Laser Cut Press-fit Bird House

For this project I made a simple press-fit bird house with a remove-able roof and protruding base. I chose this design mostly because I really like the roof joints that despite being at a 90° angle like the rest of the form, appear to create a very clean/traditional looking roof. This is still a work in progress as I'd like to add hinges to the roof and left wall and a metal fastener on the right side roof and wall to make the design more practical to hang. With the design as it stands I recommend this tutorial on a hanger made with paracord or twine to hang and support it from the bottom. This design is in part inspired by Skylar Tibbits’ Things Fall Together and his advice of creating well designed, simple structures from the "bottom up" in order to facilitate scaling up and down which I had to do several times during this process. Thanks to this I was able to come up with solutions for problems that came up along the way and easily (at least in the brain space) adjust my design. This reading is also partially what inspired my choice to make a bird house since the simplified structure of a base, four walls, and a roof seems like a good way to demonstrate his ideas.

-1/8in thick plywood

-Epilog Fusion Maker 36 Laser Cutter

-Fusion 360 + Adobe Illustrator

Proportions

Because I was working with 1/8in plywood it was important to me that the base was considerably larger than the walls of the house to avoid the house potentially folding over, so I gave it a 6x6in base and 5x5 walls with Mortise and tenon joints that were 1x1.8in so the walls could secure to the base. I also planned for the walls with points to accommodate the roof was at a 90° angle so the roof was flush against the top facing edges of the walls, because this part of the form was made using the line tool I just made sure they were set at 45°(left side) and -45°(right side).

For the forward face I planned for a door hole (that if you wish to recreate you should probably make far smaller if there are small predators of birds in your area) and a small 1/8x1/8 hole for a 1/8x1/8x3 piece to act as a perch.

Corrections

While the visible portions of the walls were meant to be 5x5in, due to the extrusions (which I'll cover in the next step) you'll want to add 0.0625in on either side of your side walls (an addition of 0.125in total making the width of the side walls 5.125)

Mortise and Tenon Joints

There are certainly easier ways to make this kind of joint but the was I was able to make sure mine where in line with their respective pieces by starting a center point rectangle at the mid-point of the bottom edge of each of the walls the same size as the mortises and tenons, and creating two point rectangles starting on either bottom most point of the same size. After this step I deleted the unnecessary lines on each one making sure their respective parts had the mirrored parts. For the walls I also created offset planes on the inner faces of each mortise and extruding the sketches outward, though it works the same as creating mid-planes between the inner most and outer most faces of the mortises. In either case you'll want to add the aforementioned 0.0625in on either side of the side walls so that they're 5.125 wide. (pictured below)

Roof

For the roof I was able to use another pair of offset planes to create the sketches, but due to the angle there was quite a bit of distortion and it was difficult to tell whether or not the roof panels extended past the top facing edges of the side walls. To fix this I used the measure tool and connected it from the top of the front wall structures to where it met the side wall structures and added 1/8 in (ply, which I recommend extending slightly for a house that more closely resembles a cottage) and determined that each roof panel needed to be 3.561in long and 5.5in wide

Exporting

While exporting as a DXF file for laser cutting, I ensured that within my setup under the cutting tool that my selected machine had the kerf settings set to 0.25mm, this setting was recommended to me by my course instructor and is what worked for a snug fit that reduced the likelihood to needing to hammer pieces together. I then opened my DXF file in Adobe Illustrator and sent it to the laser cutter, ensuring I focused the laser to the thickness of the plywood and that my lines were at 0.001pt.

Laser Cutting

The laser cut process was fairly straight forward and I was able to use the preset for 1/8in thick plywood on the laser cutter.

Once my parts were laser cut I put the wall pieces together and placed it on the back wall to slide in the perch in to the newly constructed form and finally fit the house onto the base which required some light hammering with a mallet.