A pretty hippie ant trap.

Enter... dowels.

Ahem. I apologize if I sound episodic. But I like it.

James Hetfield had a guitar made of a garage. No, it was really from the wooden garage wall which they spent their days writing two of their early records. Sentimental, like me. You can check out his interview.

So as the interview goes, the wood from the garage walls used to make the guitar body was kinda soft. So to fit in the components which makes the guitar (I don't know what you guys call them all, fretboards and pickups and all that stuff), the guitar craftsman had to dowel certain parts of the garage wood surface with very dense and hard wood so that the fretboard and other parts of the guitar remain stable.

Meet Carl.

Which brings me to the next part of the story, which is mine. 

Enter.... ants. 

I don't know about you guys, but ants just love getting into our drinking water. 

Traditionally for us back in the days at home, ant traps are hindered from reaching the water with... Water. A lazy way to do it is to just use a big plate to keep water and a small tripod to hold a water kettle above it. The problem with this technique is that: the water tends to evaporate pretty fast (Remember Malaysia is a hot country!) and get mucky and looks icky after some time. Then, there'll be these slick mossy brown films which develop on the plate surfaces, which is, gross!

Enter... Monkeys and oil.

I've been making them traps out of countless different stuff since college days and it seems I'm the only one bothered enough to make a trap. It's not like my roommates were not enjoying the unadulterated water too (Hear that Hizami and Ayie? Now Adil and Kamal... I'm not sure if they drank from my jug). Here's one which is probably the earliest concept I conceived during those days (I think this was in 2007):

If you noticed, the jug of water was standing precariously over the super-advanced mishmash of plastic containers. I too, like to live dangerously. There were days monkeys came for a little noodling for off-the-table tidbits (our colleges were next to reserve jungles in University of Malaya. Any UM student can talk endlessly about monkeys and their sordid affairs). One monkey was noodling around carelessly and... yep. The jug of water toppled, spilling water all over the table and nearly totaled my laptop computer. Luckily... it was propped up so it didn't flood the circuitry.

Anyways. Later I figured out.. what if we don't need water to stop them ants? So I experimented with cooking oil. The concept is simple: a platform, three legs with small bowls, and a few drops of oil. Voila! So later, I made those traps with oil (regretfully many prototypes were not photographed) and they work fine. Ants love water, but they despise oil. Suffice to say I was getting better at this. So back at home we tried it with those generic tripods for putting pots and it seemed to work quite ok.

And the most important thing about oil? They don't evaporate. At least not easily.

Much later in my life, I learnt 3D printing and naturally I revisited my obsession with making better traps. Here's one "failed" design:

One of my earlier prototypes. Notice the leg coming through the platform on the right side. Structural failure.

This trap was 3D printed with expired PLA filament, which is kinda soft when heated even just to 70°C. The legs were separately designed so that it can be screwed and unscrewed when cleaning is needed. One more issue is that these kind of designs take waaaaaaaaaaaay too much filament material, and this makes printing them taking forever. What if... I just print the legs and use another readily available platform? Now, if you knew me, you'd know that I don't just buy things to make them. No sir... I'll not go to the store to buy any plastic defecate and easily wiggle my way through currency. I'll usually try to take something unusable, and make it useful. Which brings me to my next story.

Enter... unusable chopping boards.

Let's fly back to 2013. Imagine you're in a remote village, hot and humid, and a running river with boats clunking around. The main roads are paved, but the trail to the village houses are graveled. Palm trees everywhere. I was getting married.

During the time, my father-in-law cut down an old durian tree to be further chopped into segments of chopping boards - they downed a cow for the ceremony and these chopping boards are made to be disposable for one-off events. Here's one:

Notice how raw it looks? Yep. It was cut with a chainsaw (as locals call it.. "chen-so") and immediately used later. And the crack developed within a year.

So after the wrap up of the event, they left with piles of these chopping boards. I've seen these things being sold at rm50 apiece (albeit the ones sold on the roadside has to be made of much better wood.. but anyway) so I asked for them to be brought back for mementos. Needless to say, they weren't much of being chopping boards in the long run because they tend to crack as you can see. So they lie in the dark not long after that, growing God knows what on the surface.

I gave away four of these bad boys to my siblings when I returned from my reception back then. They ALL cracked. But now... they can serve a new purpose!

Initially, (and this was before I knew how to 3D print stuff) I just used a small plastic pipe (used as retainers in newly bought shoes), cut them into three or four parts, and fit keypads from used computer keyboards. Then, the keypads are filled with only a small amount of cooking oil. No evaporation issue, and ants just hate it. They'll come and leap into water barricades and sometimes prevail to kamikaze in the main reservoir, but not oil. Here's one of the older designs I made:

They worked well. No ants, and happy days for quite a while. 

Except these keypads are... a bit small and difficult to clean. You see, the problem with these traps now are that they'll gather dust and the ants will use the dust as a bridge for their little Lemming Leaps. Cleaning these things are messy because I have to fumble with the whole fuselage (and it's quite heavy!). Since the keypads are too small, the distance from the edge of the keypad to the legs of the trap is too small. This makes it still somewhat possible for the ants to waddle through the oil as I experienced before, though with difficulty. It is not unusual to still find an ant once in a while. 

Also, as I have observed, ants have a know how when it comes to oil. They will just gather oil-absorbing materials around it such as cat hair, cobwebs with dust, and all that. And if the oil-filled base plate is not big enough, it'll create a bridge!! You have to admit... these guys are perhaps one of the most adaptable creatures I have ever encountered. Then, the legs are too short. 

This makes dripping oil into the "bowls" difficult and tedious. So I'd have to make the design somehow:

1. Easily cleanable oil-reservoirs

2. Long legs

3. Save (3D printing) materials as much as possible

And now we come full circle. 

Enter... dowels.

Now we arrive to the final design. A design to end all designs. The one which I'll just 3D print, but still retain the wooden board. But how do we do this? Well the fun part was: enter Papa Het! (Or Sandman?) As I told in the beginning of this entry. With the dowel concept I was inspired with, I designed the dowel and nut hybrid, while also designing the leg with the liquid barrier, and with this I can design it to be easier to clean since it can be unscrewed. I made the oil cup a bit flatter and wider compared to the keyboard pieces.

The size of the dowel has to be based on the wood drill bit used in this case. I used a standard 2.5cm flat wood drill bit for making the holes.

Here's the .STL file in case you're interested. For the 3D printer enthusiasts who might be curious: I just used a free 3D design software (Autodesk 123D) and generated the GCode with Cura. Printed it all with ABS filament which I got from trash. Again... I use unwanted stuff!

 If you notice, the dowel is slightly slanted, sized approximately to the flat wood drill bit I was using so that I can just jam it up into the hole. The video might give you a better idea:

Now let the pictures speak.

I applied three coats of wood varnish on the surface of the wood as shown in the picture. Previous ones were not waterproofed and boy.. whatever those creatures are made one heck of a job making parts of it nearly useless. Some parts of the wood turned spongy. I salvaged them by basically flooding the "soft" parts rendered by those wood mites with Elephant glue. Take that!! Then, apply 3 coats of varnish, then dried them out under the hot baking sun.

Here's the final look:

I've been using the design for the past few months and they work well. But the most important thing is (at least to me) these traps can be maintained and cleaned easily if dust or ant bridge-precursors form on the oil wells. Here's one recent attempt by the ants:

They can try... but it will be hard, as I have observed. Good luck, boys..

That's all... and until the next post!

Vizier87