Does anyone have plans or instrustions for wooden whirligigs that was wind driven?
Whirligigs come in two general types. One is simply a glorified windmill or pinwheel design, where one or more parts of the whirligig spin around like propellers and that is the only animation – such as the wings on a “flying” duck, or the propeller on a toy airplane. The other type is a little more complex mechanically. These are basically wind-powered automata, (mechanical toys or figures), which make use of the turning propellers to animate the whirligigs. You can easily see how these work by simply studying the drawings on this page – no need to order the plans: http://www.jerpat.com/whirligs.html In general even these more complicated whirligigs are very simple mechanically. If you can’t get a book about whirligigs, automata, or mechanical wooden toys from your local library, you may be able to get them through inter-library loan. Here is a list of titles currently available from Amazon.com:
