[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Some of the best parts about being a woodworker are the projects that you create and the fun that you can have in your shop while you're making them.

So on today's episode of "The Woodsmith Shop," we're looking at two great projects that constitute a whole lot of fun in your shop.

We're looking at a bird feeder and a birdhouse.

We take them a little bit over the top, but they're still gonna be a fun addition for your backyard.

Let's start building.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

♪♪ Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Chris, what a fun project.

You know, these are not your standard furniture projects, and it's fun to build something that's gonna go outside that you kind of have creative freedom over, like these bird houses and bird feeders.

Absolutely, and these bird feeders and birdhouses pack a lot of great woodworking and workshop techniques.

As an example, the coopering that makes the body of this birdhouse, the sheet metal roof, and look at the patination that Logan's applied to it.

The copper foil roof on this bird feeder and these beautiful shingles.

There's a lot of great things going on with these two projects.

Exactly, and they're not your grade-school birdhouse or bird feeder.

They're not as extravagant as some of them either, but there's a lot of different paths you can take with these, and you really have creative freedom over them, you know?

The bird feeder, of course, caters to a lot of species of birds.

The bird house you can kind of set up for certain species depending on the size of the hole and the position of them.

So it's a great outdoor project.

So, for plans for these two great projects, both are available on our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

So, as woodworkers, I feel like there are inaugural projects that you kind of build during your woodworking career.

A workbench is one of those, and, obviously, a birdhouse and bird feeders are another one.

So the birdhouse that we're gonna tackle today is this guy, and as you look at it, you can see it's not necessarily your "standard" birdhouse.

The body of it is round, and it has this cool metal roof.

Sheds water really nicely, and it looks pretty cool, but we'll let Chris deal with that a little bit later.

We're gonna concentrate right now on building the body.

Now, as you can see, this is a rounded body.

You have a couple different ways that you could tackle this.

The first and maybe the most obvious is just to start with a massive hunk of wood and either turn it or drill out the center and then shape the outside.

But honestly, that's quite wasteful, if you do that.

Instead, we're gonna do a process called coopering.

Now, this is the same way that you would build, like, a cask for wine or for a bucket, and it involves making a series of staves that are beveled on the edge.

And then once you glue it up into the round shape, you can smooth it out and create the round form.

And because this process -- it doesn't use a whole lot of material, so this is a great opportunity to try something that you wouldn't usually use.

So, I'm gonna use redwood.

Now, redwood's not something we find every day in Iowa, and I happen to have some that I had salvaged from a demolition project here in town, and it's gonna weather really nicely.

So it's gonna make a great little "bird-o-minium."

So first thing we're gonna do is grab our blank, head over to the band saw, and rip apart some staves.

So the staves to create the body of this birdhouse are about 1/4 inch thick, and they're about 7/8 inches wide.

Now, I say "about" because the thickness of them doesn't really matter a whole lot.

So I'm gonna set my fence here to make these staves a little thicker than necessary, and then I'll send them through the planer to plane them down.

But, honestly, we do have to remember what this is.

It's a birdhouse.

So if they end up being a little thinner, a little thicker, or they have some saw marks, it's not the end of the world.

And my blanks here are wide enough to get at least two, maybe three out of.

So, I'm gonna rip these down into 1/4 inch strips, and then we'll head over to the table saw and rip them and bevel them at the same time.

♪♪ So, from the band saw, I went ahead and took all these blanks, ran them through the planer just to clean them up a little bit.

There might be some saw marks here and there.

I'm gonna sand it anyways once it's glued up.

Plus, it is a birdhouse, so I'm not terribly concerned about it.

I also went ahead and trimmed them all to a consistent length.

I left it a little long so once I have everything glued up into that tube shape, I can sand the ends, make sure everything's flush.

But here at the table saw, this is where the stave construction really happens.

So, let's look at the setup I have here.

The first thing I have is I've set up a fence, and this is just an auxiliary fence.

It's clamped on to the rip fence, and the key here is just that this face is smooth.

These edges, once we make our first bevel cut, are gonna be sharp, but they're also gonna be delicate.

So I wanna make sure that there's nothing on that fence face that's gonna catch it, ding it, or bind up the stock in any way.

I also make sure I have a push block.

These are gonna get pretty narrow.

I think the width is 7/8ths of an inch on them.

So I want to make sure I have something to hold the stock down securely but safely make the cut.

And then, the real key here is setting the angle of the blade, and to do that, I like to use a digital angle gauge.

What this allows me to do is to zero out the angle gauge on the surface of the saw.

Then I can raise the saw blade, stick it to the saw plate, and then tilt the blade until the angle reads out what I'm looking for.

What I'm looking for is 9°.

So after I have that set, I'm gonna make a bevel cut along one edge of each workpiece.

Then I'll set this width to whatever the width of our staves are, flip it around, and I'm gonna make a cut.

Then I'm gonna rip a couple out of each one.

After each cut, I'm gonna have to flip the blank over to make sure the bevels are going in the right direction.

But we'll make a pile of staves, and then we'll head back to the bench and glue them up.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Okay, so now that our staves are cut, we're ready to assemble the body of the birdhouse.

However, if you think about it, putting glue on 20 different parts, trying to clamp that round shape together can get a little messy if you don't plan ahead.

So let me show you my setup that I've found has worked pretty well.

So basically, what I have is I have a T-square that's clamped to the bench.

I also have some wax paper down.

This helps keep the glue off the bench -- and there will be glue that seeps out.

And the real key here is going to be the clamping, and that's really the hardest part, but some blue painter's tape or green painter's tape -- any masking tape -- will help act like a hinge, and you'll be able to really roll everything together fairly easily.

So let's go ahead and start getting our tape on our bench.

And now we can start gluing.

I do have a couple extra staves because I want to pay attention to the bevels, make sure they're clean.

If they have some big nicks in them, if they twisted while you were cutting, set them aside and grab a new stave.

And this first stave is gonna get stuck down just on the end of the tape without any glue, and that's going to be our starting point.

Now, to glue these together, we're just going to grab a stave, add some glue along one bevel.

Now, I'm going to rub that bevel along the mating piece that we just stuck down, and then push it down into the tape.

And now, we're just gonna repeat that process till we get to the end.

Okay.

Make sure everything's stuck down really well.

And then, I've found it easiest through some trial and error to get everything loose... ...and stand it on edge before we roll it up.

♪♪ ♪♪ Okay, there we go.

Now, those joints all look pretty good.

They're all nice and tight.

And I'm gonna throw a couple more rubber bands on here, let this glue cure.

Then we'll come back, give it a final shape.

Then we'll look at adding the top plug and the bottom.

Okay, so after the glue cures on this guy, we're left with, basically, a 20-sided cylinder, and we'll have these little raised corners where the glue joints are.

So, what we have to do now is to smooth them out, and that's pretty easy to do.

Now, you can do this with a hand sander, but, honestly, with this redwood, it planes so nicely that I can just grab a block plane, hit each one of those corners, and basically blend this entire shape together.

Now, it's gonna take me a few minutes to get all the way around it, but once I have that done, we'll come back and talk about adding the top plug and the bottom.

All right, so, once we have the outside all smooth, we can go kind of straight on the inside and the two plugs -- one for top, one for the bottom.

Looking at this top plug, you can see it's just a solid circle.

This can be made from whatever you have available in the shop.

It's not gonna be really exposed to much elements.

So I just cut this one out of Baltic birch using a circle-cutting jig at the band saw.

Flipping over to look at the bottom, we can see this one's a little different.

It's same outside diameter, but this one's more of a donut shape.

There's a particular reason for this.

Now, at the end of the season, when the birdhouse has been evacuated, you can pull the bottom off, reach in there, remove the nest.

Then it's ready to go for the springtime.

Again, this was just cut at the band saw.

Then you use the hole saw to remove the center section.

Now, speaking about the bottom, the original had a bottom that was made out of two layers of 3/4-inch stock.

Those were cut into a circle and then routed at the router table.

But if you know me -- if I have a chance to use a lathe, I'm going to.

So I glued up a blank of redwood that was about an inch and a half thick and I stuck it on the faceplate using four screws.

Then I used my bowl gouge to create a circle that was the right size diameter.

And then I switched over to a spindle gouge and I cut this cove on the top side, cut the shoulder.

Then I cut the smaller decorative cove on the bottom.

After a little bit of finish sanding, this is what I'm left with, and it looks pretty good, and it's pretty close to the original.

But really, you can come up with whatever shape you want.

So this guy will just get mounted on the bottom and attach with four screws through that bottom into that donut ring.

So once that's attached, we can give everything a final sanding, give it an outdoor finish.

But now, I think we'll bounce this off to Chris to make the top.

Well, with the body of the birdhouse complete, it's time to move to the roof.

The roof consists of a couple of parts, the first being this roof plate.

Now, this plate was spun on the lathe, just as you saw Logan create the bottom for the birdhouse.

To help support the sheet metal roof, there are two roof trusses.

These trusses were created at the table saw.

The lap joint was formed using a dado blade, and these long miters were cut using my miter gauge.

♪♪ ♪♪ So what I'm going to do now is glue the trusses to the roof plate, and when the glue is dry, it'll be time to form the sheet metal and complete our birdhouse.

♪♪ ♪♪ Well, it's time to create the sheet metal roof.

On this birdhouse, we're using galvanized steel, and that's a great look, but I decided to do something a little bit different and instead have a piece of 16-ounce roofing copper.

As you can see here, I've drawn a 12-inch diameter circle, and then there's a pie-shaped segment here which will be cut out and removed to create the shape that we need to form the conical roof.

♪♪ Once I'm done cutting this roof out, I'm going to form it around a mandrel.

The mandrel is simply a very large, heavy dowel, and it will help me impart this curvature to the roof without kinking the metal.

The next step is going to be to take that copper and to gently form it around our roof trusses and nail it off.

Because the sheet metal is a little bit thick, I'm gonna pre-drill all the holes for the tacks and then secure the roof to the structure.

The last step will be to add an eye bolt for hanging the birdhouse or a decorative finial if I'm going to be mounting it on a post.

A birdhouse is a fine addition to any backyard for some bird watching, and it's great for the spring and summer months.

But for the other seasons, I think a bird feeder is a good complement to it, so that's the project that I'm gonna get started here.

And like any type of construction, the important stuff is hidden on the inside.

So let's start and work our way from the bottom up.

I've glued up a cedar blank for the base, and to give it a little style, over at the table saw, I cut a bevel on all four of the edges.

Then, in the middle, over at the drill press, made a centered hole, and that's gonna accommodate a galvanized pipe that we're gonna use to mount the bird feeder to.

Now, forming kind of a strongback for the whole bird feeder is this frame assembly.

It's just four pieces of wood that are glued and nailed together.

The top and bottom pieces have holes also to match up with that hole in the base.

To provide rigidity, I have some 1/2-inch pieces of plywood that are gonna go on either side -- kind of like house sheathing -- that will get glued in place.

One thing to note about these is that, again, at the table saw, I tilted the saw blade 45° and beveled those edges... ...and that's gonna allow the seed to just slide right down into the bins.

So I'm gonna glue these pieces together and attach them to our base.

From there, we'll work on the decorative ends, and for that, I'll be at the band saw.

♪♪ ♪♪ The two end panels of the bird feeder really are what give it its style, and you can see that I've laid out that profile on one of the two pieces.

It gives it a double-gable look here.

And what's really more important is that the two pieces are consistent with each other.

So what I've done is, after laying it out on just one of them, gonna attach it to its twin with some double-sided tape.

And since it's just two pieces of 1/2-inch material, this band saw is plenty able to do it.

Now, with a nice wide blade attached to the saw, I can make the cut and track straight lines really easily.

That means when I'm done, both of these pieces are gonna be as identical as possible, and all I really need to do is use a file and a sanding block to just clean up some of the edges.

And then, from there, we'll head back over to the bench and start tackling the siding.

♪♪ ♪♪ Once the end pieces are cut to size and sanded smooth, head over to the table saw, and you're gonna cut a groove on the inside faces.

And that's gonna hold a Plexiglas panel that creates the outside face of the birdseed hopper.

Then you can attach these to this middle strongback section that I created a little earlier.

Now it's time to add some decoration and go from plain plywood to something that has a little bit more of a cottage feel to it, and for that, we're gonna use a couple of sizes and types of dollhouse shingles.

Now, these are very tiny cedar shingles, and for this lower section, we're gonna use just the regular square-cut ones.

On the upper gable section, I have a bag of the rounded-end fish scale shingles.

So, putting these on with the original plans talked about brushing them with a little bit of epoxy and setting them in place.

Ain't nobody got time for that considering how many shingles need to go on.

So what I am gonna do is just dip the top edge in some waterproof glue, and I'm gonna set it in place on the bottom and then on one side of a center line.

You can see here a row of other layout lines, and that's gonna show you where to align the next course of the shingles as you go up.

But I don't want to have any of these shift around while I'm working on them, so I'm gonna just tack it in place... with a short pin nail.

[ Tool whirrs ] Now I don't have to worry about the shingles shifting around as I'm applying each row.

It's gonna take me a little bit here, but once it's done, you'll see that it really transforms the look of this bird feeder.

♪♪ ♪♪ All right, now, it does take a little bit of time to get all the shingles on the two end panels, but I'm sure you can see that the price is really worth the payoff there.

So what I did after that is to take care of a few trim details just like you would on any house -- added some side pieces here that just kind of covered up those plywood edges, and finished off the sides.

From there, I needed to add a couple little stops on the inside of the grooves, and that's gonna hold the Plexiglas panels so there's an escape for the birdseed.

But you don't want that birdseed going too far, so there are some side pieces that you'll add and then some perches that get added, one on each side.

Now, the top of those sides and the perches are called out in the plans to get a round-over routed on them, but this is also an opportunity to use some hand tools, and I find that an ordinary block plane will do just as good a job at rounding and chamfering.

And since this is a project for the birds, they're used to standing on branches, not perfectly round, so the faceted shape, I think, works with the rustic look here.

So once I get this other perch attached, looks like this one's ready for a roof.

There are two details that I really like about this bird feeder.

One is the decorative shingles that you see here.

The other is the copper roof.

Now, the roof is going to consist of two lower roof panels... that'll go on like so and then an upper roof assembly, which consists of two panels that have a glued miter.

All of these panels have a rounded edge on the bottom and decorative score marks.

♪♪ ♪♪ The copper that we're going to use to cover the roof is 3 mils thick, so it's pretty thin, it bends very easily, and it cuts wonderfully with a utility knife.

The copper gets held to the roof panels with just some spray adhesive.

So what I'm going to do is start by spraying both sides of my roof panel.

I'll apply it, roll it over, and then I'll start folding the edges, which you'll see, and adding a few tacks for security's sake.

Once all the roof sections are done, I'll be ready to apply them to the bird feeder.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, our bird feeder is complete.

What I've done is to add this mounting block to the top roof... and all of these decorative trim boards to the edge of each of the roof panels.

They're held on with a little bit of epoxy to seal the ends of the roof panels and some copper nails.

And with that, there's just the ridge to ply, and then we are ready for birds and birdseed.

♪♪ A bird house and a bird feeder are two popular projects and a great way to invite some wildlife into your backyard.

Projects like these are also a great way to spend some time in your shop and introduce kids or other newcomers to the woodworking hobby.

if you'd like to build one or both of these yourself, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There, you'll also find some more information on finishing outdoor projects, plans for other projects, and tips and videos to keep you busy in your shop.

Then come right back here and join us in "The Woodsmith Shop."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an email with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free "Woodsmith" book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

♪♪ Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪