Eaves nest box design tool

We have built quite a few Swift nest boxes to fit under broad eaves. Some eaves are horizontal and some slope at an angle. The angle and width of the eaves varies. Every time I generate a new drawing, so I decided to see if one could produce a generalised template. This is not for those allergic to spreadsheets or for technical Luddites, but it may have some mileage for those who can overcome these psychological barriers.

Contributed by Dick

The great thing about boxes under eaves is that they are largely sheltered from the weather. So plywood is a suitable material and it is ideally suited to those with a DIY bent. The generic design proposed here looks neat under eaves. The carpentry is not that challenging. It doesn't cover all eaves situations, but it is ideal for broad flat horizontal or gently sloping eaves. (slope less than 30° say).

Ideally one needs a parametric CAD system for these sorts of things, but they are expensive, so, we have encapsulated the design in a spreadsheet which calculates all of the necessary dimensions from a few parameters provided by the user.

You can see the spreadsheet here then download for use in Excel.

Designs resulting from 3 parameter settings

Dimensioned design drawing