The Shed magazine June/July 2025 issue 121 on sale now
With the genealogy of the five generations of South Island engineers in the family, Ross Hayes thinks nothing of rebuilding Land Rovers for fun, family and farm.
Ross Hayes was 17 when he bought his first Land Rover. It was road-legal, but that was about it. It turned out that it was cosmetically covering up a huge amount of rust, so it wasn’t going to make the long haul.
Ross bunches his lips. “I got a bit disheartened and decided that if I couldn’t trust anybody to sell me a good one, I’d build myself one.”
He bought a 1954 short wheelbase Series 1 Land Rover in December ’96, just after he turned 18. “I paid six hundred bucks to a guy out of Naseby called Owen Rawcliffe, who’s since passed. I brought it back to Oamaru through the Danseys Pass and set to pulling it to bits.”
He bought workshop and parts manuals from the UK and a set of Whitworth sockets and Whitworth spanners and got stuck in.
The Mistress, as he came to call this ‘54 Series 1, spent five years, three months in the workshop – 6000 hours – while he pulled it to bits and rebuilt it.
His idea was to start with a chassis, and everything that went onto the chassis was either rebuilt or brand new. It was hard to get parts back then in the 1990s.
A model life
If the phrase “small but perfectly formed” can be legitimately applied to a shed, then Bruce Geange’s Palmerston North workshop certainly fits the bill. In a space of about 2 by 5 metres he creates Lilliputian machines that mimic their full-sized cousins in everything but size. An exquisitely detailed D8 1940 bulldozer is 40 cm long and completely hand-built. Bruce says it took about 900 hours to complete and is completely functional.
Born in Taumarunui in 1935, the eldest of four boys, Bruce was raised on various farms in the Manawatu area, which may explain his predilection for tractor models. A life-long love of modelling started at the age of 11 when he received a No 1 Meccano set for Christmas. As finances permitted he began collecting Meccano, building up to a No 9 set after he began working.
Steampunk toy: Back to the future
Having been bitten by the steampunk toy bug recently I couldn’t resist trying once again to bring the theme to bear on another model. I have always admired the elegant lines of the clinker-built Viking longboats, their savage, war-like image on storm-tossed seas, and the whole mythology of the Viking era. I decided to see if I could combine that vision and steampunk to produce a modern take on the old boats.
As with my other steampunk toys and models, I chose a central element around which to base this one. The ultra-smooth, mirror-like, hard-drive disks I had used as hub caps in a previous steampunk toy are especially well suited to replicate (with a modern twist) the Viking shields that adorned the gunwales of their longboats.
Content categories
Videos
