The Shed - My Shed

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Woodwork: getting started (2)

20 November 2025

A home workshop is a special place and will function much better if you are able to plan how it is set out. My first workshop was in a single garage which was also the home of a very old Austin 7. As I bought machines, things became a little tricky. It was not that motivating on a winter’s evening, knowing I had to shift the Austin and re-arrange the workshop before I started. Our architect’s major renovation to our home included the redevelopment of my workshop area and from a single garage to a 9 m x 6 m workshop was a massive leap forward, even if it is shared with an MG.

Hammering history

31 October 2025

You can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of Kiwi women who have become blacksmiths in their 60s. Judy Waterston of Livingstone, inland North Otago, is one of them.
As a child Judy spent hours in her engineer-father’s workshop sorting nuts and bolts, tidying away his tools, sweeping up, and watching him make things. She says her love of tools and machinery came from her dad.
The blacksmithing seed was sown in 1972 when Judy first saw Nicol’s Blacksmith Shop in Duntroon, some 40 km from Oamaru up State Highway 83. The building was being devoured by periwinkle planted 100 years before to act as a fire retardant. Most of the windows were smashed and it was draped in cobwebs.
“I looked through the broken windows and when I saw the anvil and bellows they took my breath away,” she remembers. “I’ve loved this building ever since.”

Where wood is king

15 August 2025

When Ross Vivian heads into his Stratford shed he has to pass through his wife Heather’s workshop. The Taranaki couple are both passionate about wood—Ross carves it and Heather turns it. Retirement is not a time for this couple to put their feet up. They are enjoying exploring their own creativity and are busier than ever.
Ross has been a hunter, farmer, logger, inventor and bushman. His mainly self-taught skills developed during 70 years have now come together in his carving and the days are not long enough to complete the projects he has in mind. Heather, a creative, award-winning woodturner, has been working her lathe for 30 years, winning national accolades in a field that has been the domain of men for aeons. Over time, she has finely developed her craft, whether working big, burr-wood platters more than 500 mm across or tiny turned pieces a few millimetres thick.
The couple’s spacious lounge is like another world. Trophy heads from Ross’s hunting days adorn the walls: deer, thar, chamois, a wild bull (he shot as it came out of the bush and charged him), wild boars, stuffed birds and even moose antlers.

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.

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.

My shed: Going bush in town

10 April 2025

Many guys like to retreat to a space they have created and feel comfortable in. For some, it’s a shed to tinker in and build things, for others it’s some sort of man cave where they can socialise with their mates.
Gary Were of Stratford, in Taranaki, has gone a step further. The 71-year-old year semi-retired builder and deer hunter has re-created a replica of his favourite bush hut under his urban house.
For 30 years Gary has been deer hunting in the Urewera ranges in the centre of the North Island. It’s an isolated place, where the boys get flown in by Heliseka Helicopter and spend a week each year hunting sika and sometimes red deer.

My car the barbecue

13 December 2024

A mobile barbecue built out of an abandoned Holden Statesman? Why not. This clever conversion by Scott Edwards, a former freezing-worker-turned-motor-mechanic, was the pin-up attraction at a car, bike, truck and boat Show Day held in Riverton, the popular coastal resort town about 32 km west of Invercargill.
Scott is currently completing an adult motor mechanic apprenticeship but has always had a flair for anything to do with engines. He began early. Scott’s partner, Nicola Swain, says his mother had told her that Scott pulled apart every toy he got as a child, then put them back together again to see how they worked, before he played with them.

Building a potting shed

15 November 2024

Among small buildings you can create without council building consent, a potting shed is very handy. The fact the builder agreed to put up this structure to get the gardening tools out of his shed is another story.
If you can possibly choose a flat site, do so. In this potting shed, the only site available was on a hill which meant a fair bit of work for the builder because of the extra labour and time.
Then in order to avoid the need for a building consent, measure the site up to ensure the 10 m2-or-less potting shed is no closer to the boundary or to a dwelling than its own height. In this case, the boundary is nearby but there are no dwellings close by to worry about. Here the original idea was a three-metre long building but it had to be shortened to 2.1 metres because the boundary was closer than first thought.

My Shed