The Shed magazine June/July 2026 issue 127 on sale now
Murray Belfield is a phenomenon
He has built a few planes over the years, but none gave Murray the performance and thrills he really wanted until he built his scaled-down German paratrooper’s plane, a Storch. Building this rarest of planes consumed nine years of this 86-year-old’s life. And the result? He couldn’t be happier.
For most of us, stalking a deer across the back country, shooting it cleanly and lugging it home to furnish the table would be accomplishment enough for any evening’s bragging rights.
But when that involves landing an aeroplane you built in your shed onto a handkerchief-sized patch of hilltop scrub, finding and shooting the quarry, manoeuvring the carcase into the spare seat and getting off the ground again, and doing all that at the age of 86, bragging just vanishes in the slipstream. Murray Belfield is, anyway, far too practical and busy a guy to waste his evenings boasting to his mates, but he is, nevertheless, a phenomenon. His plane, the second he has built by hand, is another. Highly specialised for short take-offs and landings (STOL), it is a three-quarters-scale replica of a WWII flying legend, the Fieseler Storch.
The replica, designed by famed aircraft engineer Ladislao Pazmany, is so challenging to build that, to Murray’s knowledge, only one other Pazmany model has been completed to the flying stage, by an enthusiast in Alaska. As if that wasn’t a hard enough ask, Murray has incorporated many improvements of his own based on his many years of bush flying experience (and his dislike of fibreglass).
How to pimp your shed
The urge to decorate is universal, whether it be tattoos, floral designs on early Stanley rebate planes, or flames on hot-rod hoods, and sheds are no exception.
Big or small, simple or ultra-flash, sheds have one consistent feature – they all have decorations. These can be nostalgic, humorous, or more or less misogynistic (and often all three).
The mamo-centric female portraits which, in the past, were so common in garages and workshops are now rarely seen, perhaps because businesses which used to distribute complimentary “girlie” calendars can’t now risk the potential bad publicity. Or shed owners are embarrassed at the thought of their wives, children, or grandchildren seeing them. Or perhaps we have all become a little more mature.
Feminist relatives tell me that the purpose of pin-ups wasn’t decorative, but to make women visitors so uncomfortable that they wouldn’t linger, creating a woman-free zone. Sort of like farmers draping the skins of killed predators on fences to discourage their kin.
All hands to the tanks
The call goes out. The volunteers pour into the military camp at Waiouru in the centre of the North Island. The only war, though, is going to be on rust, handbrake cables,
driveshafts, seized brake systems, the battered cylinders of tank engines and the ongoing tussle to turn out new truck engine parts.
Here is a group of willing sheddies who meet about once every six weeks under the keen oversight of George Pycraft. Their job: to continue repairing the heritage vehicles of the Army Museum at Waiouru.
Their “shed” is a group of four storage sheds housing 85 vehicles in various states of repair. They are as diverse as tanks, the 24-tonne M41 Walker Bulldog, the Centurion, and Valentine tanks (the latter still in World War II Pacific theatre camouflage), a 1941 Canadian Pattern Chevrolet gun tractor, an MB Jeep still wearing its 1942 Long Range Desert Group livery, an M113A1 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) painted in UN colours and of the type used in Bosnia, a 1943 Ford F30 truck, a 39-inch searchlight and an M816 recovery wrecker truck made by American Motor Corporation in 1969.
Pycraft, the museum’s Assistant Curator – Technology, says with the help and dedication of the museum’s volunteers they are slowly coming closer to having a complete running collection of heritage vehicles.
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