I see the Toys for Weather book. Lots of ideas in that. As a kid in the late 50s early 60s my parents took some hard earned money and bought my brother and me a Reader's Digest book of projects. One of the things was to make your own instruments. Being fascinated by anemometers (moving things that were bright and shiny?) I made one out of tinker toys and learned how to carefully cut a ping pong ball in half. Calibration was tough. And then found a selsyn motor for a remote reading wind direction, and convinced the high school science teacher to let me blow a glass column for a barometer, and he gave me enough mercury to fill it, but it wasn't nearly as neat as the commercial one with the little vernier to do 1/100ths of an inch of the column.
the biggest project was using a milk carton (which we didn't have since we had our own milking herd on the farm) and a straw, with a long blonde hair for a hygrometer. The worst part was getting up the courage to ask the ONLY blonde girl in school with long enough hair to be usable for the project, for some of her hair. It actually worked quite well. I got a Taylor Max/Min thermometer (the U shaped tube with the magnet to reset the sliders) for a Christmas present, and somewhere along the line a Taylor hygrometer with the wet bulb always wet from a little glass tube along the bottom. I recorded data every day, and somewhere I still have the notebook, along with comments on rain and snow measurements.
then my older brother who by then was running the farm, built a shop and 'office' in which he put a nice Taylor wind direction and speed indicator, the old black outside pieces and the wooden box with the meter that bounced up and down with the gusts and the direction indicator which needed batteries to work. The sickness was really starting to grab hold by then.
Never did I think that the string of home-made and then when I could earn enough money to buy Heathkit stuff 1290, 4001, 5001 and then on the the breathtaking Vantage Pro (1 but it wasn't called one at that time) and since then all sorts of rag tag stuff. My wife will be sad and happy when I die, but isn't sure how to get rid of it all.
The old saying comes to mind (especially with the RM Young, Vaisala, Peet Bro, Campbell Scientific stuff) that my greatest fear is my wife will sell all of it for what I told her I paid for it.