Innehållsförteckning för No 109 June - July 2023 från The Shed

You know how it went. You started your working life in your teens, working 9–5 Monday to Friday in a job that ticked a few boxes – such as an income; if you were very lucky, it was a job that you really wanted and enjoyed. Then that wonderful creation eventually arrived, called ‘The Weekend’, and it was your time to do what you really wanted and really enjoyed. I reckon that it’s what you did in those weekend moments that actually dictated the person you ended up becoming today. For me, it was not spending the weekend writing stories or reading newspapers but an obsession with entertainment and music. What I have ended up becoming is an entertainment supplier using words and photographs to achieve that. A couple of…

FAST FACTS NUMBER 3 Did you know that NZ has lost hundreds of retail outlets over the past 10 years and there are now many less places to buy magazines? With less places stocking magazines, it makes them harder for you to locate a copy of your favourite magazine. Subscribing means you never miss an issue, it’s delivered to your home, and you save $s over the retail price when you choose to subscribe. SUBSCRIBE TODAY ONE YEAR $79 SAVE 26%! SIX MONTHS $43 SAVE 11% ONE-YEAR DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE FROM $29 TO SUBSCRIBE VISIT MAGSTORE.NZ OR CALL 0800 727 574 The Shed magazine subscription terms and conditions: • Prizes/Gifts are as stated, not redeemable for cash and the publisher’s decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into. •…

In general, because almost all of the heat arriving from the sun is absorbed by the ground, and the air in our atmosphere gets most of its heat from the ground, the air gets colder as you get further away from the Earth’s surface. This means that the warmer, less-dense air near the ground can easily float upwards through the cooler, denser air above it. Being hot, the matter produced by a fire – a mix of gases and small solid particles – naturally moves upwards because the hot mixture is less dense than the cooler air it is floating through. The mixture, of course, is smoke and, as we know, smoke rises – usually. Just as warm ground heats the air, so cold ground cools it. This is what…

The Canterbury branch of the Vintage Car Club of New Zealand (VCC) held its first public swap meet on the weekend of 8–9 September 1976, at its site at McLeans Island in Christchurch. The meet proved to be such an overwhelming success that it has been held every year since that date, except during the Covid lockdowns. Each year, the number of swap sites has increased; there are now regularly more than 500. Colin Hey is a well-known member of the club. He has been the organiser of the annual Canterbury All British Day for 35 years, having introduced the event in 1988. I clearly remember the day in 1988 when my phone rang and Colin asked, “What are you doing?” “As a matter of fact, I’m reading in the…

Fast panel fixing Panel fixing has just been made a whole lot easier with the Button-fix system, distributed by Hi-Q Components. Designed and manufactured in the UK, the simple but extremely robust system offers five main types of button-fix connectors. It’s a cinch to use — just attach the buttons to the background structure, attach the mating fixtures to the removable panel, and push the panel firmly until the Button-fixes ‘click’. Button-fix is ideal for so many applications that demand an invisible panel-fixing system, and the Special Button Marker and Fix Marker tools help to ensure fast, accurate installation. For further information, contact Hi-Q Components, sales@hiq.co.nz, or order online at hiq.co.nz. Gases for the ultimate shield Welding takes skill, knowledge, and patience, which is why you don’t want your job…

Many sheds are not lined, and for most this is not an issue. Given that my neighbours are reasonably close, and I live in a place with noticeably very hot summers, I looked at lining and insulating my shed as part of the project. I also knew that if I didn’t insulate the shed during construction, I would find it difficult to ‘get around to it’ once machines, power, etc. had been installed. The first thing to do was insulate the north wall with the same type of insulation as used on the roof. Care was taken to keep the insulation out of the cable ladder – now within the wall profile – so it did not create a significant derating issue for the cables once installed. What do you…

In two weeks, I’ve attended three gatherings – not that I had to leave home for the second one. They’ve made me think deep, long, and hard about community, friends, support, life, and priorities. So I told her I was moving out to the shed – just kidding! The first ‘garden party’ was a 50 years of hang-gliding reunion, limited to those of us who partook in the first decade: 1973–’83. Talk about a bunch of old renegades ageing disgracefully. Interestingly, several of us were still sporting long hair; yet these days I can walk the length of Dunedin’s main thoroughfare and be the only one. What was it about that echelon of people? We congregated on a lifestyle block near Rangiora – a sea of remembered and part-remembered faces;…

The Woodsman Serene log burner that I purchased was manufactured by WH Harris. I contacted the company and was invited to visit its factory in central Christchurch. I was conducted around the large manufacturing area by Richard Harris, great-grandson of one of the company’s founders. The process starts with the loading of a stack of large sheets of 8mm thick steel plate into the computer-controlled laser cutter. The steel is made at Glenbrook, just south of Auckland, by New Zealand Steel, from the North Island’s west coast iron sands and scrap steel. Richard Harris speaks highly of the quality of the steel and considers it to be greatly superior to imported steel, which they have used in the past. The laser cutter is Italian and cost well over a million…

Many of us can recall schooldays when a trip to the local hobby shop with our hard-earned pocket money rattling in our pockets meant the beginning of hours of work on a kitset model aeroplane or car – sanding, gluing, and painting our favourite models. Ah, the smell of glue permeating the house – which Mum always complained about when you were supposed to be doing your homework, the wafting fumes giving you away! The result was usually something that we proudly displayed in a glass cabinet or hung from the bedroom ceiling for all to see, testament to our skills and patience. An eye for detail Few developed their hobby to such a high level as Invercargill scale modeller Gary Petersen. Gary’s eye for detail and his constant striving…

In late April, the city of Ghent, Belgium, hosted the annual Ghent Maker Fair (makerfairegent.be/nieuws), an exhibition dedicated to all the crazy inventions of makers in Belgium. On the fair’s opening night of 30 April, the Belgian Power Tool Drag Racing Championship entertained the visitors in a one-off event. Popular in many countries around the world, this is a spectacular race of electric ‘vehicles’ powered by 220V AC and built with one or two power tools such as drills, chainsaws, and any other kind of electric-powered hand tool. The only rule is that it must be a tool that can be used by hand. In the next issue of The Shed, Issue No. 110, I will give more detail on the challenge. If it sounds like your kind of fun,…

It’s easy to have a dream for a new lifestyle; it’s a little harder to marry it to reality and actually generate income while enjoying it and staying loyal to your original concept. My wife and I had a dream of selling handcrafted furniture. After completing a full-time course at the Centre for Fine Woodworking in Nelson and working for other fine craftsmen, we moved south from Nelson to Arrowtown and set up a woodworking venture. People often ask us about how we made the crucial decisions in those early days – such as where to set up shop and how to allocate our limited budget for machinery. We could have worked out of a shed, barn, or even our home garage, but we opted for a relatively small 100m2…

In part five of this series, we learnt about lofting. Sweeping is kind of like lofting, but it offers the ability to go around corners – in fact, just about any path you would like to stretch a shape out along. To begin with, we will have a play about with sweeping, then we will apply the technique to improve the vee pulley example that we have used in the past couple of parts in this series. Let us play Fire up the Alibre Atom 3D program on your PC and click the Create New Part icon on the home page. You should now see the workspace screen with the three planes represented (Fig. 1). It is easy to change the aspect of the view by moving the mouse around…

markseek@rocketmail.com Today’s appreciating classic motorcycles were once commonplace, often parked on the kerbside outside office blocks or found leaning against grubby factory walls. These time machines are now highly prized, polished, and ridden by gents in snug-fitting leathers. It could be an inline six-cylinder Honda that resonates with you or the crackle of the infamous ‘Widowmaker’ from the lads at Kawasaki. Each relic of the past is intrinsically fixed in our memory banks. We have all known the apprentice who snaffled a brochure on the way home from the dealer on Wednesday night only to return on Saturday morning with his entourage of leather-clad mates, eager to see him throw his brown pay packet down on the counter as a deposit on the latest Barry Sheene replica. So where did…

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 and rural areas increase to 140. We have a team of Regional Reps who attend to sheds and public inquiries: Northland, Auckland - David Broadhead 021 324 762 regrep1@menzshed.nz Waikato,…