24/8/2015
My son has been honing his woodworking skills by making several bird feeders over the past few weeks. He takes advantage of my obsessive collection of offcuts and nails these very basic double story feeders together while I am working on other stuff.
Here you can see one of his feeders with an Acacia pied barbet having breakfast on the top storey.
On the weekend he made this monster using the ends of the Without boards I processed last week for my bench’s shelve. He painted it with a mixture of Diesel and recycled car oil as an African wood preservative. Then he used bits of scrap metal we pick up all over the place for the rest of the hardware. Three screws drilled through the wood acts a convenient place to fix bits of fruit for White-backed mousebirds and African red-eyed Bulbuls.
If you want to look at a few more ideas on bird feeders go here. My friend Bob Demers (The Valley Woodworker) is a very experience woodworker who likes making them too.
Very nice Gerhard! It’s great to see your son working with you in the shop. The wood preservative method that you mentioned is interesting. If I recall correctly, you used something similar when building your lumber storage sheds? Do you not worry about the wood being extra flammable with the diesel and oil soaked into it?
All the best,
Jonathan
Hey Jonathan
You make a good point, I am sure it will be more flammable.I think most of the diesel evaporates, but certainly the oil would have the mentioned effect. In the case of the bird feeder this is not really an issue, but obviously the storage shed is a different story. This is simply a very cheap, yet effective preservative used around these parts as we do not have so many cumbersome (yet perfectly understandable) regulations as what would be the case in the first world. In the case of the storage shed, I tend to think that it is a bonfire in any case, the few drops of oil will not make it all that much worse.
Nice to hear from you.
Gerhard
Very neat always great to see the kids involved in the shop.
Just wait till you introduced them to the brace and centre bits, they will be making holes everywhere 🙂
Great pics of the bird, not easy to take pics they don’t like to sit around for the camera…
Cheers
Bob
Hey Bob
I think I will look into restoring my centre bits once the bench is glued up and then give the kids a go. I remembered the other day when reading your post on the beautiful beach, that we almost ended up living in Nova Scotia ourselves. When I was considering places to go do my Psychiatry specialty training, it ended up being a toss-up between New Zealand and Nova Scotia. We went to New Zealand in the end, but it was close. I had heaps of discussion with the Lady who was the director of training over your way at the time.
Always nice to hear from you.
Gerhard