The Shed 90, May — June 2020

Issue No. 90 of The Shed has a treat for lovers of fast off-road action. We visit the shed of Cowper Trucks, which makes world-beating 597kW 4x4 off-road race cars. Built strong, tough, and powerful in a shed outside Whanganui, this is automotive engineering at its best.
Auckland woodworking supply specialist Carbatec gives The Shed a demo of the Kiwi-designed benchtop drill press that is a real international star, the Nova. This is the drill press reinvented for the digital age.
Our Guide to Welding feature this issue is a bit of a recap and goes over welding techniques for those looking to learn welding, before Nigel Young makes his own belt sander from bits and pieces he finds around his workshop.
And we have the second and final part of our Upcycling a Vintage Dial Telephone project — it’s not about what it is; it’s what it will become.
Bob Hulme is well known to Shed readers as a highly skilled engineer, with his many articles on engineering projects, but he recently decided to build his own wooden shed — how will that go?
Geoff Lewis discovered and spent some time over summer meeting a group of Kiwis who love black powder and get together each year to make and shoot historic old muskets.
In this issue’s Brewers Scoop, Bryan introduces us to the wonders of brewing with green hops, while Mark Beckett is back this issue installing a GPS to make things tough for those who would steal what’s yours when they can.
Murray gets all excited in his Off the Grid column when food just flies into his garden and he suddenly has to learn beekeeping, and Coen Smit has a crack at making some elegant walking canes.
Ritchie Wilson reviews Going by Train: The Complete New Zealand Railways Story by Graham Hutchins, and our BBC Micro Bit expert, Enrico Miglino, shows us how to take further steps in our programming with a guide to MicroPython.
We approach the end of the magazine with a visit to Oamaru to admire the extraordinary work of Rod McLean, who weaves on a 100-year-old Hattersley Domestic Weaving loom, originally designed to give soldiers home-based careers after World War I.
Lastly, Jude Woodside is at the Back o’ The Shed, as usual, this issue confessing to a run-in with the law when he was a young fella — was justice served? You’ll have to read to find out.