Bird Feeder Squirrel Shield Gen 2

thingiverse

My original squirrel shield design https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4893249 works great, but had a number of features that I wanted to improve the design and its build ability. 1. Original parts were quite large, so redesigned the size and structure a bit. I created 2 smaller pie shaped parts that can be mixed into shield in several ways. A 28 degree angle part & a 56 degree angle part. You can use 6 of the 56 deg parts, or 4 28 deg and 4 56 deg, or other combinations. These smaller parts individually print faster than the large pie sections of the previous design. 2. Original snap designs sometimes broke at the sharp edges in the design. So Gen 2 has redesigned snaps with smoother edges, and a design that is a bit easier to snap into position, with a bit of a locking part of the snap that fits the hole snuggly. 3. Gen 2 increases the mounting radius a bit to fit the 2 mount designs. One mount for 1/2 inch rod pipe bird feeders - requires 1.125-1.5 inch hose clap around the bottom part of the mount to tightly hold the mount on the pole. The other mount is sized to fit a 1 inch pipe, requires 1.5-1.75inch hose clap to hold the mount tightly to the pole. Don't over tighten the hose claps, or it could crack the plastic- tighten just enough to hold the shield in position on the pole. 4. Increased the slope of the shield an artifact of designing smaller faster printing parts. Original design had 5 70 deg. sections for a 10 deg. slope. Gen 2 has a 24 deg. slope by using 6- 56deg. sections or combinations achieving the same slope. The original parts took about 6 hours to print on my printer, the smaller Gen2 parts take 2- 4hrs. Also another artifact of increasing the slope, is that the overall print time for all the parts is less, because the overall radius of the combined prints is 14 degrees less to print overall. 350 deg down to 336 degrees to print. This can be seen by the bigger gap when all the parts are snapped together except for the last 2 snaps.