Directions for making a metal bird-cage.



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DIRECTIONS FOR MAKING A METAL

BIRD-CAGE.


By Wallace Craig.


One who keeps birds should have facilities for isolating any

individual bird when it is sick, when it bullies others, or is bullied by

others, or when various other causes make isolation desirable. This

means that anyone who keeps many birds should have a considerable

number of cages or pens, which, if bought, are very expensive, and

often unsuited to one’s needs, but which may very well be made at

home at little cost. In my own early years of bird-keeping I

struggled along with home-made wooden cages, but they were heavy,

fragile, dirty, unsanitary, inconvenient in the matter of opening

doors and changing perches, and so unsightly that they were not fit

to be seen in the house, and their clumsy wooden bars obscured the

bird from view. At last I set to work to see if I could make a metal

cage, and after trying and discarding a few other types I developed

the type of cage shown in the accompanying photograph, which has

proved so satisfactory that I am sure others will be glad to know how

to make a cage like it.


The first thing to be said about making an all-metal cage is

that it is perfectly easy. In fact, the making of these cages requires

no skill, only a certain amount of labour. The tools needed are a

pair of flat-nose pliers, a pair of wire-cutting pliers, a file, a mallet

(mine is home-made), a stick of wood cut into the shape of a chisel,

a punch (any sharpened steel rod will do), a wooden block on which

to place the galvanised sheet iron when holes are punched through

it, two straight wooden beams about 3| ft. long, a similar piece about

12^ in. long, and two stout clamps, such as shown in Fig. 7.


The construction of the cage is shown in the accompanying

figures. Fig. 0 and Figs. 1-5 sIlow pieces of a certain type of elec¬

trically welded “ fencing ” made by the Pittsburg Steel Co., Pittsburg,

Pa., U.S.A. This comes in rolls containing a length of 150 ft. The

width is 17 in., and in this width there are seventeen longitudinal

wires or strands, as shown in Fig. 2, so that the distance from the

centre of one strand to the centre of the next is l T y in. The distance



