by Brian Birk

Created on: June 30, 2008

So far I've only made one concrete birdbath without using a mold. I used a book to guide me. The book was called Making Concrete Garden Ornaments by Sherri Warner Hunter.

This project starts by piling some sand in the shape of an inverted bowl. You may need to dampen the sand to get it to hold the shape. The next step is to cover the sand pile with a sheet of plastic. I used a plastic that covered one of my suits when I picked it up from the dry cleaners. A plastic garbage bag would do the job as well.

The bag that I got from the dry cleaners had printing on it. The printing stayed on the concrete at the bottom of my birdbath. This wasn't a problem for me because I covered the bottom with ceramic tile after the concrete had cured for a while.

The next step is to mix up some concrete. I used a sixty pound bag of premixed sand mix concrete and mixed it by hand in a plastic tub. The concrete cannot be overly wet or it will be too runny for the project. Take a handful of concrete, form it into about a four or five inch diameter ball. Place the ball at the top of the sand pile on top of the plastic and pat it until you have what will looks like a half inch thick concrete pancake. Continue this process until the sand pile is covered with about a half inch of concrete.

The next step is to cover the concrete with hardware cloth. Keep the hard ware cloth about a half inch back from the edge of the bowl. Now repeat the first process covering the hardware cloth with about another half inch of concrete.

You have now formed the bowl of the birdbath. The bowl needs to have a peg on the bottom that will fit into the birdbath pedestal. To form the peg use a small paper cup. The cup needs to be tapered. It must be wider at the top than the bottom. It also has to fit inside the mailing tube that you will use for the pedestal base of the birdbath. Coat the inside of the cup with a thin film of vegetable oil or some other type of form release material. Fill the cup with concrete and place it upside down on top of the bowl. If you used the right amount of mold release you will be able to remove the cup after the concrete hardens.

I made the sand pile for my first birdbath too large. I like the birdbath, but by the time I had finished forming the bowl I had used more than one bag of premixed concrete. That means that the bowl of the birdbath weighed more than sixty pounds. It is a nice big birdbath, but the birds could get clean in a much smaller one. It isn't something that I feel

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