Greg Vincent, Author at The Shed

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.

Making a clean sweep – how to make a magnetic sweeper

31 July 2026

After mumblings of discontent about the potential punctures and those “messy engineers”, I decided to make a simple magnetic sweeper. The concept is not new. Magnets have been used for picking up road debris for a long time, and they are very effective.
The challenge, though, is where to find magnets that are strong enough, and how to effectively remove collected steel waste from the magnets. In an ideal world, it would be great to be able to turn the magnetism off and on.
This can be done, of course, by shifting the magnetic poles in the same way that magnetic chucks do on a surface grinder.
Very effective, but I couldn’t see our tool makers in the shed being happy to see the magnetic chuck from the surface grinder being “borrowed” to pick up nails.

The Shed magazine August/September 2026 issue 128 on sale now

19 July 2026

Sentimental Journey
Jack Ryder had a unique ability to hypnotise sports stars, politicians, and celebrities into donating items for his museum and sports memorabilia collection. Now, his grandson Clint manages this West Auckland landmark, but the property development vultures are circling.
It is hard to imagine a less likely location for a living museum than the back blocks of suburban West Auckland in Avondale.
Yet here, towards the end of a lengthy no-through road, the Ryder family hold tight to a self-built vestige of Auckland’s yesteryear. While the surrounding streets are turned into homogeneous multi-unit town housing, the Ryders’ two-acre slice of Pavlova Paradise remains, less a multi-generational home ground and more a celebration of the character of the city’s past.
Slipping through the tall white gates past the twin concrete lion sentinels at the street end of Ryder’s long hedge-lined driveway, the modern world slips away. Ahead, in the shade of a 100-year-old Pecan tree, an enclave of antique edifices opens out along the back-fence line like a set from a period movie. This corner of vintage Kiwiana is the handiwork of the late and industrious Jack Ryder, a coach-builder and wharfie, who began constructing it from a group of sheds spread across the property.

New Zealand Railways celebrates 150 years

16 July 2026

In 2013, Railways in New Zealand marked the anniversary in October this year of 150 years since the first broad-gauge public steam railway opened between Ferrymead and Christchurch City in 1863, a distance of seven kilometres. The original gauge was five feet three inches (1600 mm) wide, although the standard gauge for New Zealand railways was to become three feet six inches (1067 mm).
As the Railways 150 Years Committee describes it, “People and goods were barged from the Port of Lyttelton to Ferrymead, then taken by rail to Christchurch. The Ferrymead Line operated for ten years from 1863 until 1873 when the 2.6-kilometre tunnel connecting Lyttelton and the Heathcote Valley was completed and commissioned.”
The celebrations for the anniversary in 2013 are focused on operations and displays at the Ferrymead Heritage Park during Labour Weekend and include heritage steam trips with the restored locomotive Ja1240 from Christchurch to Arthur’s Pass, Timaru and Ashburton. The Railways 150 Committee includes representatives from rail organisations such as the Ferrymead Railway, the National Railway Museum of New Zealand, the Mainline Steam Heritage Trust, the Plains Railway, the Weka Pass Railway, the Steam Canterbury Preservation Society and others. Additional help and assistance is provided by KiwiRail.

How to pimp your shed

10 July 2026

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

18 June 2026

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.

A weighty subject

12 June 2026

One problem with working alone in the shed and having a liking for large pieces of Victorian cast iron is the difficulty of safely moving or lifting them.
They can be moved with load skates and pipes as rollers, but how do you lift the weight onto the rollers? Trying to push down on a crowbar while arranging pipe rollers under a machine is inviting trouble. A toe jack allows you to lift and hold the weight in the air as you arrange the rollers and put in safety blocks. It is not intended for great weights or high lifts due to stability, but it allows you to lift the weight.

From armour to fighter

4 June 2026

An unassuming garage in the Hunua Ranges south of Auckland is the current shed of Gordon Turner and home to his latest project – a full-sized replica cockpit of a Messerschmitt Bf 109E fighter plane. Made from plywood, timber and aluminium and five years in the making so far, it will never take to the skies. But it is eventually intended to become a flight simulator, giving the ‘pilot’ a realistic experience of flying one of World War Two’s most famous aircraft.

Revving up Island-style

28 May 2026

As you can imagine, on Great Barrier Island, the population is likely to have more than its share of characters, given the island’s remote location. Part of the charm is its lack of power supply and absence of a supermarket. If something breaks, there’s not likely to be a spare part sitting on a shelf anywhere on the Island, so if you don’t want to wait or to pay hefty freight charges on top of the cost of the part, you make one or use real no. 8 wire ingenuity. Even though it is New Zealand’s fourth largest island (after the North, South and Stewart Islands) and is only a half-hour flight from Auckland, it’s like a different world, and that’s why the locals love it.

The Shed magazine June/July 2026 issue 127 on sale now

24 May 2026

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).

In the dining room shed

22 May 2026

Jane Allnatt’s father was a commercial artist, a painter, model-maker and did a bit of carving, so there’s something of the family tradition in what Jane Allnatt is doing in working with wood. But it’s unlikely her father imagined her designs and creations coming out of a shed in the dining room.
Working on a sheet on the floor of a room in her house is the Howick resident’s “workshop” and preferred way of creating work. Yet that work has regularly taken prizes in various categories at the annual National Woodskills Festival at Kawerau, a central gathering place of woodturners and sheddies.
It is also unlikely you would find many men praising the convenience of their working space because, as the sculptor puts it, “the room is centrally placed and I can disappear to cook dinner or if there is any washing, I can do that. The light is good, too.”

The Workmate – a shed in a cupboard

15 May 2026

In 1961, Ron Hickman, a just-married South African immigrant to the UK, was making a wardrobe using expensive Scandinavian chairs as sawhorses (as you do) when he inadvertently cut one of the chairs as well as the plywood. This was his eureka moment. The need for a workbench which could be stored away in an apartment cupboard when not being used was obvious.
His prototype folding workbench had a classic cast-iron and steel Record brand wood vice attached to it.
Ron was known in the Lotus Cars factory, where he was director of engineering, as someone who could always see an alternative approach to design problems, and so it was with his workbench. His final design used the top of the bench as a vise; one half of the top being fixed, the other being moved by two threaded rods to clamp the object being worked on, vaguely similar to a book-binder’s vise. His background in car manufacture led to him design the folding workbench with a metal frame. Because it was intended to be used for woodwork the top was wooden – solid wood in the original design.

Readers’ forum – sheddie chatter

7 May 2026

One of the popular features we used to publish in The Shed magazine is the readers’ forum.
Here is one from way back in 2011, what a few sheddies were up to in their shed that year and what was on their minds at that time

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.

Greg Vincent