DIY CNC project - How to Make a Bird Feeder

This project is relatively easy, but you need a good clamping setup as the stock is quite big.

We recommend using at least 1 clamp (or screw) every 10 cm to reduce the vibrations and improve the quality of your surface finish. We suggest you tackle this one after you've gained some experience with CNC milling.

If you feel comfortable with Fusion360, you can modify the parameters of this project to make the bird feeder fit any plate you want. Check out our article to learn how to work with parametric designs.

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 joints 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.

Oversize your stock (+20mm at each side) to be able to secure it properly to the spoilerboard. Securing it firmly to your spoilerboard will not only prevent your piece to fly around but will also reduce the amount of vibration during milling and by means improve the surface finish. Check our “Feeds and Speeds explained” article to learn more about the influence of parameters on your milling results.

We used a 3 mm 2-flute flat down-cut end mill for milling our pieces.

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.

Download Autodesk Fusion file here