might save you some time and plastic to go with other favourite settings - but this works from.

The .stl for the Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter I printed is attached below. If your cat food is lightly larger or smaller it should scale easily enough. You could try something like:

(your cat food size in mm -1)/12*100 = % to scale

I thought about making one for our dog crunchies as well, but partially eaten crunchies has never really been a problem with him.

Step 2: Using the Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter

Very simple and very effective. Now all I have to do is dump his bowl into the Partially Crunched and Uncrunched Cat Crunchy Sorter shake it a bit and grab out all the uncrunched. I do this over one of his other bowls to collect up all the small bits and as expected he is just as happy to eat the already crunched as he is the never crunched. But I like to think that cleaning out the crunched bits is in general better than leaving them there.

It actually works quite well. I much prefer this than digging through chewed up Cat Crunchies.

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