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Shed Issue 90 late arriving in Australia

An update for all our Australian readers of The Shed.
Shipping schedules have been seriously disrupted with the COVID 19 Lockdown here in New Zealand therefore copies of Issue #90 won't arrive in Sydney until mid-June.
Expect to see copies in the shops and in subscribers' letterboxes about a week after 14 June. Our apologies for this lateness, let's hope this is a one-off disruption.

An update for all our Australian readers of The Shed.
Shipping schedules have been seriously disrupted with the COVID 19 Lockdown here in New Zealand therefore copies of Issue #90 won’t arrive in Sydney until mid-June.
Expect to see copies in the shops and in subscribers’ letterboxes about a week after 14 June. Our apologies for this lateness, let’s hope this is a one-off disruption.



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Creative duet

12 August 2026

For Dave Pauling, making guitars is the natural fusion of two passions – music and wood.
Dave, who has been playing the guitar since he was 13, also knew the pleasure of pottering in sheds from a young age. His father is a “sheddie” from way back who, among other things, still spends many hours restoring vintage vehicles.
“I grew up helping him with his Model Ts, making bows and arrows, or working on a model railway we had in the loft,” he says.
While Dave himself has spent a fair few hours restoring a 1965 Mustang imported from San Francisco, he prefers working with wood. There’s something about the malleability and smell of wood, as well as its provenance, he says. Wood, especially the recycled timber he uses to construct his guitars, has had a previous life. “Every guitar I make comes with a pre-history.”

Rust, me and CRC Evapo-Rust

11 August 2026

My tools and machinery were housed in an unlined shed for a few years, resulting in plenty of surface rust.
I tried removing it with abrasive products, but that involves an awful lot of manual labour and doesn’t always work well, not to mention the scratches it leaves on the tool’s surface. So I looked for a decent rust killer. CRC Evapo-Rust had a reputation, so I gave it a go.
Most of my affected tools were small enough to be immersed in the liquid. I had a container that I filled with Evapo-Rust, and an overnight immersion generally cleaned them up. The beauty of Evapo-Rust is that it’s reusable, so that container will last for the foreseeable future, probably a year for me.

A butterfly takes wing

6 August 2026

This simple butterfly pendant or brooch (depending on the back fittings) is a very good exercise in several basic goldsmithing techniques. It also can be decorated in several different ways to produce strikingly different finished pieces of jewellery.
I drew this design more than 25 years ago for a company that then made paua-shell jewellery. They stamped out their products, so I often made the master patterns in copper and from these patterns they spark-eroded the dies.
If this design was being made in an art school, it would be stuck to a sheet of silver and the basic shapes cut from there. If a design was made this way in, say, 18-carat gold and the wing outlines (as here) made from 2.5 mm thick metal, the outlay and waste material would be considerable from a 2.5 mm-thick sheet of 18-carat gold plate. But we will make it like a professional craftsman who has to live in the real world where costs matter.