Mid-Century Modern Birdhouse

Recently my grandfather retired and with his spare time has gotten into the hobby of woodworking. Since he has always enjoyed spending time in his garden as well, he’s gotten interested in making birdhouses to attract more local fauna. Last time I went home to visit family I was surprised when my grandfather provided me with not one, but two bird houses he had designed and built just for me. Having myself been interested in 3d printing for a while now, he has always been fascinated with the things I am able to print. As the end of the year approached, and the holidays got closer, I thought to myself what better to get my grandfather than a birdhouse designed and built just for him.

I am a Junior Environmental Science major with a focus in plant science at the historic Alabama A&M University. I designed everything in this project in Fusion360 and printed it on my Voxelab Aquila using Polyterra white PLA.

• Fusion 360
• Modified Voxelab Aquila
• Polymaker Polyterra white PLA 1.75mm

Growing up, spending time throughout Alabama and Florida, I was inspired by a more diverse range of architecture than one might initially think of in the south. Many of the areas I spent time in saw large economic booms during the 50s and 60s, like many of the parts of the US at the time. With land being cheap and money to go around, a lot of mid-century style homes and buildings were developed. As a kid, these designs always stuck out to me because of how unusual they looked compared to everything else. With how much everything has changed where I’m from, I wanted to design something that could bring back memories of not only when I was a child, but also some of the same feeling for my grandfather. To come up with an idea of where to start, I looked up some photos of old buildings from my hometown, as well as popular mid-century designs. After a while, I had sketched out a few designs and had some ideas floating around my brain.

To begin, I started by determining the size of the birdhouse I wanted to build in relation to the size of my printer bed. I don’t have the largest print surface in the world, so I knew that I would have to design everything to a reasonable scale. Once I had a basic Idea of sizing, I started my design with a box. After this, inspired by the decorative siding often used at the time, I used a copy of one of the boxes faces and a parabola to make a cool design. Using this design, I added decorative siding to two sides of the birdhouse, leaving space on one side for a chimney. I then added all of this to a base to act as the foundation of the birdhouse. One of my favorite parts of mid-century design style has always been the odd shaped and pitched roofs. Because of this, I then added a relatively sharp pitched roof. Because I wanted to emphasize the style, I made sure to allow the chimney and siding to protrude through the roof. Originally, I next added an entrance hole to the design and thought I was finished. I looked at this design for a while and just didn't feel like it was complete. When taking inspiration for this project one thing that kept sticking out to me was the use of large picture windows. After I went back again for more inspiration, I found myself drawn to these windows and knew I needed to add one. Once the window was finished, the last touch in the design was to add a perch for any incoming bird to land on before entering their new home. To finish it all off, I went back over the design and added some space to compensate for my printer's tolerance.

To slice my project, I used my slice profiles I have developed in Cura. Cura has added a lot of features in the past year or so, and if you haven't used it before I would recommend giving it a try. For my design, I opted to print the two pieces of siding together, and print the perch pole at the same time as the roof. Everything printed without support except the body, for which I used a tree support. Much like with Cura, if you have not tried using tree supports I would recommend giving it a try. While I don’t use it exclusively, I have found that I personally use tree supports much more often and get much better results with my setup. After I had all my files sliced and ready to go, I uploaded them to my sd card and got printing.

• Hotend: 220c
• Bed 60c
• Speed: 50mm/s
• Layer Height: 0.28mm
• Infill: 5%
• Top/Bottom: 5 layers

Printing went smooth like normal. Preheated everything, added a thin layer of glue stick, and let the printer go to town. In total It took around 23 hour to print everything.

Once everything was finished, all that was left was to make sure it all fit together well. I plan to leave the birdhouse unfinished as it is a gift for my grandfather. We always built and made things together growing up, so I planned on taking some time to paint and finish it with him over the holidays. I choose to print the birdhouse with such a small level of infill because I doubt this will ever make its way outside. My grandfather is one to cherish things like and I have a feeling it will end up on his side bed table. If you would like to print this as a functional birdhouse I would recommend using a much higher infill percentage and either using a light/weather resistant material or coating to help it last longer.

If interested, I have uploaded the files to cults3d for download: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/home/mid-century-...

Feel free to leave any nice comments and thank you for the view.