Farmers Weekly’s Inventions Competition wouldn’t be the same without a batch of wacky entries – some of which save time or money and others built just for fun. This year’s crop includes a hot tub made from a skip, a horsebox-cum-bar and a screw-tank ATV.

Colin Furze’s Screw Tank

Unsatisfied with conventional modes of off-road transport, off-the-wall inventor Colin Furze came up with the Screw Tank.

This bizarre contraption propels itself around the countryside, both over land and water, thanks to two spinning cylindrical tanks mounted on either side of the machine. Together, these have sufficient buoyancy to keep the machine and operator afloat and a set of auger flights welded around the outside provide the propulsion.

© Colin Furze

Power comes from a Honda V-Twin engine connected to a direct-drive hydraulic pump, and each tank has its own hydraulic motor and spool valve. These allow the screw tank to be driven a bit like a skidsteer, in both forward and reverse.

It is capable of travelling on most soft terrain, but as it can’t move on hard surfaces and the screw blades obliterate turf, it’s likely to remain a novelty. It took about three weeks to put together and the first test drive was published on Mr Furse’s YouTube channel, where it tallied nearly three million views in five days.

See also: Workshop heaters: The options and the rules

David Hartley’s hot tub pizza oven

Although not your typical agricultural invention, David Hartley says his combination of hot tub and pizza oven offers a pretty decent way to unwind after a long day.

The original idea was to take it to shows but, since lockdown, it has become a de-stress tool that has had plenty of use. The simple design is based on a skip that was cleaned, painted and decked out with wooden slats that form benches. Water is heated to about 40C by the pizza oven, which is accessed externally at one sides.

Caging around the inside of the tub keeps people away from the heat source that, when up to temperature, delivers piping hot pizzas to the bathers.

© David Hartley

Frazer Brown’s bar

Fenland farmer Frazer Brown teamed up with neighbours William and Henry Lankfer to turn a delapidated horse box into a well-appointed bar.

Dubbed the Stallion, it received extensive repairs to the frame and a new floor, before a side serving hatch was installed. The interior was fitted out with fridges, optics, charred timber shelving and a penny top bar, comprising 4,000 coins embedded in clear resin.

© Frazer Brown

Geoff Beck’s self-propelled grass collector

An all-in-one garden mowing rig allows Geoff Beck to cut and collect leaves, grass cuttings and moss from scarified lawns in a single pass.

To do so, he removes the mulching plates from his front-deck Stiga mower to swath the material. Behind that, he tows a petrol-powered Billy Goat leaf collector that he mounted on lawn tyres. This shreds the material and blows it through a length of ducting to the top of a high-sided trailer at the back.

© Geoff Beck

Tim Smith’s BBQ

A home-built chimnea fashioned from a scrap water pressure vessel, a length of old grain tubing and some grill rails has proved a distraction from the tedium of lockdown for Tim Smith.

© Tim Smith