Hey, everyone. Today I'm going to be showing you guys How to make a cat scratching post out of wood and cardboard. I always have people requesting more pet DIYs and I had a bunch of cardboard laying around because we got a bunch of packages, and it was too much to fit in our recycling bin for this week, so we just have to kind of wait until they pick it up anyway. And I've also been wanting to make one because my cats like to try to scratch at our couch and I would like them to not do that, so I wanted to provide them with a cat scratching post. [unintelligible goo-goo sounds] So let's get started. You'll need a 12" by 12" piece of wood, a 4" by 4" piece of wood, a 1¼" dowel cut to 2', cardboard cut down to 4" by 4" pieces, a drill with various bits including a countersink bit, a 1¼" hole saw, clamps, two screws, a short one and a long one—the short one that I had was probably like 1½" and the long one I think was like 2"; the long one just has to be long enough to go through the base and into the dowel. Quick-setting epoxy, wood glue, a ruler, a utility blade, a set square, and a pencil. Find the center of your wood pieces by using a ruler to mark from one corner to the other diagonally, like so. Where they meet is the middle. Now find the center on both ends of the dowel. To do this you'll need a square. Yup, this is a square. Technically, it's called a set square. Anyway, place the right angle anywhere along the edge of the circle. Mark the 90° angle. Really for this part you just have to mark the very edge like this, which makes it less confusing, but whatever. I just used two different colors of marker. Then draw a line from one end to the other. Repeat this at another point on the edge. The point where these meet up is the center of the dowel—or close enough anyway. On the base piece, drill a pilot hole. Make sure you use a piece of scrap wood underneath so that you don't damage your table. Then go through and carefully drill each end of the dowe. Try to make sure it's as straight as possible. Switch to your countersink bit and press it into the pilot hole of the base piece of wood. This will make a little indentation where the screw head will sit in. If you don't have a countersink bit you could just use a bigger drill bit and drill down a tiny bit so the screw head sits in there. The side that you're drilling the countersink into will be the bottom, so make sure the other side is the nicer side. With a bit that's bigger than the head of the screw which, for the last step, you may have just used, drill into the smaller piece of wood about halfway through. Mix up some quick-setting epoxy, put it into the hole, and position the screw. If you're lucky, it'll sit straight without you having to mess with it, but I wasn't so lucky so I had to hold it so that it wouldn't slowly fall over. Thankfully, this stuff sets up in like five minutes, so after about two minutes it was cured enough to hold itself up. Set that aside while you cut the cardboard. This is by far the longest and most tedious part, so queue up some Netflix or YouTube videos before you get started. You need to cut a bunch of 4" by 4" pieces of cardboard. Seriously, a lot. I cut about 214 pieces which, if you're using the same dowel measurement as me, it'll probably be similar for you. If you have a paper cutter that can handle cardboard I highly suggest using that. I used a ruler and utility blade for a bit, but after switching over to the paper cutter it went by much faster. Anyway, once you have all of these cut it's time to cut a circle for the dowel to fit into. So initially I just use my utility knife to cut the circles out, but then I decided to try using a hole saw which again went 'way faster, so I suggest going that route if you can. If you can't and you need to use a utility knife then mark the middle of the piece of cardboard, and from the middle measure ⅝" out. Match the dowel up to the marks and then mark around the dowel and then cut the circle out. You can use this piece as a template to mark the next piece of cardboard, and so on and so forth. If you want to use a hole saw, stack up a few pieces of cardboard. I found it easiest to make a stack that was about half the size that the bit is long. Mark the middle. Make sure the pieces are all even and then clamped down onto a scrap piece of wood on either side. Line the bit up to the middle and slowly start drilling. The cardboard ends to gum up the bit sometimes so you may have to stop and pull the little bits of cardboard out before continuing on. Remove the clamps and set this stack aside. Between each stack don't forget to clear the bit. They have these little holes on the sides so that you can use a screwdriver or something like that so that you can kind of poke the stuff out. Repeat this until you've done all of the cardboard pieces. Then all you got to do is put it together. Screw the long screw into the base piece. Then you can thread a dowel into place. When it's almost all the way screwed on, add a bit of wood glue to the base where the dowel will sit, then continue threading it on. For a really tight secure fit you may want to use the drill a little bit to tighten a bit more. Wipe off any excess glue. Then start putting the cardboard in place. I opted to go for the straight look but I've seen cat scratching posts similar to this where they twist the cardboard around into different designs. Just play with it to decide which way you want to go. The last few pieces may not look like they fit, but if you compact the squares you'll see that it fits pretty perfectly. I wanted them to be pretty squished together so that the pieces weren't spinning around whenever my cat went to use it. Take the small piece of wood and screw it into place. And there you go. The scratching post is complete. And of course, since I put so much effort into making something for my cats, they completely ignore it. I tried luring them over to it with some catnip which, uh, sort of worked. I made this so that you can take the top piece of wood off, which is nice because then you can replace the cardboard pieces as your cats use it. 𝗜𝗳 they use it. I hope you guys enjoyed this week's project. If you did, please leave a Like. 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