Greg Vincent, Author at The Shed

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.

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.

Greg Vincent