Welcome to Make Something with me, David Picciuto and today we're going tomake a real simple base and mount for this bird house.
I made thisbird house in a previous video.
I have this 1/8″ piece of sheet metalthat I'm going to use for the top of the pole.
I got this from alocal metal supply dealer.
You can get this at your home center.
It'll come in smaller sheets and it'sgoing to be a lot more expensive.
1/8″ is the recommended thickness.
You could probably go a little bitthinner and get by if you have to.
I am just going to mark out a sixinch by six inch area on here, here and cut this with the anglegrinder.
I like the score it first to give me a little group to runmy angle grinder dinner and then I'll come back and do a finishing pass.
So now I installed a flap disc in myangle grinder and I'm just going to clean up those nasty edges that we just cut.
This little wire.
wheel installed it in my angle grinderand we're just going to clean up all the rust on there.
If you wantyours to rust or you don't care, it's not going to beseen.
You can let it rust, but you do need to grind awayand get some clean metal.
We're going to weld the pole on.
Justusing some vice grips to lock that down.
You can use the same flap disc, but I find that it puts too many scratchesin there.
This is a little bit of a less less aggressive.
That is looking really good, nice and shiny and clean.
Before we weld on the post here, we need to drill the holes cause it'llbe easier now and to help us get that started.
We're going totake this, this punch here, and we're going to on all fourcorners and that's going to help the, it's going to give the place, it's goingto give the drill bit a place to go.
So we can drill a hole, a little bit of oil on each onejust because it's not necessary.
The hole that I'm drilling is slightlybigger than the screw that I'm going to use.
This is a pocket hole screw, and I'll explain why we're using apocket hole screw and a little bit.
So the post that we're going to use isthis conduit that you would find in your home center.
I chose thisbecause it's fairly cheap.
I was surprised to learnthat you can weld this, but you do have to keep inmind that this is galvanized, so they're going to be fumes.
So you wantto do this in a well ventilated area.
I have the garage door open.
You might want to have a fan blowing outand even wear a respirator underneath your welding mask.
So as I wasreading about welding conduit, one of the articles suggested to use atorch to heat up the end of the conduit to burn off any kind of the the stuffyou don't want in the way of your weld.
I tried that and then I just triedsanding it and I had the same success, so I just got some sandpaper here tojust sand that nice and nice and good.
Give it a good sand job.
It is almostMay and it's still freezing cold, unusually freezing cold right now.
Anyway, it's time to weld this up.
Now if you remember from our gettingstarted in welding video, Joel, in that video, said “weld towhatever finished material”.
So the base plate is one eighth inchsteel and the conduit is 16 gauge.
So I'm going to set my welder to 16 gauge.
Also note because this is galvanized, it might not be a super clean, good looking weld because ofall the impurities in the metal.
Don't worry about it.
Nobody's going to see this.
Nobody's going to come over to yourhouse.
Look underneath your bird feeder, judge you for your weldingjob.
This is, this is, this could be your veryfirst welding project.
This is a reason to get a welderis to do things like this.
You don't even have to worryabout cleaning up the welds.
It doesn't matter how pretty it is.
Itdoesn't even have to be that strong.
Birds weigh, a negative amount of weight.
They actually, the more birds there areon earth, the less the earth weighs.
I don't know how thatworks.
That is just science.
Plus birds are black magic.
Have I mentioned that Idon't even like birds? I'm going to go ahead and tack it up andfour different areas and then weld in between those tacks.
As you can see, not too bad.
Thatis overkill for what this is.
So now we can go pound this intothe ground.
So we're going to, he use pocket hole screws to attach thebird house to that plate that we just made.
Picciuto, are you mad? Whywould you use pocket hole screws? You're not even using pocket holes.
The reason is the screws have this.
Let me set this down and not break that.
The screws have this little, come on.
Here we go.
Here we go.
They have this little head like like amachine screw on there that's going to hold it firmly in place, but it has these threads thatare made to drill into plywood, which is what we're using.
So I don't even have to drill pilotholes into the bottom of the birdhouse.
One problem that we do have though isthis screw is an inch and a quarter and the bottom piece of plywoodis three quarters of an inch.
That means if we just screw this in there, the little baby birds are goingto get poked with a sharp screw.
We probably don't want that, so I went ahead and cut asix inch by six inch piece.
Then I'm just going to glue on thebottom of this and then we can screw into that.
How you like me now, so the last thing we need to do isjust set this up there and screw it in.
That's looking a little bit betterthan the one that's fallen over.
That wraps it up.
Thank you for watching.
Be safe, have fun, stay passionate, and make something fun.
Fact, I don't even like birds.
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