The Shed, Author at The Shed

Build an Almost Ready to Fly Warhawk

11 July 2025

Then there is the relatively new kid on the block: the ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) model.
These come all packaged up in a huge box, beautifully built and packed, with all the hardware. But you do need to assemble them which can take up to a week. It isn’t quite ‘instant plane’ but it does provide some building satisfaction and a sense of achievement, albeit a rather shallow one, a bit like a healthy walk down to the bakery to buy a pie or taking Viagra.
To the supplied kit, you need to add various glues, an engine and electrical components (servos, relays, wires) to operate elevator, rudder, ailerons, throttle, flaps, undercarriage etc. The engine these days could be glow plug, 4-stroke or 2-stroke, electric or petrol.
This part of the hobby is now huge and the range and quality of products is astounding. ARF aircraft kits are readily available from many hobby shops and certainly online from within New Zealand and from lands far away.

Mac N Sea

4 July 2025

Piopio in the heart of the King Country – a landlocked area with a village population of about 400 – is the last place you’d expect to find a boat builder. Boat builder Max Laver, however, is well settled there and business is thriving.
Boat repairs, restoration, and making small craft by hand is the speciality of Max’s business, where he works with fibreglass and timber, and specialises in custom-built dinghies.
“We focus on how well we can make a dinghy, not how cheaply,” he says.
Max is a marine surveyor as well as a boat builder.
He spent two years in Lowestoft in England learning City and Guild-level wooden boat building, and finished his time doing two more years learning in New Brunswick, Canada.
In 2009, after many years boat building, Max decided to study marine surveying and the two qualifications work hand in hand.
“I didn’t excel at school as a kid, but I loved to build,” he says.

Industrial style at home

25 June 2025

My daughter was looking for a large lamp for her husband’s birthday and struggled to find something with the modern industrial-type of look that she had in mind. She asked me if I could make something around her thinking. She particularly wanted a large tripod base with an adjustable lamp on the top.
We searched around for a suitable lamp for the top and found an adjustable lamp on a spindle base at Lighting Direct on sale for $89.95. We would have preferred a matt black finish but we felt the chrome model would work very well.

Preserving the past – by the tonne

13 June 2025

What do you do when your passion for collecting means you are accumulating objects that can be measured by the tonne?
One answer is to buy a big building and open it up to the public – Mike’s Museum in Eltham displays the extraordinary results of Mike Coil’s collection mania.
Two upper stories and a huge basement of an historic building in the small Taranaki town are bulging with the strangest things. A big collection of antique chainsaws, World War II objects, including an anti-aircraft searchlight and US submarine generator engine, steam boilers of all sizes – you name it – Mike’s collected it.
There’s also a great collection of historic tools and objects from New Zealand’s past.
Mike began collecting when he was a young fella. One of a family of 12, he was raised on Taranaki farms and he recalls when aged eight his father coming home from a stint at sea with a handful of coins.

Video of From Rust to Rrrroaarrr Part Four

11 June 2025

In the first article, I wrote about nickel welding repairs to a broken cast iron engine cooling fin, magneto check, head repair, valve work and nickel plating the push rod cover tubes.
The second article was mainly about how I developed nickel and copper plating, with a little bit about kickstarter repair using nickel plate on a worn shaft and grinding teeth.
The third article, the start of frame painting, engine, clutch and gearbox assembly and installation, with magneto timing.
For this fourth episode, I had planned to write about how I rebuilt the electrical system, reupholstered the seat and renovated the fuel tank. There has been progress on each of these three things but little in the way of meeting targets.

A model life

5 June 2025

If the phrase “small but perfectly formed” can be legitimately applied to a shed, then Bruce Geange’s Palmerston North workshop certainly fits the bill. In a space of about 2 by 5 metres he creates Lilliputian machines that mimic their full-sized cousins in everything but size. An exquisitely detailed D8 1940 bulldozer is 40 cm long and completely hand-built. Bruce says it took about 900 hours to complete and is completely functional.
Born in Taumarunui in 1935, the eldest of four boys, Bruce was raised on various farms in the Manawatu area, which may explain his predilection for tractor models. A life-long love of modelling started at the age of 11 when he received a No 1 Meccano set for Christmas. As finances permitted he began collecting Meccano, building up to a No 9 set after he began working.

Steampunk toy: Back to the future

30 May 2025

Having been bitten by the steampunk toy bug recently I couldn’t resist trying once again to bring the theme to bear on another model. I have always admired the elegant lines of the clinker-built Viking longboats, their savage, war-like image on storm-tossed seas, and the whole mythology of the Viking era. I decided to see if I could combine that vision and steampunk to produce a modern take on the old boats.
As with my other steampunk toys and models, I chose a central element around which to base this one. The ultra-smooth, mirror-like, hard-drive disks I had used as hub caps in a previous steampunk toy are especially well suited to replicate (with a modern twist) the Viking shields that adorned the gunwales of their longboats.

The Shed magazine June/July 2025 issue 121 on sale now

25 May 2025

With the genealogy of the five generations of South Island engineers in the family, Ross Hayes thinks nothing of rebuilding Land Rovers for fun, family and farm.
Ross Hayes was 17 when he bought his first Land Rover. It was road-legal, but that was about it. It turned out that it was cosmetically covering up a huge amount of rust, so it wasn’t going to make the long haul.
Ross bunches his lips. “I got a bit disheartened and decided that if I couldn’t trust anybody to sell me a good one, I’d build myself one.”
He bought a 1954 short wheelbase Series 1 Land Rover in December ’96, just after he turned 18. “I paid six hundred bucks to a guy out of Naseby called Owen Rawcliffe, who’s since passed. I brought it back to Oamaru through the Danseys Pass and set to pulling it to bits.”
He bought workshop and parts manuals from the UK and a set of Whitworth sockets and Whitworth spanners and got stuck in.
The Mistress, as he came to call this ‘54 Series 1, spent five years, three months in the workshop – 6000 hours – while he pulled it to bits and rebuilt it.
His idea was to start with a chassis, and everything that went onto the chassis was either rebuilt or brand new. It was hard to get parts back then in the 1990s.

A man of many sheds

22 May 2025

Sitting on the edge of a little paddock in the river mouth settlement of Kakanui, ten minutes drive south of Oamaru, is a ramshackle shed where Lindsay Murray creates things of rustic beauty.
The shed has a long history. It was built in 1875 as the house and shop of a nurseryman, George Packwood, who came from Scotland to plant and tend trees around the mill manager’s house in Kakanui.
When Lindsay, an artisan wood worker and sometimes blacksmith took it over in 1993 the back wall had fallen off, half the roof was collapsing and the floors were rotted through in the living quarters. As far as Lindsay was concerned, it was perfect.
It had the remnants of the original dwelling: a kitchen with no running water but with a working coal range, and two other rooms which have served, over the years, as sleeping quarters and a sitting-cum-dining room. This is where Lindsay stays overnight when working on a major project. It also serves as temporary accommodation for visiting artisans and is currently home to Rolands Selis, a highly skilled leather worker.

VERSATILE SHED OF THE YEAR COMPETITION!

22 May 2025

Do you have New Zealand’s most interesting shed?
Whether it’s the cleanest, most cluttered, an epic man cave, or simply one-of-a-kind, we want to see it!
We love them all, and now it’s your chance to show off your shed and win!
Think your shed has what it takes?
Enter today and claim the crown!
HOW IT WORKS:
We’ll select the Top 5 sheds. The finalists will be showcased on Facebook, and the public will vote – most likes & comments wins!
WHAT YOU WIN:
A $500 Prezzy Card. A feature spot on the cover of The Shed Magazine, 2026 Calendar
HOW TO ENTER:
Send a high-res JPG image of your shed
Email your entry to: editor@theshed.nz
Entries close: July 31st
Facebook voting runs:
August 1st – 10th. The winner will be notified by email.

Lights galore

15 May 2025

If you are interested in adapting and using discarded bits and bobs to make something useful, then building lights, table lamps, and the like, offers an endless source of relatively inexpensive projects to amuse you. What’s more, they make unique gifts and nice conversation starters for visitors. Lamps are also a good way of supporting a decorating theme. Whether you are into an Art Deco, Arts and Crafts, modern or industrial look, it is nice to enhance your chosen theme by constructing a light from an object that is reminiscent of it.
Of course you are dealing with 240-volt electricity, which is potentially lethal, so it is essential that you use common sense and particular care when wiring up lights (see the safe wiring tip box). The advent of 12-volt downlights powered by small transformers has also made the construction of lights much safer. Lights can now be wired in such a way that the 240-volt transformer is remotely located or secured and independently earthed. There is no electrocution risk posed by the 12-volt wiring in the rest of the light.

Child’s play

9 May 2025

When you are a carpenter by trade with an interest in cars and still young at heart, making wooden toys has to be the perfect retirement occupation—although many of Alan Gray’s “toys” are not the sort of playthings you would put in the hands of small children. His meticulously crafted vintage vehicles, fashioned mostly from native timbers, mahogany and macrocarpa, can take around 60 hours to make and are more collectors’ pieces.
To keep the real kids happy, he has a more robust range mostly made from pinus radiata— diggers, trucks, pull-along hippos and the like.
Alan, 71, and his wife, Lesley, have been living in Cromwell for the past six years. Originally from Dunedin, Alan trained as a carpenter but turned his hand to fishing after moving to Stewart Island. He then spent the best part of three decades skippering boats for the Department of Conservation.

The Ayrburn Classic announces dates for 2026

7 May 2025

Save the date: Friday 20 – Sunday 22 February 2026
That’s right. The Ayrburn Classic returns next February for what promises to be another world-class celebration, scheduled slightly earlier on the calendar to bask in Central Otago’s long golden evenings and late-summer glow. This festival will once again transform Ayrburn into a playground for car enthusiasts, food lovers, and seekers of high-end hospitality alike.
The 2025 edition set an incredibly high benchmark, and is fast becoming one of the leading reasons to visit Queenstown – amongst New Zealanders and international travellers alike. With over 250 classic and contemporary luxury vehicles on display – collectively worth more than $250 million – the festival was a visual and visceral feast for attendees.

Futuristic fabrications

1 May 2025

A sci-fi artist working from a backyard shed in Central Otago is turning stuff no one wants into things that are sought after across the globe.
Sean Boyd uses anything that takes his fancy, from light fittings and plumbing parts to typewriters and old vacuum cleaners, to make futuristic fabrications which include ray guns, life-sized robots, jetpacks and other cosmic curiosities.
“The satisfaction is in finding parts, imagining outcomes and working out how they can fit together,” says Sean, who gets most of his raw materials from the local recycling centre, Central Otago WasteBusters. “I fill the back of the car for about $35. I think I’ve got more waste here than the waste station,” he says, looking round at the piles of paraphernalia in his humble garage in Clyde.

Hand tool grand slam

24 April 2025

It splits wood and rock, it severs roots, it levers…it slams. The Slammer may be a literally ground-breaking tool to work with, but the manually operated device is a rare creature in the thriving high-tech landscape of new DIY tools.
Developed by TJ Irvin, a globe-trotting American who settled by Lake Hawea more than a decade ago and handcrafted by one of the oldest engineering firms in the country, Templeton & Sons, the Slammer is an unusual piece of kit any manual worker needing a bit of extra grunt should consider trying.
The 9 kg, two-piece Slammer developed by Irvin uses the impact of a solid, high-tensile steel rod rammed down a length of pipe by the operator. This provides the momentum to ram the attached blade into—and through—the sort of material most people hire a jackhammer to deal with. Other attachments turn it into a fence-hole rammer and a compacter for foundation work. As TJ describes it, the slammer/rammer multipurpose tool is a combination of a crowbar, axe, spade, mattock and sledgehammer all in one. Made in New Zealand.

The Shed