Naturalistic wood branch bird perch with spinner toy, clip in for welded wire mesh in inches by Gazaah

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

This is a two-part perch, it has a print-in-place built-in spinning toy. The perch is tree-themed, with a naturalistic wood-like surface and leaf themed spinning toy. The maple leaf sculpture acts as a counterweight, so the toy does not spin wildly or strike the bird if the bird on the opposite branch.
The tolerances are pretty tight, so use a medium or high detail setting for most FDM (like PLA or ABS material) printers. You may need to tweak the size % to get it to print right for you as it was exactly printed for my Raise3D E2's specs.
Make sure to run a lighter along the underside of the perch when you are done, to adhere any long extruded dilaments that may not have completely joined. Long strings of filament can become foot tangle hazards or strangulation hazards.
I washed the perches after printing them to remove any microdust plastic from the printer.
The 4/32 depth plates I've included will work for almost any 12 or 14 gauge welded wire mesh used for birdcage making, in inch sizes: 0.5 x 1.0; 1.0 x 1.0; 1.0 x 2; 1.0 x 3; 0.5 x 2; 0.5 x 3. I know this because I have tested it on about 10 different brands and sizes of wire. I have included a 5/32 depth plate as that can accommodate SOME lighter-duty 10 gauge wire meshes.
If you have a very light duty wire, such a 16 gauge, you can shrink the perch and the mounting plate by a few percent to hug the wire. Don't only change the mounting plate, as the clips for the perch need tobe shrunk to match!
You can see that the plates are oriented for verticle or horizontal wire. The perch's pop-on and pop-off clip mechanism will work for any of the wire sizes I've listed above because I'm a badass.
The model is made to be printed solid, this is because it has hollows built into it with strategic location and thickness. If you print it hollow, the spinner will break off and the leaves will snap off. I tried printing with four wall layers and a gyroid infill and it went poorly.
I printed this using two colors and single color, in ABS and PLA. I like PLA for bird toys because when they wear it down, I can send it to an industrial composting facility to be turned into soil. For smaller species that are unlikely to damage the perch for a long time, I used ABS for better weather resistance. Because it is long and thin, I definitely suggest using some glue on your bed surface. Long, thing rafts like to pop off.
I prefer to print with a 5 layer brim over a bed smeared with Elmer's purple glue sticks. For animal safety, when I wash the perches the glue turns purple again so I can be sure I've removed all the glue and I don't get a parakeet stuck on a perch after the bird takes a bath!!!
The main body of the perch is hollow, so if you separate shells to print the spinner in your second color, be aware you will need to recombine the hollow of the perch with the outer shell of the perch, otherwise you might end up printing a honkin' solid piece of plastic!