As you may recall from an earlier post, I put together a bunch of Space Squid distribution racks.
There were quite a number of these pieces of wood in the back yard, so to thank my housemate for letting me steal some of her scrap lumber, I decided to use some of that material to make a birdhouse.
But how to put that birdhouse up in a tree at 10pm? Which is the proper time for compulsive project construction.
I could either wait until morning and pay a reasonable amount of money to rent a ladder from Home Depot, or I could throw together a haphazard birdhouse erection mechanism.
In the following helpful diagrams, which took longer to put together than the birdhouse hanging contraption, you can see that there’s a length of spring steel (you always pick up the streetcleaner bristles you find broken in the gutters, right? they’re pretty damn useful)…
A loop of rope, prethreaded through the springsteel,is thrown over the tree branch. Then as it’s pulled taught, it pulls the birdhouse into the tree and threads the springsteel through the eyelet at the same time. Then when the rope is pulled from one end, it extracts itself from the springsteel, which is pulled crossways against the eyelet.
It’s not a perfect frictionless world (yet, I’m working on it) so I needed to help the birdhouse rise into the tree with the help of a long stick, but other than that it worked on the first try.
Viola!
