Indholdsfortegnelse for No 125 February - March 2026 i The Shed

Our cover story this issue is on installing solar power – and how many of us have been considering that for years? The attraction of installing solar power is plain to see and there’s a lot to like about it. Harnessing energy from the mighty sun feels like a no-brainer. It’s all just sitting there, with so much of it going to waste, kind of. Solar power gives you independence from the greedy power companies. There’s power there for you should the main grid go down for any reason. It’s environmentally better and has no major infrastructure for you to support and contribute to the costs for. In the long run, it should lower your energy bills, and in an ideal world, you may even be able to create some…

Local youths refer to Christchurch’s seaside suburb of New Brighton as ‘B-Town’, but the previously neglected area is undergoing a renaissance, with elegant apartment blocks replacing ageing cottages on a major scale. New Brighton Mall, once the centre of Saturday shopping in the city, is still virtually deserted except for the Saturday market, but here too there are signs of renewed life, such as the recently opened skate shop Tide and Timber. Behind the Mall in Hawke Street is a giant car park, a relic of the retail glory days. This year, the Hawke Street car park was chosen by organiser Ben Lappage as the assembly point for the annual ‘Syd’s Run’, a day-long outing for small motorcycles: mopeds, motorised bicycles, scooters, step-throughs, paddock bikes – anything with a small…

About 10 years ago my son attended a ‘have-a-go-day’ at the Tauranga domain. He came home so excited about a new, wheeled, board thing that he had seen. He described it to me and I duly made one. It turned out to be a ‘dirtsurfer’. He rode it for years and got quite skilled at using it. My son then left home and the board got left in a cupboard. Until recently. One of my Year 10 students happened to be surfing the net and came across a site showing a video of these people doing some radical things on what was called a ‘dirtsurfer’. He had been to all the bike shops and sports stores in town and could not buy one anywhere. Most places had not even heard…

Part 8 The 1952 AJS 500 is slowly coming together, much more slowly than I had expected over a year ago. I knew that the bike is a bitzer, but along the way, I have found that it is way more of a mongrel than I expected. But you can still love a mongrel, and the upside is that I feel little pressure to keep things genuine. For example, I’ve nickel-plated bits where chromium was originally used, and I used part of a barbecue to fix the motor – see earlier articles. Part 7 ended with the discovery that I had several leaks in the preferred and now-prepared fuel tank; probably to be expected with the bike’s 50 years of storage in a relatively damp shed. I had been hopeful…

How do you get your FREE T-shirt? It’s easy. Head to magstore.nz to subscribe or renew. Once you have ordered, this is where you can leave us a message. Go to your cart and enter your T-shirt preferred size and style in the box that says, “If you are an existing subscriber, enter your subscriber ID here:” We will do our best to give you the size you want but stocks are limited. Tell us if you would like a larger or smaller size if we cannot give you your preferred size. T-shirt and polo shirt sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL Terms and conditions Stocks and some sizes and styles are limited, so first in, first served. This offer is for New Zealand subscribers only. This offer ends 22…

Like many of my generation, I grew up building huts at all altitudes – underground, overground, and aerial. The best were aerial. Although we were urban, there was a stand of big old macrocarpas behind the house, topped in the distant past and interestingly shaped as a result. Before I reached double figures, I could traverse the row without descending and knew many branches well. As we siblings grew, aerial huts developed from a few randomly nailed sticks to more formal structures. Those early joys never leave – it’s probably why I still enjoy freehand chainsaw joinery. This story is about a grandfatherly dream, an interestingly formed macrocarpa, and a reversion to said childhood. “I did some surgery with future hut-building in mind” That’s a good hut spot I spotted…

On my little piece of land I occasionally get to do farm things. My place is used as a runoff by my neighbour for his rams. They help me keep control of the grass except in summer. In summer the grass gets very long as it throws up seed heads and sheep don’t care for long grass, so the paddocks begin to look like wheat fields. It helps to top the grass, cut the seed heads, to make the grass grow again. After I have topped the paddocks they come away again after the first rain. Farmers do this by grazing cattle on the fields as the grass gets tall and then graze sheep after the cattle. Nearly as old as me One of my favourite farm things is topping…

I’m environmentally aware, but am not an environmentalist, so I’ve gone solar for only one reason: because it makes good financial sense to do so. That said, it isn’t necessarily going to be right for everyone, and its impact on your power bills will depend on where you are in New Zealand and the orientation and design of your house relative to where the sun rises and sets. I’ve been interested in renewables for many years. I first looked at it while living in the UK. The early systems had promise, but really didn’t make financial sense, as the cost of installation and ongoing maintenance wasn’t offset by big enough reductions in power bills. They wouldn’t repay that investment during their service life, which at the time was 15–20 years…

West Australian inventor Graeme Attey came up with the idea for the dirtsurfer because of a double frustration. He likes surfing, but the surf around Perth is generally small. He enjoys snowboarding, but the nearest suitable mountains are 4800km away. So he came up with the speedy inline board on wheels for all-year-round fun. Attey told the ABC’s Perth edition of 7.30: “What I wanted to do was just have a two-wheel device, with very low drag so it would go faster, and also turn with that same fluid motion of a surfboard or a snowboard. “It can be used anywhere, from grass to bitumen to compacted dirt. You can jump it, you can do virtually all the things you do when you go skiing or snowboarding or something like…

In my first term at art college, we had a set project to make a chess table, which involved wood turning, carving, some basic jointing processes, and veneering. Messing about with beautiful pieces of thin wood appealed to me the second that I found out it was a thing. Over the years, I have continued to incorporate veneering techniques in my work. Last year, my wife and I enjoyed a 60th birthday in Sorrento, Italy, which coincidentally turned out to be the home of decorative marquetry in Italy. All through the town centre are small workshops with craftsmen selling wooden things covered with veneered marquetry patterns and pictures to tourists, some quite exquisite and unique. We visited the museum of inlaid wood (Museo Bottega della Tarsia Lignea), seeing an incredible…

Helensville is in the sweet spot – close enough to Auckland to make the big city accessible but still a proper rural town. As such, it draws people working on odd and fascinating projects, restoring and building every kind of vehicle, inventing the next big mechanical wonder, but still with a full complement of farmers. They all, sooner or later, turn up at the hardware shop of their dreams, and once found, they keep returning to it: Thrifty Auto Supplies, a local legend for near on half a century and now also selling online for the benefit of mechanical tinkerers nationwide (thriftyautosupplies.co.nz). Having emerged early this year from premises hidden off the main road, Thrifty is finally on show in an industrial warehouse large enough to display its mind-boggling variety…

The postie must hesitate on dark and stormy mornings to reach into Bruce Aldridge’s letterbox. It is guarded by a large and rusty entity called ‘Creature’ – for the dictionary’s definition of a cross between a human and an animal. The imposing sculpture is a hint of what awaits within the gates of this rural Taranaki property. An enormous pterodactyl with a wing spread of 14m, named ‘Big Bird’, flies threateningly over the main entrance gate, looking like something out of Jurassic Park, and a T. rex (called ‘Big T’) stands tall amid the tī kōuka (cabbage trees), ready to pounce on a hapless gremlin perched among the branches. Near the house, there are more benign forms. A larger-than-life kiwi sits in a rock garden, and around the back, a…

Free power from the sun seems like a no-brain alternative to paying power and gas bills, but Gerry Magner of Bay of Plenty specialist Solar Options cautions that the numbers and the building have to line up. “Swapping power from the grid for solar is not cheap. You have to look at your individual situation to make sure it will work for you,” he says. At an initial cost of at least $10K, if you want to see it pay off, you need to be able to look forward 10 years or more to amortise that cost, so from a financial point of view, the younger you are, the better. If you are heating your water with electricity, then solar will show a quicker return on the power bills, but…

Every week, we upload new content onto The Shed website to add to the hundreds of articles and videos already on the site for readers to discover, learn from, and enjoy. Some uploads of the past few months include: Recreating history A former principal of Piopio College, a local boat builder, and the whole community rallied around to recreate this Model T Ford bus. https://theshed.nz/recreating-history/ Project: metal and wood shelving Slim, strong, homemade shelves are simple to make https://theshed.nz/metal-and-wood-shelving/ Hammering history Volunteers ensure an original Mainland smithy flourishes https://theshed.nz/hammering-history/ Video: Geraldine Military Museum military revival Fifty re-enactors turned up in their historically correct uniforms and weapons for this annual event https://theshed.nz/video-of-geraldine-military-museum-military-revival/…

Keeping you and your paint cool is important, so try to avoid painting in direct sunlight. Overcast conditions are best, but if a cloudless day stretches out ahead of you, a good plan of attack is to start early, ahead of the sun, and work your way around the building, keeping ahead of the sun as you go. Take a break during the hottest part of the day, for the sake of your finish as well as your health, or use that period to prep, for example sanding or priming surfaces. Use shade protection where you can. A gazebo or large sun umbrella will help keep you and your Resene products cool, while allowing you to continue painting even in the heat of the day. Keep in mind that if…

Simple to do and produces a striking result. Many people have taken this idea to a highly creative degree if the internet is anything to go by. The entire design is made from a simple 60-degree diamond shape. Choose three wide sheets of veneer: a light, a medium, and a dark tone. I have used walnut, silky oak, and mazur birch with a sapele backing. It is worth noting that smaller hexagons look more effective, as bigger ones lose the three-dimensional effect. Accuracy marking and cutting are essential; every single diamond must be precisely the same. Any discrepancy will compound as you assemble the Louis squares and end up looking terrible. Start by drawing a straight line on the veneer with the grain. Mark a point and, using a protractor,…

A shed brings men together in one community space to share their skills, have a laugh, and work on personal projects or within a group for the shed or community. Sheds and their members decide the projects to undertake. However most sheds throughout New Zealand take on some community projects, examples include repairing toy library stock, building playgrounds for early learning centres, repairing old bikes for community distribution, building planter boxes for the main street of the local central business district, the list goes on. The shed is a great place for blokes to learn new skills. We see builders teaching engineers some of their skills and vice versa. Sheds have been operating in New Zealand since 2008. The last decade has seen the number of sheds across both urban…