Fig. 51.
This windmill is made of tin; this is rather difficult to cut unless your hands are strong, but sometimes you can get very thin tin or brass from kindergarten stores, and it is quite easy to make it of this. Draw a circle about four inches across on the tin, round a jam pot or some such thing to give you a good even circle, and cut this out with the scissors. Now take a ruler and scratch lines across your circle, at right angles first, so that you have your circle divided into quarters; now divide these quarters again into three or four divisions, and draw a smaller circle on your tin about three quarters of an inch, or less, from the outer edge. Now make a clean cut with the scissors from the edge to the inner circle along each line. The tin will always bend in one way as you do this, and you must leave the little divisions bent very evenly. Make a hole in the center of your wheel and fix it strongly with a nail into a stick. You will find you can hardly hold your windmill if you stand with it facing a steady wind. This windmill is a grand one to go.
A WOODEN MILL
Materials Required:—
Two narrow strips of thin, soft wood, a stick for a holder, a screw, penknife, gimlet.
Figs. 52 and 53.
This is a wooden mill and it requires some care and skill to make it. It can easily be made with a penknife out of two pieces of thin, soft wood. First you must cut a neat socket across each piece of wood in the center, halfway through its thickness. The socket must be exactly the same width as your piece of wood, so that when you set each piece socket to socket they fit exactly. Now with an awl or pricker make a neat hole in the center of the two pieces when they are fitted together. Next you must shave away with your penknife the right-hand edge of each of the "arms" or "sails" of your windmill, graduating the shaving evenly from the left-hand edge, where it is thick, to a fine blade at the right-hand edge. Now fit together the two halves and put a nail through the hole and fasten it into the end of a stick. If the nail is apt to split the stick you can put a reel on to the end of it and fix the nail into the stick through the hole of the reel. It is a very good thing to put your nail through a large glass bead between the windmill and the stick.