Years ago Lance White dabbled in making toys from plastic kit sets, but no more. “Wood’s my go,” he says. “With wood, it’s something you’re making and designing yourself.”
The toys he has made include a Mack truck, the Volvo with its low-loader trailer and excavator, the bulldozer and a front-loader backhoe tractor.
But Lance solved the problem of making the Mack truck when he came across the book, Making Toys: Heirloom Cars & Trucks in Wood by Sam Martin and Roger Schroeder in Auckland’s Technical Books outlet.
The details were all there in Making Toys, so he set to work out in the shed. The finished thing is 900 mm long with its trailer 610 mm x 135 mm and some of the details are delightful.
He used pine and South African rosewood for the darker parts. The 160 mm-high cabin was the hardest thing; working on the tread details on the big wheels took a lot of time.
Lance used a Letraset to stencil the name Mack on the top of the radiator and duct tape for the rubber spray flaps. “You have to improvise things,” says Lance.
When you ask him about the scale of the model, he grins. “Well, it’s 900 mm long, but I didn’t know what scale it is. I sort of played it by ear so that it looked right.”

Read more in the April/May 2010 issue of The Shed