Bat House Forum

[Dave Miller]

I wanted to start a thread to combine our collective experience and wisdom on successful and unsuccessful methods for roughening solid wood roosting surfaces.

Please reply with the following information for each roughening experience:

- Was it successful?  i.e. did the bats use it (or if no occupancy, do you think they could), and did you retain all your fingers, your sanity, and most of your blood?

- What type of wood - species and approximate thickness

- Describe the tools and the method

- Pros and cons, lessons learned

[Dave Miller]

I will start.

Method 1: Saw kerfs

Successful: yes

Wood: 1/2" cedar fencing

Method: Repeated passes of the raw material (before cutting to length) under radial arm saw, to create 1/8" deep kerfs about 3/8" apart.

Pros: Works great on any kind of wood.

Cons: Takes some time and creates a lot of sawdust.  But I think the time invested is in the neighborhood of manual scratching.

 

Method 2: Wallpaper scoring tool

 



(in the photo above, I used both Method 1 & Method 2)

Successful: yes

Wood: 3/8" pine wainscoting, 1/2" cedar fencing

Method: Run the tool over the wood surfaces.  Takes a little elbow grease, but not bad.  The teeth leave small puncture marks in the wood.

Pros: Relatively easy, but you will work up a sweat.

Cons: Probably would not work on hard wood.  The outer edge of the tool makes some noise when you are pushing down hard. 

 

Method 3:  Round hole saw on electric drill

Successful - no (sanity not retained)

Method - Put hole saw on drill, move it over wood surface while drill is on.

Pros: None

Cons: The hole saw just jumps all over the place, without doing much scratching to the wood.   Also it felt dangerous as this spinning saw leaps off the wood toward your body.  Positioning the saw at a bit of an angle worked a little better, but not much.

[IowaNate]

 My preferred method now: Shallow scratches with screws

 Successful: yes

 Wood: 3/4" pine

 Pros: very easy to make and fast, very reliable on most types of wood (even plywood)

 Cons: none

 Here's the tool (1/2" pine with three screws protruding about 1/4")



  Here's a piece of 3/4" pine with 48 passes with the tool (took less than 45 seconds)



 

[Terry Lobdell]

Method: Saw kerfs about every 3/8" using a jig for a circular saw.

Material: rough sawn red pine one inch boards

Pros: fairly quick, inexpensive,  red pine does not have sharp splinters. minimal equipment needed (just a circular saw & lumber to make the jig), easily adjustable to different baffle sizes.

cons: messy......lots of sawdust, danger of kickback from circular saw. 

Results: At this time do not have a lot of boxes mounted with these baffles. I do have one that has about 10 little browns that was mounted in late in May 2008. All other saw kerfed baffle houses kerfed on a table saw have done very well. The combination of the saw kerfs and rough wood should be very effective. I am going to try some with just the rough sawn surface next year. I have had encouraging results from baffles of weathered 5/8" cdx plywood.(frequent big brown bachelor use) Already roughened weathered wood surfaces make a real quick easy baffle!

Here is the link to my post of the pictures:

http://www.batnic.org/forum/forum5/443.html