Maize is the third most important cereal crop in India and is most susceptible to weed management practices. Weeding is one of the costliest and laborious operations in crop cultivation. Most of the existing weeders are of horizontal type and very less work done on vertical axis rotary weeders and energy aspects of the weeding units. A study was under taken to develop non-powered self-propelling vertical axis rotary weeder to eliminate the external powering unit, which provides the energy to cut the weeds and soil. The developed weeder was tested in maize crop at 2 and 4 cm of operational depth and 15 and 30 DAS of crop growth stages. The developed weeder performed very well at all the crop growth stages and obtained a weeding efficiency of 65 to 70% with 1.98 to 5.88% of plant damage. The highest cob yield of 12.9 t/ha was recorded weeding at 15 DAS followed by 30 DAS. However a care must be taken and a safety zone i.e. a gap of 7–10 cm between machine edges to the tip of plant leaves should be maintained to avoid the plant damage. At operational depth of 2 cm the draft force required to pull the weeding unit was 6.3 kgf and obtained field capacity was 0.08 ha/h, which was higher when weeder was operated at 4 cm of operational depth.