Birdy Birdhouse

My daughter came up with the idea of a bird-shaped birdhouse. She did the original drawing and design of the bird, as well as the painting at the end, and I did the engineering in between.

I printed all three pieces with rafts and without supports on a Replicator 2. The raft kept the bird sides as flat as possible, so that they would glue well to the extruded middle body part. I used silicone glue to assemble the parts. This way, once birds are done nesting, I can slice through the silicone glue on one side to clean out the birdhouse and then glue it back together.

We used SketchUp Pro 2013 to create the model. I used the free Autodesk 123D 3D Print Utility to generate a hollowed STL file of each the birdhouse parts for efficient printing on the Replicator 2.