Project Hex: Building an Hexagonal Bird Table (Part 1)

I’ve been meaning to document the build of ‘Project Hex’ for some time, since I began in the Autumn of 2008.
Yes, the above photo isn’t that inspiring, but it represents the start of this slightly oddball way of spending some of my weekends.
I guess it all started when I built a regular rectangular, pitched roof bird table a while back. I was quite pleased with the way it came out and it got me thinking.

I wanted to have a go at something more involved, more challenging. This isn’t so much as a hobby, as something to do when I was bored, or the weather was bad. Also, I had recently lost my faithful dog of 13 plus years and needed to keep my mind occupied, so I guess this is what I did.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos from the early stages of building the bare-bones structure of the table, so all the pics I have are from the beginning of the tiling stage. As you can see, it shows the start of tiling the roof with small wooden tiles. I originally planned to cover the bird table with some roof felt that was kicking around the garage. Although the felt looked OK, it didn’t really have a wow factor…. hence the wooden tiles idea.

I decided to rip the felt off and have a go at creating a tiled roof. I headed down to the local retail park and into a large ‘hobby’ store. I left clutching a jumbo sized bag of standard lollipop sticks. This is not as mad as it sounds, the white birch wood used for lollipop sticks is high quality as it is primarily used in food. So, no splinters, no weak wood with consistent quality and thickness.

I had cut each tile with some wire snips. Resulting in 4 tiles from each lollipop stick. Each tile was then filed smooth at one end and pencil marked accordingly. A flexible outdoor waterproof glue was used to mount the tiles on the triangular sections of outdoor grade plywood that make the base structure of the roof.

The beginning of the tiling process

One side of the first tier complete

With the now defunct roof felt removed, side two of the first tier gets underway.
Any gaps bordering the roof base where filled with black outdoor silicon sealant. The reason I have only tiled 1/3 of the way up the roof is that I intend to have a three tiered roof.

I have many more photographs to sort out, so further updates will be forthcoming.

Click here for Part 2 of ‘Project Hex’