Building a great deck for typical Kiwi indoor-outdoor living is on every home-owner's list at some point. The deck we are building here is a fairly normal slatted timber deck less than one metre high. This article is an overview of general steps in building a deck and is intended as a broad illust...
In creating a fully automated target, with spring-back target buttons controlled by microprocessors, I was able to compare the workings of Arduino and PICAXE. Arduino and PICAXE are two very different devices—like comparing a revolver and a shotgun. There are smaller Arduinos and bigger PICAXE...
When designing a house, first build your giant shed where you can make joinery for the house-to-be. That was the thought of Julian Pirie. But he was to take a special route—he decided to model his barn-like “shed” on old-style English oak barns, typically housing Aston Martins in magazines p...
Without knowing electronics, it’s easy to tackle this small robot which demonstrates how a machine can be programmed to back off obstacles it hits. Mark Beckett helped to construct his daughter Hayley’s easy-to-make “HaloBOT” which is controlled by PICAXE. You can follow the building proce...
Restoring old motorbikes and cars is Dad’s passion. The garage is home to four of Dad’s prize beauties all lovingly semi-restored in various stages of TTI (Time Till Ignition). The projects in question are two cars: 1956 Wolseley 6/90 Series 1 and 1935 Hudson de Lux 8 (side-valve, straight-eig...
This project to make a stool was developed as a way of introducing students to a number of basic wood-bending and shaping techniques, whilst also giving experience in several useful applications of the router. The stool consists of two legs in the form of continuous steam-bent hoops or arches, whi...
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Feb / March 09
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As the light began to dissolve the gloominess of a dark spring morning, 70 young Polynesian voices sang in harmony while the building in front of us was unveiled.
In the previous issue (Dec/Jan 09) we focused on the boiler for a small steam engine. Now we come to interesting part—the engine. Although daunting at first, it is fairly logical if tackled a small step at a time. The use of a lathe is desirable but with a little lateral thinking it would be possible to make it without one.
Even its builder struggles to identify the DNA of his latest creation, a reverse trike. The mother is a Mini breed, mixed with Morris Marina, possibly Nissan, maybe Anglia. The father is purebred Honda 1100 cc V4 motorbike. Well not quite purebred, the rear wheel is “homemade”. What has emerged from “Mad Geordie” Alan Sutton’s shed is apparently a reverse trike with a Mini front and Honda motorbike rear.
Wanaka woman Maggie Barton has built a substantial drystone wall and never once considered it was work. Rather, she said, it was a passion. And while she concedes it has been physically demanding, she says it has been a whole lot more rewarding than working out at the gym. Neighbours and passers-by have followed her progress with curious interest as the great wall, more than 100 metres long, gradually took shape and reached its splendid final form.
A keen Southland observer of the stars has a DIY shed with a telescope so whenever Ray Murray goes AWOL, his wife Pam knows where to find him—either in his engineering shed or in his “home away from home,” the backyard observatory. Ray, or The Globman to his astronomical friends (from his love of globular clusters), is a man of many talents, all of which he attributes to his parents.
A basic third-world cooking technology, the bucket stove makes sense for a Kiwi home