Bird House

Me and my group member decided to construct a bird house for a fabrication project and we are trying to accomplish a design for a bird house in order to create a safe environment to help keep birds safe.

Materials Needed:

Plywood (3ft by 4ft) (1/2 inch thick)

Screws

Craft Sticks (for shingles on roof)

Blue Spray-paint

Dowel Rod (Dia 1 1/4in)

Filament for 3D printer

Ruler/Measuring tool

Appliances:

3D Printer

Drill

Drill Press

Table Saw

Sanding Machine

Screwdriver

The first step we took in creating our bird house was to brain storm on paper what we would want to create, what was the purpose of us creating it and what we were going to focus on while creating it. After going over many ideas, we choose to work on creating a bird house. We wanted to build a bird house that a bird could rest/nest with water and food provided as well. With this in mind we drew out many layouts for what our birdhouse could look like. Then me and my group member decided the best design from all the sketches and got to work.

To try and expand on our design and conceptualize what it might look like in 3D we decided to create a prototype of our birdhouse on on-shape. On On-Shape we sketched out all our parts first and then extruded it to make a 3D part. We then took all our 3D parts and assembled the prototype of our bird house. For the prototype on On-Shape we made about 7 parts, including, the floor, the roof, the sides, the front, the back, the water/food cups, and the base.

After creating our prototype, we took the dimensions of the different parts from on-shape and wrote them down on paper so we could see the layout of the parts more easier and have it in the workshop alongside us so we could reference it while working with the wood.

Dimensions of Parts:

Sides: 12 in X 14 in

Front/Back: 12 in X 12 in

Roof: 12 in X 14 in

Water/Food Cups: 2 in Dia with an extrusion of 1.5 in and hole depth of 1.4 in

Base: 19 in X 19 in

Perch: 6 in X 1/2 in

Dimensions of Front/Back Entrance on the Front/Back:

Front Entrance: 3 Dia

Back Entrance: 3 Dia

Dimensions of Water/Food Cup Holes:

Hole: 2 in Dia

Brim: 2.3 in Dia

Depth of Hole: 1.4 in

Depth of whole cup: 1.5 in

Dowel Rod Dimension:

1 1/4 in Dia

Drawing the parts on plywood would seem like an easy enough task but it takes more steps than at first glance. The problem me and my group member faced was finding a piece of plywood that we could draw all our pieces on and cut out from. One of our classmates gave us advice to add up all the surface areas of our wood, so we could estimate how big our piece of plywood needed to be. We added up all the surface areas of our wood pieces and we roughly estimated that we needed a 3ft by 4ft piece of plywood. Then we needed to figure out the placement of the bird house parts on the plywood to effectively use up all the piece of plywood as best as we could. Our teacher recommended that we use an On-Shape sketch to plan where we were going to put our bird house pieces on our piece of plywood. Using our On-Shape sketch as reference we drew all our parts on the plywood using measuring tools.

Cutting out the Pieces of plywood was the next step in the process of constructing our bird house. It was rather simple as we only placed the 3ft x 4ft plywood piece on the saw table and cut out our bird house parts individually along the already sketched out lines.

For this step me and my group member decided that a drill press would be the best option to get as close as possible to our diameter for the bird house. We tried as best as we could to get our back and front entrance to be a perfect circle with a diameter of 3 in and at least 6 in away from the side based of the center point of the circle. The key word for this is tried as we couldn't find an exact drill bit of 3 in so we had to improvise and drill out holes next to each other to get as close enough as possible to the 3 in diameter of or circle. If we had any remaining sharp edges inside the back/front entrances we sanded them down as much as possible.

There is a lot of planning involved this stage, even a little more than the Drawing on Plywood stage. We first decided to draw out where all our pilot holes for our screws would go for our front/back of the birdhouse. Then we drilled the pilot holes out. We then got the side parts of our bird house and drew little markings on the 1/2 in depth of the wood using the already made pilot holes of our front and back as a guide so we could smoothly drill in our screws later on. Then, we placed our drill above each of the markings and drilled out the pilot holes on the 1/2 in depth of the side parts of the bird house.

Pilot Holes Placements:

Front: 4 screws total; 1 screw close to the top right corner, top left corner, bottom right corner, and bottom left corner of the surface area

Back: 4 screws total; 1 screw close to the top right corner, top left corner, bottom right corner, and bottom left corner of the surface area

Sides: 6 screws total; two screws at the top with one close to the far right and left. two screws near the top and the bottom on both the right side and left side of this piece.

Roof: 4 screws total; 1 screw close to the top right corner, top left corner, bottom right corner, and bottom left corner of the surface area

While we were working in the workshop on our bird house, we decided to 3D print out our food/water cups as well. The process of 3D printing our food/water cups went a little along the lines of exporting our 3D On-Shape part as an STL onto a 3D printing program called Original Prusa Drivers, then we got a flash drive and downloaded the STL of our water/food cups onto it. As our last step, we plugged in our flash drive into a 3D printer, adjusted the settings, and finally started to 3D print our food/water cups.

After drilling our pilot holes into our bird house parts we decided it was finally time to assemble all our parts together. We decided to assemble the roof, back, sides, and front first, and attach the base last after we finished doing all the necessary adjustments to it. So we assembled both sides to the roof by attaching the sides via the pilot holes we just made. We screwed two screws on the right and left sides of the surface area on the ceiling into the top of the side pieces. Then, we screwed the front and the back into the sides using the same technique we did on the roof. Two screws on both sides of the surface area on the back pieces and front pieces screwed onto the sides of the side pieces.

To drill out the base holes me and group member found a 2 inch diameter hole screw and placed it into the drill press and drilled out our 2 inch diameter holes for our food/water cups. Afterwards, we got a hole screw with a diameter of 1 1/4 inches and placed it into the drill press and drilled out the hole for our dowel rod.

To make our bird house more aesthetically pleasing, we decided to spray paint it. The color we decided on was a cool blue color and we sprayed two coats of spray paint on all the surfaces of the birdhouse for full coverage.

To add on to our design element of our birdhouse we wanted to add shingles onto our roof and it would match our original on-shape prototype. To create our shingles on our roof we got craft sticks and placed each one side by side in a row until we ran out of space. Then we layered another row of popsicles sticks onto the first row repeating the process until we completely covered the roof with shingles.

To try to keep the dowel rod in place and prevent it from moving, our teacher recommended that we get a thick block and drill halfway through it and attach it on the base right above where the dowel rod hole would be. So when we insert the dowel rod inside the base it would not move around but stay in place due the block preventing it to move around. The block we choose to use to do this was around 1 1/2 in thick. After we choose our block and drilled a hole for our dowel rod in it, we drilled pilot holes onto the middle of both sides of the block and the base as well so we could screw it onto the base with ease. Then we attached the 1 1/2 in block to the base. We used two screws for this step.

To get our finished bird house the last thing me and my group member had to do was to attach the base to the bird house. To attach our birdhouse to our base, we first had to figure out where the birdhouse was going to be located on our base. We decided to place it at the top left of our base, then we tried to locate where the bottom of the side parts were on the base. After we figured out a close estimate we drew pilot holes as near as possible to the center of the bottom side parts and drilled pilot holes there. Using the already made pilot holes as a guide we made marks on the bottom sides of our birdhouse and drilled another set of pilot holes there. Lastly we screwed the base and the bird house together and got our finished result!