Tomcat Look Out Perch
If you don’t follow us on Instagram then you would have missed this interesting side quest to a customer enquiry - Juantina, who is based in Bremen, Maine, in the USA, recently got in touch as she needed some help reinstalling her 10 year old Tomcat, which had become unsteady due to a foot coming loose at the base.
After some back & forth we agreed that the best remedy would be to send out a set of our new rubber feet to replace the now old style adjustable ones & also include a couple of ceiling grommets for the ceiling connection to bring the install up to date - when we started Hicat® back in 2008 adjustable feet were used to install our units with a rubber capped connector that located into a raw ceiling hole but the non-adjustable feet & grommet ceiling fixing that we now use have proven to be a much better & simpler install solution.
During our discussions with Juanita she also enquired about a Cat’s Cradle type perch that could be installed onto the Tomcat so that her cat Tom Tom could to take in the garden views from his unit, which is installed in a windowed patio - we explained that our Cat’s Cradle has been specifically designed for use with our Polecat but we would have a think on this to see if we could come up with something for Tom Tom.
After a day or two an idea formed around a small shelf that can be installed on the outside of her Tomcat to act as a perch, rather than bed, & got to work fabricating a sample that we could ship with a new set of install bits - it would be secured using a bolt that tensions the perch onto the Tomcat from inside the unit through a small hole with added adjustable mounting points to make sure the perch stayed level once tensioned.
The prototype has been sent to Juanita & we will let everyone know how Tom Tom gets on with his Look Out Perch - if it goes down well then it may be something that we offer as a retro accessory to give cats an extra high level vantage point or even used as a dismount step from taller units.
