Indholdsfortegnelse for No 90 May-June 2020 i The Shed

Our feature article in this issue about the grunty Cowper 4x4 off-roaders has reminded me of a misspent youth with my off-roading pursuits with my chums. I was born and grew up in West Auckland next to a creek with a whole expanse of bush on the opposite side to our home. This was a magic place to grow up as it felt like living in the country, with trees to climb, bush huts to build, and corrugated iron canoes to construct and paddle down the creek. Eventually Robin Hood and Zorro games turned more automotive as we all turned 15 years old and obtained our driving licences. Now we wanted fast and noisy cars — the faster and noisier the better. With all this space on my doorstep and…

Globex Engineering is an Auckland product-engineering consultancy that productionizes all kinds of gadgets. While the small workshop had the 3D printers, oscilloscopes, and the like for the smaller items it prototyped, when it came to the bigger stuff, such as a vandal-proof pedestal for outdoor digital screens, principal Craig Shannon had to cast about for workshops that could cut, bend, and weld bigger bits of material. He faced two problems: using other people’s equipment soon got expensive, and when he wanted to use machines that were “big enough to kill yourself with” health and safety regulations prevented it. They … have installed lathes, mills, routers, presses, metal folders, and woodworking machines Dream becomes reality Craig’s plans to have his own engineering workshop turned into reality when an engineering company that…

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They arrived after a big southerly blow. I suspect someone’s hive blew over but, given that they weren’t sporting airframe numbers, it was a case of finders beekeepers. They coalesced on a branch of one of our fruit trees, hanging in an ever-changing shape. A beekeeper we contacted said nobody would be interested; another said they would die of cold. Well, heck with that, we thought. My better half had swapped three chickens for a part-build top-bar beehive some years back. It was still part-built, but a crash production line on a temporary template saw enough frames assembled to get us started. With a strip of mesh tacked across the base and a piece of plywood to serve as a temporary roof, we were ready to go get ’em. Bee-gathering…

Rugged, grunty, daring, muddy — 4x4 truck motorsport and the associated fabrication are both Dan Cowper’s livelihood and his leisure. In fact, he is the classic example of someone who turned a hobby he had lived and breathed since he was a nipper into a job. He is self-taught too. Every year, on his 32-hectare farm at Turakina near Whanganui, Dan hosts the Suzuki Extreme 4x4 Challenge, which he created and has filmed for television. Dan prepares the 10 to 12 tough, challenging courses over four hectares — courses that test the mettle of participants, many of who drive the trucks that he and co-worker Cameron Hastings have designed, and made from steel pipes. “If I go to a national trial 20 trucks out of 40 have come out of…

MICRO BIT PROJECT BOOK? I have read with interest Enrico Miglino’s contributions about projects that use the BBC Micro Bit. I was wondering if there was any chance that he (or The Shed) was going to put together a collection of these projects along the lines of the Best of The Shed? I am a teacher and such a collection would be a much-valued resource. Andy Gray Thanks for that idea, Andy, and we are very pleased to learn that your students are finding these articles a valued resource. After we have a good number of these projects under our belt we will look at producing a digital publication of the series. Editor Letter of the MONTH KEEP IT LOCAL We had our local library come to the Rolleston Men’s…

In the first part of this series, which appeared in Issue No. 89, we saw the principles to be followed to upcycle an old rotary telephone. The simple circuit connected on the Raspberry Pi general-purpose input/output (GPIO) to control the amplifier buttons worked fine, as did the three LEDs used to provide some essential visual notification to the user. Making the hardware and adapting the internal design of the phone to include a Raspberry Pi (with the circuit), the amplifier, and the batteries was a challenging task — at least, that’s what I thought until I faced the real challenge of making all the elements actually work together. Things became more complex when I tried to accomplish the task on a Linux machine I made this upcycling project battery operated,…

I’ve heard the refrain “Bring back the cane!” more than once from colleagues at our school during the Friday afternoon debrief, after yet another arduous week of attempting to impart our collective wisdom to the current generation. However, should you be outraged at the prospect of bringing back the cane, rest assured that is not the sort of cane that is the focus of this article. Brought up on a diet of black-and-white television showing the exploits of Robin Hood and his band of merry men, I developed an early appreciation of the tall walking stick (staff) so deftly deployed by Friar Tuck at the expense of the Sheriff of Nottingham and his evil henchmen. During my teenage years my entertainment tastes expanded to include the TV series The Avengers.…

In the Making a Music Box article in Issue No. 89 of The Shed we saw that it is possible to use the BBC micro:bit in conjunction with other boards, in that case an Arduino Nano, to accomplish complex tasks. We developed the micro:bit software using the standard graphic tool available on the site; the language behind the graphical interface for programming the micro:bit was Javascript. An easy way to programme with blocks and learn coding is to check the Javascript programme corresponding to the graphic blocks of code. However, when going deeper into the use of micro:bit, making projects more complex, this method becomes less user-friendly. The process we followed to programme the micro:bit with the blocks language can be summarized in four steps: Obtaining certainty This procedure is…

Downsizing is almost a swear word to us sheddies, but when the later stages of life arrive there are practicalities that are difficult to fight. A casualty of this horrible but necessary downsizing is the loss of that shed space. Selling up in Auckland and moving into what was our weekend beach bolthole has been — and still is — a tricky exercise in reducing the stuff that my wife and I have accumulated. The other side of this has been creating more storage within the beach house so we can keep the essential stuff and items we’re not ready to let go just yet. A significant part of the solution to this problem was to build a 10m2 shed/workshop in the backyard. Now, I may be an engineer but…

There was a time when people respected other people’s property. Locking houses and hiding keys wasn’t normal, but at some point that all changed. As criminals started targeting other people’s property, they chose the easy targets; alarms and sensor lights were enough to make them try somewhere else. Sadly it seems we are living in an age when your property is deemed to be ‘waiting for collection’ by someone who will sell it for the next fix or to repay a debt, and the criminals involved are getting bolder. Day or night, residents home or not — it doesn’t seem to matter to the thieves. It’s likely you’ll simply see your prized possession disappearing down the road Alarms We covered domestic alarms in Issue No. 74 of The Shed, and…

The descendants of George Hattersley of Keighley, in England, might have had Rod McLean of Oamaru in mind when they developed the Hattersley Domestic Weaving System in the late 19th century. Hattersley looms, as they became known, became especially popular in the UK after World War I when servicemen returned shell shocked and otherwise disabled. This domestic weaving system allowed them to earn a living at home without having to work in the fraught environment of mills and factories. The Hattersley looms were, and still are, also used to weave the original Harris tweed. Rod suffered a trauma that affected him in a way that was similar to the WW1 soldiers’ shell shock. He was felled by a brain aneurysm in 1988 and the injury left him unable to continue…