The Shed 88, January — February 2020

For many of us Kiwis, summertime can mean it’s time to dig out the family tractor.

Because summer means beach-holiday time and using that good-old-boy tractor to get the fishing boat in the water as often as possible.

To celebrate our love of old tractors, we head south to meet a tractor restorer from Oamaru, one Colin Harvey, who has shedfuls of tractors and spends all his time tinkering with and restoring some great classic farming workhorses.

Des Thomson is back in this issue, showing how to make our own PVC moulding machine. This device could save you a fortune and enable you to make your own plastic products like sinks, basins, and much more. It’s an easy project using a fair bit of waste wood lying around your shed.

Part four of our Learning How to Weld series is on welding aluminium, then we head off to New Plymouth to meet up with ex–stock car racer Albert Gordge. Albert is refusing to retire gracefully and thought he would have a bit of fun by putting an extra engine in the rear of an old Morris 1300. A terrific yarn this one.

In this issue’s Brewer’s Scoop, Bryan Livingston discusses how far home brewing has come these past few years, and then Enrico Miglino gets upcycling a rare Brionvega desk lamp to LED illumination and USB power. 

Murray Grimwood gets really off the grid on a trip to the Auckland Islands, coming across a lot of old abandoned sheds, and he shares the island’s history with us. Emil Nye shows us how to make pieces for the historic game of Kubb, and with summer now upon us, we revisit our very popular How to Build a Pizza Oven, by Robin Overall.

We have the second and final instalment on building a musical box using BBC Micro Bit, we visit the workshop of mechanical legend Mike Hobson in Feilding, and Hugh McCarroll gets building a sturdy clothes rack for his niece’s Lord of the Rings costume-hire business. It’s quite the design challenge.

There’s a real creative close to this issue when we head to Rarotonga to see how local Riki Adamu’s business has stopped using a machete to carve out its native timber ukuleles and now uses sturdy power tools, and in the Back of The Shed column, Jude has a poem with a Christmas wish from a sheddie to Santa.

NOTE: All retail and subscriber copies of this issue come with our first ever The Shed calendar. This 2020 Shed calendar is also onsale with single copies sold via our Magstore online shop as well as being available to purchase separately - while stocks last.