I made the weathervane itself out of some orange plastic. A griffin I designed myself and cut from an old, cracked, square plastic garden bin. My mother had kept it in the shed - Czech genes. In Czecho, people keep things and find a use for them, barter them, sell them or find a use for things that other people have thrown out. To make a waist-level garden grill.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but there is a flip side to everything.
Back to the past. In 1992, I went into a Bosch agent in Prague to buy an electric lawnmower. They had one left, the most expensive, on the wall, and would put it in the original packaging, it was under warranty etc. The trouble was, it had no extension lead, only the little whiptail it came with. It seems Czechs in those days objected to having to spend money on extension leads.