Innehållsförteckning för No 102 May - June 2022 från The Shed

Often when we think about who and what we feature in The Shed, we think of traditional workshop skills and projects — do you think that way as well? Let’s describe how to build a log splitter, Kon-Tiki, a power hammer, a table, etc. Our minds head towards those types of projects as they are projects we can use and even admire; they have a real use, a function. It’s just the way it is. However, there is another huge group of sheddies out there whose projects are not furniture or a tool but are for another purpose entirely — maybe even for fun or something just to hold or look at to enjoy. These are sheddies who create art pieces, and in this issue, coincidently, we have three articles…

Paul Clegg of Pukerua Bay won our Father’s Day Ampro workshop 300-piece-plus tool-pack prize worth $3500 late last year. Paul wrote to the magazine informing us what a happy sheddie he is now: “The other day I took a call from the team at The Shed magazine informing me that I’d won their Father’s Day subscription prize. Being a pessimist, I thought Well, hey, I’ve won a pen, but was shocked to discover that I’d won a major prize from the folks at Hobeca Trading Group with a value of thousands of dollars. A few weeks later, a courier delivered seven boxes filled with the most incredible sets of tools. A huge thanks to the suppliers of Ampro and the folks at The Shed for a wonderful prize. The difficulty…

Whenever railway enthusiasts chat, the talk often turns to the gauge of various lines. Gauge is the distance between the inside of the two rails and has almost limitless variations. The first railways were in mines and made of wood. The tracks provided a fairly level and low-friction path for the ore-wagon’s wheels. The gauge would be determined by the distance between the wheels and would vary from mine to mine, but would be narrow to negotiate narrow mine workings, so would have been similar to the width of a miner. When horse-drawn wagons were used on above-ground railways, the gauge would be about the width of the hindquarters of two horses. This was called ‘standard gauge’ and was fixed at 4 feet 8 inches. Stephenson’s Rocket, the first successful…

The CSMEE was established in Christchurch in 1933. After many years in Addington the club moved to its present location at the Halswell Domain, where it has two railway track layouts, a boating pond, enviable club rooms with an extensive library, and, of course, a large locomotive shed. In the loco shed are stored members’ locomotives, boats, and the large number of passenger trolleys used to give rides to the public on fine Sunday afternoons. There is also a workshop where the trolleys are maintained; their brakes are serviced, wheels lubricated, and paintwork refinished on a regular basis. On running days club members use their locomotives to pull up to four trolleys filled with passengers of all ages — with a definite bias towards young families — around the 900m…

1. Assemble control. While stringing, ensure the control hangs parallel to the floor. 2. Attach string to body and thread up through the control at hole A. Secure at a suitable working height (just above waist height for the person who will operate the puppet) by tying a double knot. The feet should just touch the floor with the legs straight. 3. Attach a string to the centre head screw and thread up through hole C. Secure at a length that holds the head in a position that you are happy with. This string is to carry most of the head weight. 4 Find the best point to place the hook on the control for hanging the puppet for storage or display. The ideal position has the control level, or…

As shed locations go, it does not get much better than Rudi’s. It sits at the end of a long gravel road, high above Karekare Beach in the Waitakere Ranges where the only sounds are the chorus of tui and kanuka branches stirring in a sea breeze. The corrugated-iron shed is a deliberate nod to the past. Stepping inside is like entering an early 1900s blacksmith’s forge: clay floors and open beams, antique technology, vintage hand tools, and the faint smell of burnt coal. It is brand new but feels as if it has always been here. Thirty-eight-year-old Rudi embodies a pioneering spirit of discovery and Number 8 wire ingenuity. Whether it is restoring or repurposing old machinery, maintaining his hot rod and his neighbour’s motorbikes, or creating his one-off…

What’s happening online at the-shed.nz? 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: Meccano seems very popular with Shed readers lately. Here’s a project to build a robot arm out of the still widely available product: the-shed.nz/build-your-own-robot-arm Project: These handy stools for bar or kitchen are enhanced when built in macrocarpa: the-shed.nz/build-these-honeyed-macrocarpa-bar-stools Check out our camper-van mods article series with this video from Enrico Miglini: the-shed.nz/video-of-enrico-on-the-road/ Take a close look at the technology of drills with an expert, Kevin Donovan, General Manager, Patience & Nicholson: the-shed.nz/know-the-drill…

Nothing denotes summer as much as a Cape Cod / Adirondack chair. A low-slung chair with a raked back and wide arms perfect for holding a drink seems to epitomise long, lazy afternoons. This design was created in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State where New Yorkers would take their respite from the hot humid summers of the city. It is also commonly called the Cape Cod chair; perhaps it was just as common there — or maybe it’s easier to say. The chair itself is relatively straightforward, and this version is easily fashioned from commonly available material — in this case H3 tanalised pine primed and painted, but any suitable hardwood would do as well. When selecting the timber for this chair, try to ensure you get the…

“An average dad with a passion for tools and creativity, to whom nothing in the shed is a stress,” is how Julian Stone likes to describe himself. He might be being a In his lifestyle-block home in the Waikato, while his wife looks after the horses in the paddocks, Julian tends the horsepower in the shed. The shed is a converted farm pole shed, well equipped and stacked with plenty of old and not so old motors. Julian’s IT background has given him the skills to create a vibrant web presence with two websites: NZ Classics (nzclassics.com) and Messed Up Motors (messedupmotors.com). NZ Classics is a platform linked to a number of Facebook groups for selling classic cars, hot rods, vintage cars, and old tools. Messed Up Motors is his…

The sculpture was originally called ‘Dark Meccano’, linking Meccano and the innocence of childhood play with a foreboding dread. The name shifted to ‘Dark McCahon-O’ — a play on Colin McCahon’s dark landscapes — then a serendipitous discovery of the archaic word ‘vue’ led to Dark Vueccano (Vue: the viewing slit in the visor of a knight’s helmet). The name itself lends further meaning to the piece, pitting innocent echoes of a carefree childhood against harbingers of doom, habitat loss, and an uninhabitable planet.…

In this part of the series, we face the second part of the software that I developed to manage the four Raspberry Pi 4 — the user interface. As mentioned in part four (The Shed, Issue No. 101), the Raspberry Pi that manages features such as network routing still has sufficient processing power to drive a user interface. The user-interface style adopted for the two interaction points — the driver dashboard control panel and the main control panel — has to be: • easy to use • lightweight • easy to connect to hardware data • easy to maintain • modular. Adhering to these requirements, I have opted to use Node.JS with Node-RED as the front-end development platform, integrated with Node-RED, natively available in the Raspbian Linux operating system (the…

Computer-based technology is changing the modelling world just as it is transforming most other areas of life. The ability to use 3D printers to make scale-model versions of complex engineering components relatively quickly and easily has been a boon. Take the coverings of the axle ends of rolling stock. The full-sized items are cast-iron plates, often with a logo, such as SKF, NZGR, or BR, cast in high relief on them. To make a very small number of accurate, small-scale versions in metal would test the most able modeller. However, 3D printing allows these items to be easily made to a high standard in polymer, which, when painted, is indistinguishable from metal. Some of the signal lights on the CSMEE track layout are mounted in housings that have been made…

My cell phone rang. “Ordinary jokers aren’t getting heard,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Is that right, mate?” I replied. “Yes, we’re not getting a fair deal,” he said. Apparently, this guy has been attempting to access a social agency to help him with a few reasonable requests. However, he was rejected because he was not considered a priority or deemed to be at risk. Undaunted by this, he found my website and contacted me, hoping for some advice. Now we’re chewing the fat. What’s ordinary? I asked my guy what his definition of ‘ordinary’ was, just to clarify what he meant. He proceeded to elaborate: “Well, Mark, an ordinary joker can back a trailer, wears comfortable underwear, mows his own lawns, washes the family…

The factory that made more drill bits than any other in Australasia burned to the ground early one morning in January. Nearby houses were evacuated as it was feared that poisonous gases could be produced by the fire. Neighbours said that the heat of the fire, the largest in the Canterbury town of Kaiapoi for many years, was intense. A container-load of drill bits was sent to Australia about every three weeks Oil used in the tempering of the drill bits found its way to a drainage ditch and entered the nearby Cam, Kaiapoi, and Waimakariri rivers. Firefighters managed to stop the blaze spreading to the separate engineering section, where some of the factory’s machinery had been made. When The Shed visited a week after the fire, the devastation was…

LETTER OF THE MONTH In the February/March 2016 issue [No. 65] you published an article by Jude Woodside about installing a Hafco 320G lathe in his workshop. He mentioned flushing the headstock to clear the manufacturing crude out. Well, I can go one better. I bought mine in 2020. In 2022, I pulled mine down to fix the headstock leaks (loose fixing screws for the gear-shaft seals). Imagine my surprise to find not only two teaspoons of crude in the headstock but also a spare 30mm cap screw rolling around in the bottom of the headstock case. Had that been picked up by the gears, the results do not bear thinking about. In a later issue, Bob Prescott recommended a modification to the cross-feed lever. I copied his modification but…

There’s off the grid, then there’s really off the grid, then there’s so far off the grid that you have one all to yourself. Australian Ben Carlin qualifies for the third category; from 1950 to 1958 he circled the planet in a WWII amphibious jeep, crossing two major oceans and enduring a hurricane in the process. Not bad, considering that most ‘Seeps’ went straight to the bottom on their first immersion. Carlin’s combination of talents — fitter, engineer, thinker, strategiser, seaman, and raconteur — puts him right up there; a sheddie extraordinaire. This wee project started when I loaned a fellow a copy of Carlin’s first book — Half-Safe, published by Andre Deutsch — which I’d rate as one of my half-dozen all-time favourite reads. The fellow returned the book,…

For 10 years, Robin Wilson has held the position of loco foreman at Christchurch’s miniature railway, which is run by the Canterbury Society of Model and Experimental Engineers. The loco foreman has responsibility for the certifying of model locomotives, the issuing of locomotive driving licences to club members — all of whom are volunteers — the assigning of club locomotives to drivers on running days, and the general organisation of the large locomotive shed that the CSMEE operates on its site in the Christchurch City Council–owned Halswell Domain, alongside football fields, a skate park, and a children’s playground. As well as being the kingpin of the loco shed, Rob is also a life member of the CSMEE and club secretary. The current project Rob is an experienced and very prolific…

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