Larger flyers can be made in a similar manner; and to make a very large one, plant a post in the ground, having its upper end reduced to form a shoulder, as explained for the small stick. Get a round piece of wood several inches in diameter, and arrange four very stout steel-wire nails in the top of it. Make a tin or iron flyer twelve or fifteen inches in diameter, and use a piece of small clothes-line or cotton line to spin it with.
To operate it, wind the spool with the rope, and have some one under it to keep it from slipping. When you are ready to pull the rope, place the flyer on the pins, and as the spool is released give the rope a quick, strong pull, and the flyer will rise.
All real boys welcome the approach of the winter season with its glorious opportunities for sport on the snow and ice. Toboggans, double-runners, skees, and snow-shoes—the very words make the blood tingle in one’s veins, and happy is the boy whose home is in the Northern climes where there is real winter for at least four months out of the year.
Nowadays it is possible to purchase almost everything for winter sports, but the boy who is handy with tools and of an inventive turn of mind will take more pleasure in constructing his own things than in buying them out of a shop.
Very few boys would care to make their own skates, as the modern steel-clamp skates are superior in lightness and durability to anything he could construct; but the various varieties of sleds, coasters, and snow-shoes are quite within the measure of his abilities, and their making will fill most pleasurably the leisure hours after school and on Saturdays.
All the cold-weather countries have their distinctive and peculiar forms of winter amusements. Tobogganing and snow-shoeing are particularly popular in Canada; skeeing is the national sport of Norway. But it is the American boy who has reduced coasting to an exact science, and the Yankee bob-sleds and “jumper-coasters” are now pre-eminent wherever the snow flies. To take the best wherever we find it is the sportsman’s motto.
There is no more enjoyable winter sport than tobogganing, and in many parts of America, notably Montreal, large and expensively constructed artificial slides are in constant use throughout the winter season.