’20S BOARDWALK MOTORCYCLE REPLICA
WELD YOUR OWN BBQ TROLLEY
MARCH–APRIL 2018 ISSUE 77
IT’S TIME TO SORT YOUR OWN water supply
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theshedmag.co.nz
SOLDERING TIPS & TRICKS
SHEDDIE’S UNIQUE TOYS
Contents
ON THE COVER
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Rainwater harvesting
A guide to setting up and good practice to collect water. Do it before you are made to.
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Frozen in time
Visit the shed of an Auckland refrigeration manufacturing business which has shut its doors for the last time
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With these easy steps, we show you it’s not that difficult
Trolley busted? Throw the BBQ away? Never, weld a new one
Make a bow
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BBQ trolley
Boardwalk racing motorcycle
A sheddie recreates a 1920 American racing bike in his Christchurch shed
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Steampunk toys
Coen uses a vivid imagination to create some extraordinary toys
Oamaru Steam & Rail
A team of enthusiasts keep the steam trains running in the railway sheds near the town wharf
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A cut above
Enjoy the work of two South Island wood millers who have their own unique approach to prepping timber
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A Canterbury sheddie creates unique and desirable pottery
Get a few tips and tricks in part one of We move up a level in our skills and a two-part series print out a camera
Pottering about
Soldering tips
3D Printing part three Fires Part 4
Every issue
1 Editorial 18 News: round and about the world of The Shed 20 Readers’ letters 36 Subscribe to your favourite Shed magazine 122 Back issues order form 124 Men’s Sheds listing: find your nearest group 126 Bookcase: get your sheddie books here 128 Back O’ The Shed: Jim returns to Wigram Air Force base and recalls what could have been
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Finish of your block fire with a perfect plaster finish
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Going for gold
A Kiwi tradie takes on the world and beats them all
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Sawmillers
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TWO SOUTH ISLAND SAWMILLERS ARE SOUGHT AFTER FOR BESPOKE TIMBER PRODUCTS AT EACH END OF THE SPECTRUM — ONE USING CHAINSAWS AND THE OTHER TINY HANDMADE BLADES By Sue Allison Photographs: Juliet Nicholas
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Lloyd Knowles: sawmilling
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he smell of macrocarpa and scream of saws greets visitors to a family-run sawmill up a valley behind Motueka where Lloyd Knowles specializes in making one-off timber products, often with intricate profiles, for do-it-yourself builders, renovators, and furniture-makers. “We make a whole range of stuff, from weatherboards to architraves, as well as replica mouldings using different profiles. We just make a pattern to fit whatever they want. ‘Negative detail’ is the flash term,” says Lloyd, who runs the business with his wife, Diane. Most requests for bespoke work come from Golden Bay and Motueka. “A lot of people around here are doing their own building now, especially baches.” Lloyd’s father ran a small mill on the
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“A lot of people around here are doing their own building now, especially baches”
property in the 1960s before turning to tobacco farming. “He made the mill up from parts, starting with derelict steamdriven machines hitched to a tractor and adding electric motors. The gorse grew up through it and you couldn’t even see the sawmill when I got there,” he says. Lloyd was working as a joiner in Motueka in the 1970s before hanging
Above: Lloyd makes all the knife steels by hand, cutting new ones to specific profiles if they are not already in his collection. It takes a good eye and a fair bit of maths to replicate the negative detail of samples to be copied. He has 200 little patterns and drawers of curved knives and set-up gauges in the workshop
up his hammer to resurrect the mill and build a house. “I made all the windows and cupboards before I left, then just had to build a house to put them in and hope they fitted,” says the droll sawmiller, who claims that he built the house, where he and Diane raised their family and their daughter now lives, with a skill saw.
Fruit boxes
In 1985, he transformed an old lean-to barn below the house into an operational mill and from small beginnings grew it into a boutique business that now employs a full-time staff member as well as the couple and their son. “We started out making pallets for the kiwifruit industry,” says Lloyd. “Next they wanted trays. Little boxes out of thin bits of wood. One year I The Shed 77 March/April 2018
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Rainwater harvesting
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rain, rain, come again PRESERVING OUR MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE PRESENTS SOME DISTINCT CHALLENGES By Jude Woodside Photographs: Jude Woodside
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ater is becoming political; it won’t be long till we are taxed for it or paying for how much we use. Climate change will only exacerbate this as droughts become more frequent. It will soon be incumbent on all of us to preserve and reuse water. That is already the case in Australia where many states insist that new homes have water tanks, and grey-water tanks are often mandatory too. In New Zealand around 10 per cent of the population relies on tank water, mostly rural or coastal properties. Others use tank water to supplement their town supply for gardening and other purposes especially where usage is monitored and charged.
Mandatory harvesting
New Zealand is blessed with ample supplies of water, in the main, but even we can suffer from seasonal shortages in regions according to the weather. The east coast of both islands has quite significantly reduced rainfall compared with the west coast or central regions. In areas where the water supply is problematic or will require large investment in infrastructure to secure in the future, some district councils such as Kapiti have passed by-laws so that all new dwellings from 2008 on must have a 10,000-litre rain water tank or a 4000-litre rain water tank and a grey-water diversion system. ď ˝
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Racing motorcycles
Art of
g n i r e e n i g En CHRIS GORDON USES SKILL AND ARTISTRY TO MAKE RACING MOTORCYCLES IN HIS SHED By Ritchie Wilson Photographs: Juliet Nicholls
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Chris doesn’t race bikes himself, he enjoys building them
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hris Gordon has been devoted to the internal combustion engine since his earliest days when his next-door neighbour was a motor mechanic. At 14 he was a crew member for Ron Collett, who successfully ran a Top Eliminator class dragster at strips throughout New Zealand. His Chris Gordon Racing Team won the 1998/’99 125cc New Zealand Road Racing Championship, with well-known rider Dennis Charlett riding a Honda RS125 that Chris owned and prepared. Chris and his team ran the bike in the 125cc class at the Australian MotoGP at Phillip Island in 1999.
Milling machine
Chris has also from a very early age made things: models, an electric bicycle, an electric go-kart, a fibreglass road-registered scratchbuilt car, and a 500cc V8-powered Grand Prix racing bike. He has a minimalist approach to tools and equipment, but to make the racer’s V8 engine he had to buy and master a small lathe and a serious large and highly capable milling machine. The alternative would have been to get the machining and development done professionally. Chris calculates that this would have involved thousands of hours of very expensive machine time — say, 3000-plus hours at $100 per hour. That’s a lot of money.
One of the many jigs Chris made. In this case, for the machining of the V8 racer’s crankcase
This is a Bridgeport-type mill made by Luxcut, and it has a very useful digital readout that allows much improved resolution and hence more dependable operation. Chris has used the machine to produce parts for his bikes and the very many gigs and mounts needed when undertaking precision machining.
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The crankcase patterns for the V8 engine