How to DIY a toy weed trimmer using recycled materials

Reuse Reduce and Recycle

My twins broke their tent during some over-enthusiastic play. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the poplar tent poles and plastic connectors. Inspiration struck this week on how to give these items new life and keep them out of the landfill. My boys adore all things to do with lawn trimming and have pretended some string and sticks were their weed trimmers for months. I knew I could throw together a quick and easy wooden weedwacker for them to use in the yard.

I did buy the wooden disks from Michaels, the other materials I used I scrounged from my tool box.

What I used

3 foot long wooden dowel

wooden disk

cupboard knob

screws and bolts

Saw, Screw Driver, and Drill bits

How to build a weed trimmer

I am a big fan of extensive planning for DIY projects, but this one is simple and quick, so do not stress the details. Just do it.

Using my dewalt circular saw I cut an angle at the broken part of the dowel. It’s somewhere around a 30 degree angle, but I eyeballed it.

Wooden handle secured with a screw. I squared off the piece of handle and then shaved a spot flat on the end of the dowel with a utility knife.

The only part I bought new were these Wooden Round Plaque, 4-Inch plaques from Amazon. I drilled a hole down through the handle and into the plaque to secure the dowel to the disk.

Drilled through the dowel and plaque at one time to insure proper placement.

When you are working with wooden materials it’s essential pre-drill to keep them from cracking.

The machine screws I had were a little long so I used some extra nuts to space it up. The single point of attachment eventually will fail. So I drilled a hole through the dowel closer to the end and used a short screw to anchor it further.

Voila, a weedwacker head – or a metal detector, it could be either, I guess.

Weed Trimmers have side handles, so I found some unused cupboard knobs, predrilled the hole and tightened it all up. The fun part, is that one of my twins is a lefty (we think) so I switched sides for his handle.

Finally, a use for those two pesky knobs hiding in my junk drawer years.

So here it is – I decided not to do any sort of attachment for the weed trimmer string in the interest of expediency. But you could easily add something with a bolt and a washer.

Mission accomplished

If these two are any judge, this was a complete success I pulled off in under an hour.

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