How to make a birdy playstand

Here (at last) are the plans for a PVC birdy playstand that I built, for our Cockatoo and Pionus parrots. Please, feel free to copy this design! That's what it's up here for! If you want to credit me somehow (give your birdy a scritch and tell them where it came from?), I'd be happy. If you like the design, or have suggestions for improving it, and let me know, I'll be even happier!
	This is the top of the stand. Working from the bottom up is the 2" pipe, 3 feet long. Then comes a sleeve (for joining two 2" pipes), and on top of that is a 2" to 1" adapter. Then we start building the actual 'play area'! The play area is up of 1" T connectors stood on end, with a short (3 inch) chunk of 1" pipe between to join them, and a longer piece of 1" pipe sticking out for the perch - Ours are about a foot, on average. If you want, you can try mixing in a couple of 3/4" pipe for the perches, too - they make a T adapter that's 1" on the long side, and 3/4" on the short side. Knowing our bird's love love of eating anything they can, I put end-caps on all the pipes. You should, too.
This is the bottom, and the most tricky part! Making sure you get those feet parallel is very important, or you'll have a wobbly stand! I tried making this with endcaps instead of 'feet', and it just didn't stand up very well on carpet. I have an idea about a way to fix this, and I'll list it in the instructions. As you can see, it's basically a whole pile of 90^o 2" joints, with some short chunks of pipe to connect them.
Materials Note: I use " for the pipe thickness, and inches to indicate length. For the bottom: 4 - 2" 90^o fittings. 3 - 2" T fittings 6 - pieces 2" pipe, 8 inches long. 1 - piece 2" pipe, 3 feet long 1 - 2" connector 1 - 2" to 1" adapter For the top: Lengths of 1" pipe, length to suite (for vertical seperators) Lengths of 1" pipe, length to suite (for horizontal perches) 1" T connectors 1" to 3/4" T connectors (if desired) 1" and 3/4" end-caps
Instructions First, put together the feet - glue one 3-inch long piece of 2" pipe into each of the 90^o connectors. Next, glue one 3-inch piece of 2" pipe into each of the 'long' sides of one of the T connectors. This will form the joint to the vertical piece. This next step needs to be done pretty quickly, before the glue sets! Glue the 'feet' into the long sides of the remaining two T's, to form legs. Glue the center vertical section into the leg assemblies. I found it helpful to insert the 3-foot 2" pipe, to make sure the vertical really was vertical, at this point There, the hard part's all done! I left the long vertical piece un-glued from the bottom, so it's easy to break the whole thing down for transport, but you may want to glue it in. The rest of it's pretty self-evident from the pictures - just go crazy putting in different sizes and lengths of pipe, as you think your bird will enjoy! Don't forget to finish the top off with a bit of 1" pipe and an end-cap, or at least a bit of wooden dowel, or they'll get up there and chew! You might try making a short horizontal perch, then adding a T to that, with two more short perches, for a nice long T-shaped one. Try wrapping the perches in Sisal rope - gives it a better grip, and the birds love to pick at it. You might also try using wooden dowels for the perches, rather than PVC. I had a hard time getting it to fit, but nothing some time with the saw and a hammer couldn't fix. As a note for the curious, all illustrations for this project were done in Animation:Master, as my first 'real' project using it. I'll release the source project file and models after I clean them up a bit - it was a really rough draft.

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