Friday 12 August 2011

Dishing it out to the birds

Several years ago, the dish antenna guy replaced our antenna and was about to discard the old dish. DH, knowing fully well how I like to re-use almost everything, decided to save it for me. I turned it into a bird-bath. Really doesn't take much time at all:

What you need:
1.  1 Dish, of the antenna kind!
2.  1 can of paint of your favorite color. I picked yellow, because I wanted the birds to be attracted to this thing.
3. 36 2" binder rings.
4. soap and water and a sand paper.
5. Some sturdy rope.

Method:

Remove the "arm" of the dish antenna by removing the nuts attaching it to the dish.
Discarded arm of dish antenna

Put back the nuts, so that there are no holes in the dish.
Scrub the dish clean with soap and water.
Sand it down a bit and let it dry.
Spray paint and wait for it to dry.
Make four chains using eight binder rings each by interlocking them.
interlocked binder ring chains

Look for the holes on the side of the dish antenna -- there are four of them.
Attach one binder ring chain to each of these, by hooking it through these holes.
 Join the four chains together with the remainder (4 of them) binder rings so that it looks like the pics below.


you can see the nuts that held the arm of the dish in this pic


Now all you need is a sturdy rope or chain to hook through the top-most link in the chain and then hang it using that on a sturdy tree limb.

You can also make rain chains using the same interlocking binder ring method and hang it from the tree limb to direct more water into the bath.

Alternately, you could dig a hole and stick a wooden post in it, then attach a sturdy plant hook to the top of the post and hang this thing from that.

Or, you could simply find a log and put the painted dish on top of it.  You may have to screw it down into the log so that it does not fly away in bad weather.

Keep it near a bird feeder and you should have some traffic.

If I get a chance, I might even paint some pretty hibiscus looking flowers on the dish.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

3 comments:

Saru Singhal said...

Very interesting and you're very creative...Click some pictures after painting flowers on it. Will be waiting...

kpsrcm said...

Hey, thanks Saru!

Agnija Bharathi said...

Hey thanks Saru!! :)