dowel hoop frame for garden netting by ecloud

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

We've got a balcony planter, and I've been growing strawberries in one end for a few years, but last year the birds discovered it. One bird seemed quite taken with them, so she came back this year and built a nest in a neighbor's bush just to be near them, I think. So this year I went to Plantasjen and bought a fitted sheet of netting, with elastic meant to hold the netting over a metal frame which can be attached to the standard-sized wood garden boxes that they use in Norway: https://www.plantasjen.no/fuglenett-for-plantekasse-120x85x55-cm-200024801-no It so happens that our planter is about as wide as those boxes. Next problem was to come up with a way to put this net onto the balcony planter. I've had an idea for a while about building frame-like things from long thin tree branches (for example, a bed for a cat or dog could be a space frame to suspend a cloth lining, with a pillow inside), so this seemed a good time to try it out. I went to the woods nearby and cut a few green shoots to use like dowels, and then designed some corner pieces. It's OK to use straight dry sticks or dowels for most of it, but you really need green ones to make a curved hoop. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1242328 was some inspiration: I realized that the holes in the corner pieces don't have to be round, in fact square holes might work better. But that "thing" doesn't include the design file, only the stl, so I had to start over.
I happened to have a wall available to fasten it to, and lately I like the idea of using GoPro hardware for other purposes like this. So I made a wall-mounted GoPro clip (which I could potentially use for time lapse photography of the planter later on) and also a clip-to-dowel adapter to fasten the top of the netting frame to the wall. It seems quite stable so far, and also easily removable to pick the berries. To work with gopro_clip.scad, you need gopro_clip.stl from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1702176 which BTW is a very good design IMO (except for some dimensions being a bit off to work with my printer); but for this we only need the clip part, not the triple-tab part. Again, that design is only an STL, so you can only scale it, not easily change it in other ways.
The wall mount clip is modified from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:909819 - thanks to knick for providing one of the rare OpenSCAD gopro accessory designs.
On the other end, the tabs hanging down from the corner pieces help to secure the frame against the sides of the planter. I just happened to make them fit tightly, without really measuring too accurately, so it seems pretty well held in place on that end too.
I used a pocket knife to shave and square off the ends of the sticks and make them fit tightly into the corner pieces. Then I drilled through with a small drill bit (3/32" I think) and found some small nails which fit tightly into those holes. In some critical places I bent over the ends of the nails, but in others I kept them removable so that I can disassemble the frame for storage when the season is over.
So anyway here are some pieces for doing things like that; I'm sure they have other applications. The OpenSCAD files are meant to be moderately customizable in case your sticks are bigger or smaller or you need to change the angles etc.