Tabla de contenidos para No 101 March - April 2022 en The Shed

Our cover story this issue is about setting up your own CNC router in a home workshop. Who would have thought that such an amazing piece of kit would become available for home workshop use at such an affordable price? It is an incredible asset to a busy home workshop as it can perform many, many tasks that are usually the domain of large carpentry or metalwork businesses. This router works out at about $1400 all up, not bad eh? I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised; we have been enjoying this glorious digital age for some time now — what do you reckon, 30 years? When I started in this magazine publishing lark back in 1989, it was my introduction to a computer: an Apple Macintosh. It was used for…

Covid-19 and the lockdowns of the past few years have had something of a halo effect for some industries. “When we went into the first lockdown, I was prepared for the toughest year in the 10 years I’ve been with the business,” explains Miles Donald, NZ branch manager of Machineryhouse, “but despite everything we were flat out in 2020 and recorded significant growth in sales — and it hasn’t stopped. It’s been record breaking.” The only downside has been the increasing struggle to recruit staff to join the burgeoning business. “We carry a huge range of product and focus on the engineering side, from sheet metal, woodworking, and automotive right through to storage, and cater to both big business and DIY. We placed ads in November last year for staff…

So you’re back into the swing of the year but perhaps didn’t quite get all those projects finished that you had planned to do over the holidays. To help you get your decorating projects done, we’ve asked the Resene experts to share some of their top tips: Break it The thought of painting a whole house can be a little daunting. Rather than try and tackle everything at once and end up with a muddle everywhere, break your project down into smaller parts, ideally to take a weekend or so. Then you can focus on finishing one part at a time before starting the next. Not only is it more motivating when you can get stuck in and finish in a couple of days, it also means that your home…

To grow good plants, it is important to have good soil. Healthy soil has good physical, chemical, and biological fertility. Too often in the home garden, people concentrate on the chemical aspect by trying to control the acidity and also hoping some liberal handfuls of a general fertiliser will do the job. I know I have done that in the past. It is now evident that the biological health of soil is vital and that by over-applying fertilisers we damage all those important microbes. These bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, and protozoa form a community within the soil that essentially processes organic matter. By doing so they turn nutrients into a more available form for plants to absorb. We usually see indicators of good soil condition such as earthworms, but microbes…

The magic Before working on some new components to improve the camper van, it’s time to take a look at the magic that keeps alive the hardware I presented in the first three instalments of this series. In this fourth episode of “Enrico on the road”, we forget the tools on the bench and dive into the Linux world. The bare sources are available on GitHub: https://github.com/alicemirror/JanTheVan — explaining the logic and principles behind the internal network. In the next episode we will complete the software components, including the control panel interface. The software architecture The core of the camper van electronics focuses on four Raspberry Pi 4Bs; the software development has been in the Raspbian Linux environment — the Debian version of Linux specific for the Raspberry Pi. “To…

Owen uses a range of bone, tusks, and teeth, however for beginner carvers he recommends cow leg bone, which is solid and reasonably thick, inexpensive, and available from supermarket butcheries, farmers, and home kill. Cow bone is hard and rather brittle, whereas deer antler is softer, fibrous, more flexible, and breaks less easily. There are eight antlered species of deer in New Zealand. Emu is quite brittle — he uses this along with ostrich leg bones for flutes; and makes small carvings out of tagua nut, or vegetable ivory – a legally available material that grows on palm trees in South America. Whale bone, theoretically, is flexible, he says, and harder to come by. Mammoth bone, 40,000 years old, can be legally imported from Alaska, Canada, and Russia. A solid…

We all know much more about epidemic diseases than we did a couple of years ago. We know that a disease-causing organism is called a pathogen. We are also more familiar than we were with the ways a pathogen can jump from one victim to another. The agent of transfer — fleas in the Black Death, used needles in HIV/AIDS, mosquitos in malaria — is called the vector. Drinking water has, over the centuries, been an excellent vector. In the early days of European settlement in New Zealand, if you weren’t drowned crossing a river in flood — known as ‘the New Zealand way of death’ — you would probably die from typhoid in the embryonic towns, due to the very common contamination of water supplies by sewage. In 1993…

When stacking timber, ensure the boards are filleted to stop them touching and getting mildew. “Once the timber gets that fungal discolouration, you cannot sand or stain it out; you end up with firewood.” Mark the timber before it’s machined to get a grain match after it has been through the saw. “Even the borer matches up! Saves a lot of time at this end.” Moisture is not only a killer for timber but for sanding belts, too. “I keep mine in the container, and save and use the old belts for working with recycled timber; if it’s got paint and stuff on it, use them, because if it clogs up, you don’t have to worry about it.” Clean air “All the air that comes out of the guns, including…

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: How to make a handy English Wheel https://the-shed.nz/make-anenglish-wheel Unpublished photos from our visit to Tempero coachbuilders https://the-shed.nz/unpublished-photos-from-the-shed-issue-93-tempero-coachbuilders Video of dollshouse makers Peter & Linda Brocklehurst https://the-shed.nz/video-of-dolls-house-makers-peter-and-lynda-brocklehurst How to make an elegant planter box https://the-shed.nz/elegantplanter-box-on-a-tablesaw…

Alive centre or dead centre that fits the tailstock of your lathe is necessary to support solid workpieces. However, you need a pipe centre to support hollow tubular items at the distant end from the lathe chuck. Without this support, a long workpiece may not be rigid enough for a good finish. Sizing may also be erratic as the workpiece is pushed away from the cutting tool. With care, you can meet the challenge to produce a pipe centre as a really worthwhile piece of equipment. When you need a pipe centre, you might not have time to make it so my advice is to make one ahead of time. I have drawn a simple design first as I am the sort of guy who needs a clear picture of…

Alibre Workshop and new Alibre Design Version 24 Alibre workshop is a CAM program bundled with a CAD program that gives you all you need to get started with your design and machining projects. It’s the ideal solution for people and small businesses that make things on router tables and smaller CNC machines. Alibre workshop is not over-complicated and easy to learn. It’s available from only NZ$648, plus GST. The new Alibre Design V24 brings real-time 3D previews in sheet metal workspaces. Productivity and performance are beefed up with the improved lofting and new file menu. The equation editor and save function have been overhauled, with significant improvements to sketching, parts editing, and general performance. Install it on your computer with no hassles — new licence prices start from NZ$335…

Everybody in New Zealand has the right to apply for a permit to cut up a whale, Owen advises, however as far as he is aware Pakeha will not be given a permit by the Department of Conservation (DOC). “DOC hands over stranded whales to the local iwi. So the local iwi gets whatever they want — bone, teeth, maybe oil from time to time. In my case, when I started carving in the late '60s, I could cut up a whale on a beach and nobody took offence. DOC might come past, police might come past, local iwi might come past, and nobody raised any concerns with me. As far as I was concerned, I was rescuing a precious material and honouring the dead whale. So in the '60s…

Reid Wilson has always enjoyed tinkering around with tools making things, and by the time he was 14 he had his own woodworking workshop, complete with power tools and machines. “I spent a lot of time researching woodworking on YouTube and reading and buying books,” he says. Reid heard about the Launch it, School to Work programme, run by the Marine and Specialised Technologies Academy of NZ (MAST), through his careers advisor at Pakuranga College. He decided to investigate apprenticeship opportunities in marine cabinetry. When he went for an interview at Lloyd Stevenson Boatbuilders (where he is currently doing his apprenticeship) and learnt they weren’t offering cabinetry apprenticeships at the time, Reid (19) decided to give boatbuilding work experience a shot. “I soon realised that I enjoyed this just as…

Special thanks to Peter McCurdy of the TPS for his contributions to this article Appearances can be deceiving and that certainly is the case for the Toroa ferry. While enormous progress has been made — including the renewal of the steel framework — none of this is visible to passing commuters who see it from the adjacent motorway. They only see the superstructure and timber work that has yet to be tackled. Seaworthy? Not yet. But despite first impressions, her refurbishment to an operational and authentic state is well underway. “The perception is, ‘Oh, they are not doing anything’. But there are hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man hours that have gone into the hull, which is invisible from the outside,” says Toroa Preservation Society President, Robert…

Our hot-water cylinder (HWC) was made of copper and so had some value as scrap. It has been reported that the price of copper has increased by about a quarter in each of the past two years, reflecting the increased world demand for the metal. For instance, an electric vehicle (EV) contains about four times as much copper as the equivalent internal combustion engined car and, as the proportion of EVs in our car fleet increases, more and more copper will be required. The copper cylinder had to have its pipe junctions and electrical connections removed and to be extracted from the encasing foam insulation and the galvanised sheet steel shell. This is a messy process, generating a large volume of waste, and my broker recommended that I bring the…

My efforts at composting in the past few years were limited to throwing unwanted vegetation in a pile near the back boundary. Now I have this raised veggie garden, I thought it was about time I got more organised. Many years ago, I built a series of three compost bins with timber sides like picture frames with wire netting on them. These worked really well as the composting material could ‘breathe’. Plenty of aeration is important; otherwise the compost goes slimy and smells awful. This time, I tried a new idea that my wife spotted on the interweb. This simply involves using a roll of heavy-duty plastic netting (it won’t rust). Coiling it out to a diameter roughly the same as its height seemed about right and then tying the…

It is said Stephen Morse devised the taper system as a way to drive the twist drills he invented because drill chucks had not been invented at that time. When fitted into an identically tapered hole in a tailstock or machine spindle, a tapered drill shank has amazing grip and a lot of power can be transmitted through this purely frictional connection. In mathematical terms, the slighter the angle of the taper the tighter the grip that can be produced when the two parts are put together with a brisk push. However, we then need to get them apart again without too much trouble. Back in the 1860s, Morse settled on a taper of approx ⅝-inch per foot (15.8mm per 304.8mm) as the best compromise to give excellent grip yet…

When master bone carver Owen Mapp, CNZM, began carving bone and ivory in the 1960s there were no teachers and no bone carvings being sold commercially, so he had to learn just by doing it. “I was the first one. There were a few jade carvers but nobody was interested in the materials then and I had the field to myself,” Owen says. He has developed his practice and passion for the art form over 50-plus years, creating original works that are strongly influenced by Māori history, concepts and design; as well as Scandinavian, Asian, and Japanese netsuke designs, symbolism, and traditions. His carvings have a palpably sensual, at times erotic quality, an expression of his reverence for life in its myriad forms. “I believe in the magic or spirit…

For the past few months I’ve been cobbling together a Meccano set. The excuse is that grandchildren will have rainy-day entertainment when they visit. The real reasons are probably nostalgia and straight-out indulgence; I’ve always loved this medium. A quick online search of Meccano exhibitions — check out the 4WD Bugatti! — will tell you that I’m not entirely alone. Our first collection came home in the early ’60s; Dad swapped his 1936 Rudge 500 for it — and, boy, were there debates about that over the years! It would have been somewhere near a Number Six set: one big clockwork motor — a 1a, I’ve found out recently — one small one, and a drawerful of red-and-green-and-brass that promised unlimited possibilities, the way an unwritten page does. I can…

To repair the various holes in the Gib board wall linings, I cut pieces of plasterboard just larger than the openings and made two tiny holes in the middle of these patches through which I threaded a short length of welding wire to act as a handle. I then smothered the front surface of the patches with gib-stopping compound to act as an adhesive, slid the plasterboard patches through the holes, jiggling them into position so that they sat symmetrically behind the holes, and held them in position with the welding wire wound around a small stick. Next day the patches were firmly stuck to the inside of the wall lining. The welding wire was pulled out and the cavity in front of the patch filled with more gib-stopping compound…

The first thing you notice when you step inside Graham’s shed is how spacious it is. Fitting really, as he is a big man with a penchant for making large wooden furniture. Most of his workstations and weighty machines are on castors for portability, accessibility, and making room in the shed to turn built pieces around. The building started life as a milking shed and separator room for the dairy farm that once occupied the property. Before Graham moved in he added windows, battened the exterior, knocked out a wall or two, and poured the concrete floors. “Some people collect cars or have beach houses,” he says. “I have my shed; it’s my mental health space.” Graham’s passion for timber goes beyond building furniture. From milling and drying to restoring…