How to Make a Homemade Weather Vane

Learn how to make a homemade weather vane at home with whatever you have lying around. These simple homemade weathervane plans can utilize spare parts around the house.

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by AdobeStock/sergei_fish13

Learn how to make a homemade weather vane at home with whatever you have lying around. These simple homemade weathervane plans can utilize spare parts around the house.

Making yard art is a great way to express your creativity, decorate your homestead and recycle old things you no longer use. Here’s how I used a bunch of spare parts to make a weather vane for my property.

I’d been impressed for years by weather vanes I’d seen around the country. So one day I decided to fire up my welder and build a weather vane from the junk I had lying around the ranch. As I have one of the finest collections of junk in the area — much to the dismay of my wife — I had and have plenty to choose from.

The first thing to build was a base that would fit the peak of the barn. The base was an old piece of 3-inch angle iron about 4 feet long with two pieces of 2-foot-long bed-rail angle iron welded perpendicular to the center. As our barn is oriented true north and south, I simply cut out letters for each wind direction from an old truck hood and welded them to the appropriate piece of angle iron, according to the way it would sit atop the barn. I welded two braces to the center of the base to stabilize and secure it to the roof. It is important that the base be level so that the center of gravity is perfectly centered.

  • Updated on Feb 5, 2023
  • Originally Published on Feb 1, 1992
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