How to Quiet a Trio House / Glenn Wooddell

[Professor BirdBrain]

Quieting Your Metal Houses
By Glenn Wooddell / Texas

Have you ever raised or lowered your Nature House martin house and heard a screeching sound that sounded like one hundred fingernails dragging on a blackboard?

Remember when you were in school (if some of us can remember that far back) when some one or the teacher was writing on the blackboard and they scratched their fingernail, made your skin crawl like crazy?

Well, think what it does to the baby martins. This sound has caused many baby martins to jump their nests when they are about 20 to 23 days old as you raise or lower your house doing your weekly nestcheck.

There is a remedy to stop this noise. J.L.Wade, the founder of Nature House and the original owner had been informed about this, but chooses to do nothing about it. He would say it would cost too much to re-tool the die that makes the parts. So, I guess he was saying “let the martins put up with the noise.”

To remedy this, take your houses down this fall and disassemble them (a chance for a good cleaning) and remove the ceiling bracket and the floor bracket. Lay each piece on a piece of 1/4" exterior plywood or plastic. Trace around the parts and cut out the same as the metal part.

Then, take the metal parts and cut the hole that slides up and down the pole 1/4" bigger in diameter. File off the burrs and replace the parts back on the houses in their proper place, putting the new part next to the metal floor or ceiling (see sketch http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...etal-house.jpg
).

You will have to use longer machine screws to do this. You may cut the bigger hole in the metal parts any way you wish, but I clamp it into a bench vise and use a saber saw with a metal cutting blade.

Replace the house back onto the pole, run it up and down and BINGO! no more screeching.

The wood or plastic sliding up and down the metal pole does not make the noise of metal on metal. This is also easy on the ears of both landlords and birds.

Glen Wooddell / Texas

[Tim Hammonds]

Its nice to see an article by Glenn Wooddell. As a member of "Purple Martin Landloards of North Texas", since its start and considered one of the clubs best knowledgeable landloards. It's nice to see one of my past Mentors article.
We miss Glenn at the club and also Tom Dellingers presents. Since they have moved on, that moved me up the totom pole. I now just try to pass it foreward.
This trick he speaks of was taught to me by him, many years ago and it works very well.
Glenn has been known for the laymans "do it yourself" projects that always works well and keeps your costs down.
I certainly would watch out for anything with his name tagged to it. If any of my mentees of the past, see this post, I am sure it will catch their attention.
Glenn old friend, its nice to see you are still at it.
Tim Hammonds
Boyd, Texas