Introduction
This project is relatively easy, but you need a good clamping setup as the stock is relatively big. We recommend using at least 1 clamp (or screw) every 10cm to reduce the vibrations and enhance the quality of your surface finish.
We suggest you tackle this one after you’ve gained some experience with CNC milling.
Material
The bird feeder is made out of one bigger piece of 12 mm plywood and one ceramic plate (available in any DIY store).
.530 x 229 x 12 mm
We used plywood for our bird feeder, but you can use any material you want for this project. Please keep in mind that the project is made for 12 mm thick material and that the joins making everything fit into each other have to be the exact size of your stock.
If you want to use another thickness of the material, please check out our parametric design article to learn how to edit parametric files.
End mill
We used a 3 mm 2-flutes flat down-cut end mill for milling our pieces.
Milling
This piece is made out of 2 operations:
We start by milling the hole for the rope with a bore operation. The spindle should run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the feed rate is 1725 mm/min with 1.5 mm passes.
The second operation is a Contour2D operation that will cut all the pieces in the stock. The spindle should run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the feed rate is 1725 mm/min with 1.5 mm passes.