Innehållsförteckning för No 100 January - February 2022 från The Shed

The warmer months are a great time to get all those exterior painting projects finished. To help you make your painting projects easier, we’ve asked the Resene experts to share some of their top tips: Keep your home cool Dark finishes, such as black wood stains and paints, are very popular for exterior walls and fences, but they can absorb a huge amount of heat from the sun. If you’re planning on a dark colour for your exterior project, consider using a Resene CoolColour paint or stain, designed with special pigment technology to reflect more heat than a normal paint. It will help to keep the paint and surface cooler so they can keep looking good. Add the additive When the sun turns up the heat, your paint can start…

Hugh McCarroll WRITER I started very young I was into DIY before it was a thing. I admired people who could make stuff, do stuff, and fix things. As a little boy I wanted to help any tradesman who came to the house to do jobs. My uncle Gordon was my first mentor. He was a motor mechanic, and I remember helping him when he was repairing a car-door locking mechanism that had been damaged by thieves. He also did beautiful woodwork. However, I remember mostly his laconic humour and endless patience. He taught me to drive, too. Another mentor was my friend Pete’s father, Neville. I learnt a lot helping him and Pete build a lounge extension to their house when I was a teenager. He was a teacher…

As far as careers in the building trades go, Stan’s has been out of the box, driven largely by his insatiable curiosity and his never-say-never attitude. Building, he says, has taken him places he never dreamed of going. Stan is a familiar face to many Kiwis. He has built and presented on a raft of TV renovation shows and is the current brand ambassador for Mitre 10. He’s even managed a few how-to articles for us in the early days of The Shed. When he’s not busy planning, building, filming and fronting Mitre 10’s web-based DIY series or giving in-store presentations across the country, Stan is at home juggling his own building jobs with personal projects and family life. While he has enough work-bench ideas to keep him busy in…

“Ideally,” he says, “you need a couple of sheds. One for sawdust and making, the other for hanging out and keeping all your cool stuff.” Stan’s board and batten coastal workshop is a nice combo of both. When planning a shed layout, Stan says the first thing he does is locate where the workbench should go. He made his from 30mm box steel (so he can grind and weld on it) with hardwood ply cabinetry set on castors for extra functionality. The decorative NZ Railways brass plates are a nod to his grandfather who worked in the NZR workshops. “Getting the bench at the right height for you is critical, as is good lighting above the bench. I make tools easy to access. Some people like them locked away —…

• Two sawhorses and a cheap 8ft X 4ft sheet for a workbench. A third sawhorse to extend the workbench is very handy for the early stages when cutting the larger sheets. • Palm sander, with vacuum extraction • Sandpaper galore for the sander, 80–300grit — I used mostly 80–120. Likewise, many sheets for hand use, same grit, and a sanding block • Cordless driver • Temporary screws • Sheet plastic • Cordless drill, various bits, including countersink bit and hole saws • Tape measure and carpenter’s square • Jigsaw • Lots of clamps, large and small • Plane • Various screwdrivers • Wire cutters • Pliers • Hand (rip cut) saw • Hammer • Chisels • Rasps — curved, round, and flat in cross-section FOR THE EPOXY AND PAINT…

Imagine that you are 12 years old and have decided, who knows why, to make a knife to give as a gift. You have seen your grandfather making wooden toys in his workshop and have used his bandsaw, drill press, and hand tools. There are tools and a workbench in a shed on your family’s farm. Now, how do you go about it? This is exactly the position Scott Gregan was in four years ago. Scott decided to make the knife from a piece of mild steel he had found, not realising how unsuitable it was. He traced a knife profile onto the steel and then drilled multiple small holes along the line with a drill press to obtain the rough shape. He refined this using an angle grinder. He…

On his property in Reikorangi, David Dilks wheels the fairground organ he made out of his shed into the garden and commands it to strike up a tune. There’s something nostalgic about the jolly, roundabout sound of the melody. Even if you can’t see them, the music evokes images of brightly painted carousels and children astride highly coloured horses going round and round, up and down. The 320-pipe fairground organ that David made from scratch is visually and acoustically impressive. The array of beautifully crafted pipes, different shapes and sizes, the accordion-playing monkey, and the drums make quite the show. It’s hard to resist jiggling — but then David and wife Joy, both ballroom dancers, kick up their heels and show their form. Music is a big part of their…

Dear Sir, I’m writing regarding the article “To server or not to server”, part 3. First of all, let me say that I think it is great to be reusing older computing equipment. I, too, love the challenge of getting it working on something useful. I recently dug up an old Dell laptop of similar age and power as Nigel’s Toshiba. I have been working in the IT industry for 35-odd years, so I have seen lots of tech come and go — a big pile of it is in boxes in my shed. However, using it can be a difficult question as Nigel says. It runs the risk that the solution is overcomplicated, overpriced, and difficult to maintain — plus it is old, so it will be less reliable…

In the beginning, I was inspired by other venerable publications like Popular Mechanics and Fine Woodworking that had lasted the distance. I had a vision to create a magazine that would link all the various tinkerers and artisans labouring in their sheds all over the country. Jim Hopkins’ book Blokes and Sheds had made an impact and reinforced in me the belief that there was a substantial potential readership for the magazine. Not everyone shared my enthusiasm. I got a terse one-line rejection from a major magazine distributor saying, “We don’t see any market for this title.” Fortunately, their competitor had a different opinion. At the time I couldn’t find anything similar to what I had in mind for The Shed. Instructables.com and YouTube were just starting but their initial…

Eight years ago, I realised my dream of building a camper trailer from scratch for our family of four. Since then, we have spent in excess of 240 amazing, adventure-filled nights in our nano house on wheels. As an engineer, project manager, and general maker junkie, I have built many things over the years, from a seagull outboard race boat to creative furniture pieces and lamps using recycled materials and old car parts — and everything in between! However, no project has given us as much ongoing satisfaction as our camper trailer (The Shed — April–May 2014). Here’s a review of how we have used our camper, what we loved, hated, and what we have changed over the years from my original build. I hope this provides some valuable ideas…

In this series instalment, we will mix the wood and metal codes by using our metal-working lathe to make stair gauges used by chippies when building a staircase. As I understand it, these gauges are fixed to your rafter square to ensure uniform layout for angle cuts on the stair stringers or on rafters — great for repetitive situations. I can see them being handy as edge guides when clamped to a portable saw base, too. This is not so much a clash of codes as a tribute to the vast majority of sheddies who can turn their hand to a broad range of skills that include carpentry, cabinetmaking, metalworking, and electronics. Even at Prescott Engineering we enjoy coming up with solutions to clients’ problems that involve the use of…

We all are familiar with polystyrene — whether from unpacking your new television snuggly housed in protective casing, or because you’re a tradie using products for drainage, insulation, or a multitude of other purposes. What perhaps we’re not so familiar with is the strides towards sustainability that have been made in recycling this product in New Zealand over the past few years. Leading the drive is Expol, the country’s largest polystyrene manufacturer, who has seven plants devoted to producing and recycling throughout New Zealand. “Expol has been very serious about promoting sustainability for a number of years and perhaps one of the most important conversations we need to has is educating people about the fact polystyrene is 100 percent recyclable,” says the company’s sustainability manager, Cameron Brooks. “Another challenge is…

Four thousand of the distinctive torpedo-shaped 175cc two-stroke motorcycles were assembled in South Auckland by JNZ Manufacturing Ltd between 1960 and 1964. The company, run by well-known motorcyclist Laurie Summers, also put together Jawa motorcycles. The N-Zeta scooters were based on the Czechoslovakian Cezeta scooter, but 25 per cent of the machines had to be of New Zealand origin to escape import restrictions. The tyres, paint, batteries, and wiring were locally made, the handlebars and exhaust were produced by NZ Steel and Tube, and the chrome plating was done by an Otahuhu company. The sheet metal pressings that formed the body, sourced from the Jawa factory, were welded together by VW Motors, the local Volkswagen assembly company, which was also in Otahuhu. Two models of the N-Zeta were built in…

Dear Sir, Good to read your article on the [cigar box guitars], “Outside the Box” (The Shed November–December 2021, issue 99), and learn a little of the maker, Don Buckley. I am a high school technology teacher. We make a box ukulele with Year 9 students (13 years old). Attached is a short YouTube clip, showing how it is made. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=WwT5VPhEZXM This simple instrument was developed in collaboration with Brian Nelson, also a teacher and musician. He is playing the ukulele for the music to the video clip. There have been about 80 or 90 per year completed over the last 10 years, in three schools I have taught in. The ukuleles are normally fairly well finished and most of them play. We fit them with simple nylon strings,…

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Well, of all the things Dad has built for our family over the years, nothing has brought us more joy than that little camper trailer. While initially resenting the fact that our parents could camp in such luxury while my sister and I were forced to live like peasants in our tent, we eventually warmed up to the idea after realising just how much of an impact the project would have on our lives. We couldn’t be more grateful for the amount of camping experiences we have been able to share as a family thanks to the convenience of the camper trailer — and, in all seriousness, our nights in the Oztent were actually not too bad at all. Of course, it helped that the tent only took us a…

Better late than never. Stan is a goofy-footer on the board and did not learn to surf until well into his twenties. “I started on the waves in West Auckland. Someone said to me if you can ride Piha and Karekare, you can surf anywhere.” Now living near Gisborne, he says, “I don’t have to worry about the wind direction any more, because there is always somewhere to surf: reefs, points, beach breaks and the island.” At present his two go-to boards are by Tommy Dalton: A Jet — a short, wide, swallow tail — and a Puddle Jumper, which he says are both perfect for Gizzy conditions. He has plans to make his own board one day and has talked with local operator Red Leaf Surfboards about learning the…

The 31-year-old business owner and serial house restorer relishes a challenge and likes nothing better than taking on a job he knows nothing about, then working towards gaining the knowledge and perfecting the skills needed to make a success of it. His latest venture was sparked by a shed full of tools he acquired in the process of doing up 15 rentals over the past 10 years. “I bought the equipment to do jobs like fitting new kitchens and bathrooms, gibbing, tiling, you name it…” He ended up owning one of everything he needed to get the job done, which got him thinking about all the sheds up and down the country packed with quality tools and equipment that a lot of the time just sit collecting dust. He knew…

It came from a lunchtime-coffee discussion. I was noting the thrust I could put into my recumbent bicycle pedals, and the potential that had for wrecking my knees. Dad noted that at top-dead and bottom-dead centres, all our thrust is attempting to bend our bike frames; only halfway down a pedal stroke are we cyclists fully leveraged. A moment’s pause, then, “What if we started with a right-angle pull?” Quickly he sketched a crankshaft, end on, with a big end — or a pedal — at top dead, and added a two-part linkage to one side, with a fixed pivot furthest away from the crank. Push down in the middle of the linkage, and the big-end point will be pulled at 90 degrees; perfect. Push down further and the pushed…

In this third article of my camper van technological adventure, we will see the fourth onboard computer I installed: another Raspberry Pi 4B, covering a key role in the design of my smart van. I will show how I implemented the driver’s front panel, which is an independent module that can be connected to the camper van network or installed as a stand-alone device. The driver’s front panel will collect information on the trip and manage the dash camera as well as the rear camera — which I showed in the previous article (The Shed 99). The components As discussed in the previous article, the three Raspberry Pi 4Bs installed inside the living area of the camper van — the router/control panel, the Wi-Fi access point, and the rear camera…

During WWI the Austin Motor Company imported and sold several makes of farm tractor. At the end of the war Herbert Austin, the company’s managing director, instituted a one-model policy based on the expensive Austin 20 — probably because at that time, as with electric cars today, most cars were bought by rich people. The Austin tractor was powered by the ’20s engine, modified to run on paraffin as well as petrol; it had a tank for each. It was a copy of the Fordson Model F, where the motor, gearbox, and differential formed the chassis. All Austin tractors of the period had steel wheels. The Austin didn’t have the reliability of the Fordson, and was more expensive, but it was a useful machine nevertheless. The museum’s green 1936 example…