Birdhouse

Octagonal birdhouse

Or more exactly a 3d printed roof and floor for an octagonal birdhouse made of wood. I like the octagonal shape but the roof and floor takes time to make out of sheet metal and wood so I tried to simplify the process by 3d-printing these parts.

The floor part has a completely over-the-top mechanism for locking it in place with 8 pistons that extend 8mm from each side when turning the knob. This makes it ultra-easy to clean out the old nest, and makes the construction job much easier, just drill 8 shallow 10mm holes in the middle of each wall a couple of centimeters from the bottom and it's all set. Likewise in the top of the walls, for holding the roof in place.

The roof is permanently mounted when the walls are glued together around the roof and the assembled floor. I found that laying all the ready made walls down with the outside facing up and taping them together, then carefully lifting them up to add glue and wrap around the roof and bottom works quite well.

The diameter is only suitable for small birds, so a 25mm hole is probably best.

Source included

FreeCad and Blender source files included for the roof and floor.

Printing

The roof part obviously needs support. Autogenerating support however tend to fill the whole cone with support structure which is completely unnecessary. I had better success with turning off auto support and enabling 'force support for first layers' for the bottom part (Slic3r settings).