Greg Vincent, Author at The Shed

Westland Industrial Heritage Park: From trash to treasure

30 April 2026

The West Coast has a history as rich as it is rugged, with a past steeped in mining, logging, and dairy farming on a forest-clad strip between the mountains and the sea. Up by Hokitika airport is a sheddies’ paradise where relics from this past are being resurrected by an enthusiastic and capable band of volunteers.
“It all started back in 1981. Everything was going by train out to scrap, so we formed a club to stop it,” says Mort Cruickshank. The “we” were four young men – Spike Jones, Jim Straton, Mike Rooney and Mort. They formed the Westland Farm and Vintage Machinery Club and started salvaging old machinery that had been destined for the dump. With no premises, they kept it in their backyard sheds and met sporadically to plan the future.
Four decades on, and the Westland Industrial Heritage Park, spread over several acres up by Hokitika airport, is packed with machinery, sheds and enthusiasts. It is a hub of community activities, has a Menzshed on site and is increasingly a drawcard for tourists.

Making a gate – the blacksmith way

22 April 2026

Joe Parkes is a blacksmith and as a youngster learned his trade the hard way. In 1958, aged 12, he was apprenticed to his grandfather and he quickly learned not to make mistakes. His giant Scots grandfather, Jack James, was a smithy of the old school. If young Joe got something wrong he had his head dunked in the half barrel of water used for cooling steel from the forge. He learned quickly.
“My grandfather, I called him Pop, was a big bugger, standing 6 ft 11 inches (1.8 metres) tall and weighing in at 20 stone (127 kg). He was a hard bastard, but he was my mentor. I once saw him pull a man through a high hedge and throw him over the top. You didn’t mess with him. If the blacksmiths got into a scrap you kept well clear.

Hot stuff in Taranaki

9 April 2026

Hot rods – we see them rumbling round the highways and byways, big V8s burbling, immaculate finished body and paintwork and obviously someone’s pride and joy. Many people don’t realise the work that goes into customising one of these gleaming machines. Some are old cars reshaped and rebuilt, and some are made from scratch, often using the classic designs and lines of cars built in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
In the little town of Normanby in South Taranaki there’s a workshop set up to create these beasts. We caught up with guys from three businesses in a row having smoko together. An upholstery business, a custom fabrication shop and an engineering shop. All mates who work in together in a way that can only happen in a small town.

Heart of glass

27 March 2026

Parts of Carmen Simmonds’ cast glass studio glow with the ethereal, often surreal treasures that emerge from their creator’s imagination and the searing heat of her kiln. Radiantly coloured dolls’ heads, glass lace and crochet, headless dancing dresses, ballet shoes, lilies in milk bottles, flowers, and other organic forms are at once beautiful and disturbing.
Then there is the other side – the chemistry and chemicals, machinery, and tools; hours of modelling, firing, grinding, sanding, and cutting.
But this studio is also a home. Carmen and her husband Glen live at her work studio – a 100-metre-square shed on their 8.5-hectare lifestyle block in Brunswick, Whanganui. The shed was originally intended as Carmen’s full-time studio but when they sold their house in town they had nowhere else to live so they moved into the shed “to camp for a while” and have stayed, still temporarily, for eight years.

Making a workshop bench video

22 March 2026

Every shed needs a utility bench, and most sheds usually have one or two.
It’s a place where things can be worked on or stored. I have built a few recently, and I have developed a simple process that makes the process quite easy and results in a sturdy workshop asset with space for storage.
The advantage of this design is that it doesn’t require good, straight timber. In fact, I often buy very cheap, knotty 2nd or third grade timber from my local sawmill, who specialise in Macrocarpa. I can get long lengths, but they are rarely straight or twist-free. Sometimes I can get relatively straight pieces, or I can find 3 metres or so in a 4-5m length. For the most part, you can usually find enough pieces of around a metre that are relatively straight.

The Shed magazine April/May 2026 issue 126 on sale now

22 March 2026

Hayden Scott’s road to crafting Damascus blades has been a journey of self-discovery, from an ambitious teen working the boning tables of the Balclutha freezing works to chef Al Brown’s right-hand man. Now, with over 25 years of experience using knives, he has found his calling: hand-forging the finest blades for cooks all over the world from his backyard sheds in the Waitākere Ranges.
“Hayden grew up in Balclutha surrounded by farmland and a practical family: his mum made the family’s clothes; dad was a chippie; an uncle built airplanes, and another uncle was a fitter and turner.
Hayden and his brother were often left to their own devices, usually with a pocket knife in hand. He remembers, “I always had a project on the go. What have we got here? What can I make from this?” Huts and bows and arrows lead to hovercrafts with electric motors, and later to bicycles, motorbikes, and furniture restorations.
His uncle Russell was a real inspiration, a builder who knocked together a Jodel airplane, which Hayden fondly remembers flying around Otago in. “I was in absolute awe that someone could build something like that, at home.” Another uncle, Allan, was a Fitter and Turner who rebuilt motorcycles. He had to dig out a cellar under his house to store his vast collection of vintage motorcycles. Hayden remembers, “He was always in there with his overalls on, working on them. Growing up around people like that was really motivating.”

Hobbit haven

17 March 2026

I have made a hobbit house for my kids almost entirely from recycled materials and left-overs from building a garage. The frame is an old trampoline. It is 3.2 metres wide (this depends on the size of your trampoline ) and 2.3 metres high at the apex. I can stand in it easily. The poles that were for the side of the trampoline had holes at the top so by the time I lashed them all together it was incredibly strong.
I made the walls out of an old pallet with a couple of bigger bits of driftwood on top. We mudded the walls with a mix of dirt, grass and a little cement until there were no more holes and then patched as needed. I used all kinds of recycled wood that would fit. We have added more layers as needed or as bits fall off. The walls are probably about 100 mm thick on average but up to 150 mm in places and we have added paper in the middle for extra insulation.

Racing motorcycles – the art of engineering

12 March 2026

Chris Gordon has been devoted to the internal combustion engine since his earliest days, when his next-door neighbour was a motor mechanic.
At 14, he was a crew member for Ron Collett, who successfully ran a Top Eliminator class dragster at strips throughout New Zealand. His Chris Gordon Racing Team won the 1998/99 125cc New Zealand Road Racing Championship, with well-known rider Dennis Charlett riding a Honda RS125 that Chris owned and prepared. Chris and his team ran the bike in the 125cc class at the Australian MotoGP at Phillip Island in 1999.
Chris has also, from a very early age, made things: models, an electric bicycle, an electric go-kart; a fibre-glass, road-registered, scratch-built car; and a 500cc V8- powered grand prix racing bike. He has a minimalist approach to tools and equipment, but to make the racer’s V8 engine, he had to buy and master a small lathe and a serious, large and highly capable milling machine. The alternative would have been to get the machining and development done professionally. Chris calculates that this would have involved thousands of hours of very expensive machine time – say, 3000-plus hours at $100 per hour. That’s a lot of money.

Choppers with pedal power

5 March 2026

Geraldine High School technology teacher Alan Minnear built pedal-powered choppers with his Year 11 students because he wanted something to capture their interest. He says he initially got the idea for the choppers from another local teacher but then discovered the Atomic Zombie website (www. atomiczombie.com) which opened his eyes to possibilities with the clear instructions available. He paid for and downloaded the PDF files for the two choppers named Vigilante and Overkill that caught his eye.
Because of their relative inexperience, the students basically followed the book for the choppers they built. However, the book gave no measurements, wanting builders to create their own design from the basics.

On the move

26 February 2026

Farm life, even on a pocket-handkerchief farm like mine, means that you will need to move stock from time to time. I run a few cattle beasts and a few goats. I plan to get a few sheep soon, too. The issue with stock is moving them. Moving the cattle is a different story but for the smaller stock I could carry them either on the tray of my ute or my trailer if either had a stock cage.
I decided that building a cage could be an easily achievable project and so it has proved. It has value even if you don’t have stock – it certainly increases the options for your trailer. It is a lot easier collecting firewood with a cage, even transporting rubbish, or green waste. In the case of the latter you might want to make the end hinged rather than incorporate a gate to make it easier to unload the waste.

My shed the barn

20 February 2026

Capacity is always the issue. My two sheds at home were each at their limit. I had woodwork in one and a one-off car suffering fabrication right on top of it in another.
When it came time to plan a new house on the new section, I thought of a barn-sized shed. In this barn, I would build all the joinery for the house. But first I had to build the barn.
I had a design that had been kicked around for ages and required a giant leap forward in capacity. This barn as my workshop would have good height, tall openings, a range of areas for different tasks and that all-important swing room around the main machine, a multi-function dimension saw.
Like other glimpses I enjoy of by-gone eras, I have always loved those English “oak barns” typically housing Aston Martins in magazines portraying classic cars. The vision I had for my barn was of posts and beams and the roof crouching over long flanks, suggesting back rooms filled with the rare and the useful.

A life in harmony

12 February 2026

There is such a thing as serendipity. When Paul Downie was 11 years old a chance meeting at his grandmother’s house was to eventually set him on a course that would define his career.
“I was learning the piano at the time and her friend had a harpsichord that he invited me over to see. I thought it was marvellous,” he recalls. “He told me I should build one and although it sounded like a ridiculous idea, it never went away.”
When he was 22, Paul embarked on the project, researching how to build a harpsichord, scouring junk shops for old tools, sawing bits of wood, and gluing them up until he had constructed the instrument.
“I enjoyed the whole process so much that when I was 23 I decided to build another one. I discovered that overseas museums had very detailed technical drawings of old instruments which you could buy – when they are restored everything about the instrument and the mechanisms are recorded.
“I went on to build two more harpsichords. The first one did work but it wasn’t up to the same standard so I ended up pulling it apart and my sister burnt it as fire wood,” he says laughing. “The others have survived and are owned by very good musicians.”

Create your own parrot-beaked pliers

30 January 2026

A specialist tool we made in that Hatton Garden workshop where I served my time was parrot-beaked pliers. These are used by the ring-maker for hand-made gem settings. They present the setting in a ring at just the right angle so the jeweller can pierce and file the design of the setting.
The best pliers for this are a pair of heavy, flat-pointed pliers, known in the trade as snipe pliers. Good jeweller’s pliers can cost up to $50, so I save my students money by most often using second-hand electrician’s snipe pliers. You can pick these up at any market for used tools and they do just as well. I am still using the pair I made during my apprenticeship 50 years ago.

The Shed magazine February/March 2026 issue 125 on sale now

24 January 2026

Going solar
Solar power seems like a great idea; who doesn’t want free power, right? But, what to choose, and what are the pitfalls of solar?
Regular The Shed writer, Andrew Broxholme, has just completed a large solar installation on his property and shares all the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of his solar power journey.
I’m environmentally aware, but am not an environmentalist, so I’ve gone solar for only one reason, because it makes good financial sense to do so, that said it isn’t necessarily going to be right for everyone and its impact on your power bills will depend on where you are in New Zealand and the orientation and design of your house relative to where the sun rises and sets.
I’ve been interested in renewables for many years. I first looked at it while living in the UK. The early systems had promise, but really didn’t make financial sense as the cost of installation and ongoing maintenance wasn’t offset by big enough reductions in power bills. They wouldn’t repay that investment during their service life, which at the time was 15–20 years (maximum).
That’s no longer true, with higher volume, the equipment has got a lot cheaper, it is more efficient, but we have also seen huge increases in energy costs; this, in particular, changes the economics dramatically. That doesn’t, however, mean that you can buy the first solar system presented or recommended to you. Read on to find out why.

The ultimate man cave

15 January 2026

It’s tempting to think of Gregor Kregar’s work space as the ultimate humongous man cave. The 410-square-metre studio in a gritty industrial area of Auckland’s New Lynn certainly has all the “boy’s toys” to make the most avid sheddie happy.
Vises, grinders, table saw and cut-off saw? Check. MIG and TIG welders and drill press? Check. Two electric and a gas-fired kiln? Check. You get the picture. This is a serious space set up to work on all manner of materials.

Greg Vincent