Gardens and vegetable gardens are a good help both in terms of food and in terms of relaxation for the soul. But everything that is grown on personal plots, there are many dangers - beetles, larvae, birds, moles. And if they help fight plant diseases or insect pests chemicals, then it is best to scare away birds and moles from the site, rather than destroy them. This will be helped by a primitive design - a windmill made of plastic bottle, made with your own hands from scrap materials.
Waste material goes to work
Many, many different useful crafts can be made from so-called waste material. Here are some useful things for garden plot and vegetable gardens are also easy to obtain with imagination and skillful hands to, it would seem, unnecessary things. A lot of various options repellers for birds and moles can be seen in various sources, some of them are quite complex, and some are primitive. It’s worth starting to create with the simplest designs. Plastic bottles, scraps polyethylene pipes, broken handle from a house mop, used welding electrode, gift ribbons from already unwrapped gifts, toy bells or cans from drinks - you can put everything into action.
Design Basics
It is no coincidence that a device for scaring away birds or moles from a site has a very specific name “windmill”. The main force that makes the structure perform its function is the wind. The wind is blowing - the windmill is working. In order for such a repeller to work, it needs to catch air currents, which means it needs blades. If you set a goal, then making a windmill from plastic bottles with your own hands is quite simple. The most important part - the blades - is cut out of plastic. Moreover, the blades from the bottle will not need to be attached, because they are cut out in place and simply bent. The remaining design elements will depend on the purpose of the windmill. Tools you will need for work:
- stationery knife;
- scissors;
- universal glue;
- hard wire;
- beads with a hole for wire;
- self-adhesive film or colored electrical tape.
What are birds afraid of?
Birds provide many benefits by eliminating pests. But when the harvest ripens, they are not averse to eating tasty, sweet fruits, pecking at cherries and spoiling apples, pears and plums. Making a windmill from a plastic bottle with your own hands is quite simple, if you remember that birds are afraid of moving objects. That is why turntables and scarecrows with fluttering sleeves have always helped gardeners and gardeners preserve their harvest.
How to scare away birds
A windmill made from a plastic bottle must be movable to scare away birds. The simplest and a budget option- spinner. It does not require additional costly motors and batteries, because it runs on air movement. But it needs blades to catch the wind. You can make several options for such garden helpers. For example, like this.
Cut an ordinary plastic bottle in the center into four sections that can be bent without separating the parts from the whole.
Then, bending the blades so that they catch the wind, pieces of foil are glued onto them. You can use self-adhesive mirror film. It is also necessary to cut a hole in the bottom that is suitable in diameter. The finished bottle-windmill is put on the remainder plastic pipe or a mop handle. The bottle should rotate freely when the wind blows, but not dangle too much, otherwise rotation will not work. The remainder of the pipe should be long enough for the birds to see the pinwheel.
You can make a windmill from a plastic bottle with your own hands in this version - cut long blades from the base of the bottle, bend them at an angle of 45 0. The turntable diagram is shown below.
Such a windmill is mounted on a rigid base at right angles to the ground. You can secure it in any way - using a nut, if the base is threaded, using a large smooth bead, making a loop on the wire with pliers. There are many options; the master decides which one is more convenient to use. The most important thing is that the turntable rotates freely. Some craftsmen attach several of these devices to one base, decorating them with colored film or painting them acrylic paints. The result is not only functionally useful, but also beautiful thing for a personal plot.
What are moles afraid of?
A windmill made from a plastic bottle to repel moles is a very useful thing, because moles are also pests. They eat earthworms that loosen the soil and spoil the roots and tubers of plants. Sometimes a lot of such underground inhabitants appear on the site. You should get rid of uninvited guests - moles. Moles are practically blind; you can’t scare them with some kind of flicker. But moles have good hearing. It is on this feature that the principle of scaring these animals away from the garden is based. Making a windmill from a plastic bottle with your own hands means saving the harvest, leaving underground inhabitants alive, and not flooding your garden with chemical poison.
How to scare away moles
Moles are afraid of noise, and if something is placed on the site that will make noise underground, then the moles will leave it, going in search of more quiet place a habitat. A windmill made from a plastic bottle to repel moles, the diagram of which is proposed below, works just for this outcome. In order for sound to travel well in the ground, it must be amplified using resonance. This can be achieved using a hollow pipe dug into the ground. It will amplify the sound and transmit it across the earth.
The base of the windmill can be taken from the design proposed above - blades are cut out on the body of the bottle, and the windmill itself is placed on metal base eg used electrode. Sound will be transmitted better through metal than through plastic. Then the electrode, a metal rod, must be placed in the buried pipe so that the sound from the rotation of the windmill is amplified. A do-it-yourself windmill made from a plastic bottle to preserve the harvest is a very simple design.
Pinwheel beauty
Many of those who maintain a garden or vegetable garden try to decorate the area using available materials, the same plastic bottles, for example. What craftsmen can come up with from this waste material. For example, by placing a windmill made of plastic bottles above a flowerbed, you can make it much more interesting. The classic turntable is made of 4 blades according to this scheme.
The blades can be cut out from colorful bottles, then assembled in the center using a bolt and nut or a stapler. You can decorate transparent plastic self-adhesive film or paint with acrylic. You can make more than 4 blades. In any case, such a classic windmill made from a plastic bottle, made by yourself, will be an interesting addition to the flower garden.
There are very simple designs of pendant windmills. From a small plastic bottle you can make interesting decoration- cut the bottle lengthwise in the middle into thin, 1 centimeter wide, strips. Then connect the upper and lower parts to form a “flashlight”: press the blades in the middle, folding them in half, but at the edges they should be bent at an angle of 45 0. Make a hole in the cork using a hot nail and insert a looped paper clip into it. You can hang a bell or shiny beads on it. The windmill pendant is ready and can be placed on a tree branch.
It’s not difficult to make a windmill from a plastic bottle with your own hands, but it will provide a lot of benefits and beauty.
This project is very simple wind turbine With vertical axis rotations from scrap parts. A DIY wind generator is very easy to assemble and requires almost no tools. Drilling a few holes is much easier.
And, most importantly, this way you will give a second life to several empty plastic bottles that are lying around a lot.
Step 1: Basic Idea
From Wikipedia: a fuel-free vertical axis generator is a type of wind turbine with a main rotor drive shaft mounted in a crosswind direction (not necessarily vertical), with the main components mounted at the base of the turbine.
In such a turbine, the blades rotate around a central vertical shaft. The blades are often cup-shaped, with the recesses of the blades being hit by the wind in turn, causing the blades to spin and rotate the central shaft.
In our wind turbine, the blades are made from three empty plastic soda bottles, cut in half and mounted on a cheap plastic tray. The tray is fixed on a long bolt (axis), on which the skateboard bearings are secured with nuts, for easy rotation. The bolt is fixed to the base.
The video shows how our windmill made from plastic bottles works.
The photo shows basic design turbine axis. From right to left (top): plastic spacers (they were needed because the bolt shaft under the head is smooth, approximately 5 mm without thread). Then a plastic tray (in the photo it was replaced by a piece wooden plank), fixed with a nut between two middle washers. Below, two bearings are fixed on the outer sides with nuts, another nut separates them, this increases the mounting height and increases stability.
Step 2: Parts Needed
The photo shows all the components of the turbine:
- Plastic tray, diameter 30-35 cm
- 8mm bolt, 125mm long
- 4 8mm nuts (or more if you want to secure them)
- 2 medium washers with 8mm hole
- 2 skateboard bearings with an internal hole of 8 mm (I used bearings with an external diameter of 22 mm and a height of about 7 mm)
Of course, the turbine will need to be mounted on some kind of foundation; then I will show you what kind of foundation I made.
Step 3: Making the Blades
Any three two-liter plastic lemonade bottles will do. Cut them in half as shown in the first picture. I was cutting band saw, it was loud, dirty and, in places, dangerous, but fast. This can be done with scissors, a sharp utility knife or a handsaw.
Bottle caps come in handy to secure bottles to the tray. You need to make holes in them to drain rainwater (second picture).
Step 4: Drill holes in the tray
It is better to take a tray from flexible plastic that will not crack during drilling or bending.
You need to drill three holes equidistant from each other, near the edge of the tray, of such a size that the threads on the neck of the bottle can go through. This means that the holes are located at an angle of 120° relative to each other. The first photo shows measuring 120° angles, the second shows marking the holes with an awl.
The diameter of the holes should be between 26 and 29 mm. Optimal size– 26 mm, but if it’s larger, that’s fine too. I drilled the holes with a 29mm ring bit. On last photo drilling of holes is shown. I used the remaining plastic discs as spacers for the turbine axle.
In the center of the tray you need to make an 8mm hole for the axle (bolt).
Step 5: Assembly
Now we just need to put all the parts together.
First, we put a washer on the bolt and a tray with the bottom side facing the head (first photo), the tray will be positioned bottom up so that it does not accumulate rainwater. On the other side, we fix the tray with another washer and nut.
Then we put bearings and nuts on the axle, in the same order as in the second photo. The distance between the tray and the bearings depends on the height of the side of the tray. When the turbine rotates, it should not touch the base on which it is installed.
Now we fix the bottles on the tray. They just need to be screwed on, as shown in the third and fourth photos. The open “face” of the bottles should be turned perpendicular to the edge of the tray. all three bottles should be oriented equally relative to the center and edges of the tray (fifth photo). The direction in which the bottles will be turned will determine whether they will spin clockwise or counterclockwise. The turbine in the fifth photo will spin clockwise.
If the holes in the tray are larger than 26mm, you can remove the white retaining ring on the neck and put it back in place, but upside down. The diameter of the base of the ring is wider than the diameter of the top, this will give a tighter fit in the hole.
Step 6: Base
The main part of the turbine is assembled, all that remains is to make a base for its mounting.
The type of base is determined by the location where you want to install the turbine. Maybe you want to mount it on a fence or a pole, or just in an open space.
I decided to install my turbine on a fence support, so I will show you what kind of base you need to make to mount it on this support. You can easily adapt it to suit your needs.
As you can see in the first photo, the T-shaped base is made from 18mm board. The base leg is fixed to the support cable ties, stretched through four holes drilled in the board. The bearings on the turbine axis are tightly seated in a 22mm hole drilled in the base crossbar (second photo).
The last photo shows the “clamp” for the bearings. Feather drill I drilled a 22mm hole. I then made a 2mm wide slot from the edge of the crossbar, running exactly through the center of the 22mm hole and extending 80mm into the board. This slot helps you to insert the bearings into the hole without force and then tighten the edges of the hole with a screw, as shown in the last photo, so that the bearings are clamped. A bolt and nut seems like a more secure fastener to me than a screw, and I'll replace it later.
Now the turbine is completely assembled, but I still have an option for improving it, you might be interested.
Step 7: Build Resilience
Although soda bottles themselves are quite resistant to wind pressure, there is one option to increase their resistance. This can be done by securing the centers of the bottoms to a common frame.
I assembled this frame from what I had: a piece of brush handle, a few bamboo skewers and small clamps.
I drilled three 4mm holes in a piece of cutting at equal distances from each other (120° between them), inserted bamboo skewers into them and filled them with glue (second photo). Then I drilled 3mm holes in the bottoms of the bottles for the clamps, and secured the skewers to the bottoms using clamps and glue (photos three and four). Naturally, the bamboo skewers were cut to the required length.
Now wind turbine ready to use! If you want to harness the power of the wind, you can attach the device to the threads on the axle (note: the turbine has only experienced moderate winds so far, and I don't know what gusts it can withstand).
Why do you even need a windmill on your site? Naturally, this is not a mechanical wind generator, which allows you to convert wind energy into mechanical energy.
Our goal is to create a beautiful “accessory” for decorating a summer cottage, the main task of which is to transform wind energy into “spiritual” energy.
If you want to make a pool out of a tire summer cottage, step by step instructions for production see .
Materials
In material terms, the process of creating a windmill is not very expensive.
To assemble a windmill we need:
- support - wire;
- 2 plastic bottles with a flat bottom;
- 4 caps;
- 3 large beads;
- available tools: stationery or painting knife, hammer, awl, wire, glue, paint;
- perseverance and attention;
Manufacturing instructions
The assembly process is not difficult at all. So let's get started.
Cut the bottle into two parts with a knife
Depending on the size of the windmill you want to build, the displacement of the bottles that will be needed during the manufacturing process will depend. Our mill will small sizes, for this we take two plastic bottles with a flat bottom, 2 liters each.
We take a stationery or painting knife and cut the bottles. The closer to the neck you cut, the larger the blades of your future mill will be. But don’t get carried away, because if you cut too close (almost close), the blades will turn out useless.
So, you should be left with parts of the flat bottom bottles. We don't need other parts.
The remaining parts should be cylindrical. We begin to cut strips in a circle with scissors, but do not cut to the base. When choosing the width of the strip, you need to decide how many blades you want the windmill to have.
We do the same with the two remaining parts of the bottles.
After we cut them, we bend each strip at the base at an angle of 45 degrees. The end result should be something like the sun with rays.
It is best to paint the blades from a spray can, so you can make them multi-colored
Afterwards we proceed to finishing works. The wing blanks and caps can be painted either with a spray can or with paint; in any case, it will take time for everything to dry before continuing work.
Glue the cap to the middle of the wings on each side.
We put the bead on the wire
And now the final part of the work. For this we need four corks, two cap blanks and three beads.
The sequence of actions is as follows: we insert a wire through the bead (be sure to check whether the wire passes freely), then bend the tip of the wire so that the bead cannot fly off.
With the onset of spring, everyone begins to restore order and beauty in the yard, at the dacha. I want to do something interesting with my own hands. Alternatively, it could be a weather vane, but not made of wood, as in old times, but from plastic bottles.
Weathervane airplane-starship.
Materials and tools:
Plastic bottles 1.5 l. 4 things. and 0.5l. 2 pcs.
Bulgarian.
Thermal glue with a gun.
Scissors, knife, screwdriver, screws 3 pcs.
Step 1. Making propellers.
For the owner of a mechanism for opening bottles into a shrink cord, this will be an additional idea for recycling accumulated bottle bottoms. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, we simply take three 1.5-2.5 liter bottles and cut off the bottoms of them as in the photo.
If you immediately find bottles with the original color, then you will not need further painting with nitro paint.
On the resulting bottoms there is a marking for cutting.
We cut out the propellers along these lines. You can cut with a knife or scissors, but it’s easiest with a grinder, because... The central thickening is very difficult to cut through.
Before cutting, you can plan in which direction the future propeller will spin and change the design in advance. After cutting with a grinder, there will be very large edges of baked chips that need to be cut off with a knife and scissors.
You get these turntables (propellers).
Now we make a hole in the center of each spinner for a self-tapping screw on which it will rotate. To do this, it is convenient to use a heated awl or you can immediately drill with a drill.
The turntables are ready.
Step 2. Airplane body.
Now we will make an airplane body from two small and one large bottles.
And from a piece of polycarbonate the wing is 400x40 mm.
On the body big bottle We mark two holes for drawing the wing through and cut through it.
We try on how the wing goes, if necessary we trim off the excess.
On small bottles we make a slot only on one side.
We assemble the plane and use glue from a gun to seal everything hermetically.
The structure should be rigid.
We find the balance point and drill a hole for the pin on which the weather vane will turn in the wind. We drill first with a thin drill and then with a thick drill.
For the axis we use an old helium pen or another.
We insert it all the way and secure it firmly with thermal glue.
Punch holes in the center of the lids with an awl for screwing in self-tapping screws.
Good screws of this type.
We screw the turntables onto the lids, do not tighten them, check that they rotate easily from a light blow.
From the flat part of the bottle we cut out two rectangles 50x120 mm, for the tail of the plane, it will turn the plane towards the wind. We fold the rectangles in half and glue both tails, top and bottom, to the rear of the fuselage.
The invention of the weather vane has its roots in the distant past. Windmills were made of metal in the shape of animals or birds. In addition to indicating the direction of the wind, the weather vane was considered to protect the city from enemies. Now the product is used more as decorative decoration, making it with your own hands from scrap materials. At their dachas, many people make a weather vane from a plastic bottle not just for fun. Its sound and rotation scares birds away from the crop.
General structure of the weather vane
Different weather vanes differ in shape and material, but their general design remains unchanged over the years.
The windmill consists of the following parts:
- The housing holds the rotating axis. For metal structure a pipe with two bearings is used. The body of a product made from a plastic bottle can be an ordinary wooden block.
- The protective cap is located on the axis. It is shaped like a cone and serves as an umbrella for the body, covering it from the rain. In addition, the cap serves as a limiter for the axle, holding it at a certain height.
- The axis connects the weather vane to the hull. It rotates on it top part from exposure to wind. Make your own axle from a flat steel rod. Even a nail will do for a PET bottle.
- The wind rose is a cross made of stripes or rods with fixed letters indicating the cardinal directions. By using the wind vane and arrows, the wind roses recognize the direction of the wind.
- The rotating part is called a weather vane. It is she who indicates the direction of the wind according to the wind rose. For beauty, the weather vane is given the shape of a bird or animal. Most simple design make your own from PET bottles. The indicator of the weather vane is an arrow, and a counterweight is necessary for centering on the axis.
Using the same principle, a windmill is made from plastic container. If there is no need to determine the wind direction, the wind rose can be excluded from the design. And the protective cap does not play a significant role due to the lack of bearings.
Advice! By making a weather vane from a plastic bottle to determine the direction of the wind, the design can be improved with a device for measuring the strength of gusts. The device consists of a metal plate suspended by a rope from a weather vane. A scale is installed nearby. When the plate is deflected, the wind force is determined on the measuring scale.
Making your own windmill from PET bottles
Making a windmill with your own hands from a PET bottle will not take much time. The most difficult part here will be the process of cutting out the propeller. For beauty, it can be made from a container of a different color. For example, the body will be transparent and the propeller will be brown.
But first things first:
Your handmade windmill is ready. All that remains is to attach it to the mast and install it as high as possible.
This video shows a musical weather vane:
What functions does a bottle product perform?
Weathervanes are most in demand by residents of seaside villages. For example, fishermen know the direction of the wind and determine whether there will be a storm.
A self-made weather vane made from a PET bottle and installed in the yard can perform the following functions:
- If you use your imagination, the weather vane can become an advertisement for the owner’s activities. It is made according to occupation. For example, a windmill made in the shape of a boot will help a shoemaker make a sign.
Previously, people considered a weather vane to be an amulet that protected the house from evil spirits with rotating elements. If someone still believes in this, then making a talisman from a bottle will not be special labor.
This video shows a spinner made of PET bottles:
Installing a windmill made from a PET bottle at the dacha will not take much time, but it will bring maximum joy to the children, plus it will add decoration to the yard.
Sergey Novozhilov - expert on roofing materials with 9 years experience practical work in the field of engineering solutions in construction.