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Architect, designer, sailor. Add lateral thinker, enthusiast and passionate Kiwi to the mix and you have the CV of a Christchurch man who has made it his mission to put Maori waka back on the water by marrying traditional knowledge with today’s technology.
Quentin Roake’s goal is to find a way to build waka in numbers, recreating the appearance and characteristics of traditional craft in a modern version that is portable, durable, and economical to manufacture.
“The big question is, how do you translate the traditional form of canoe into modern materials? You can’t cut down a big totara tree every time you want to make a canoe,” he says.
Quentin’s quest for a solution involved consultation with tohunga waka (canoe experts), including Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr and Sir Hekenukumaingaiwi (Hector) Busby, and led to Nga Waka Tangata kaupapa, a collaborative project to develop contemporary forms of waka.
Everyone knows that at some stage you need to blame your tools (after the other excuses have run out), and like most things you can pay a little money or a lot, and sometimes there is little difference in the result … or so it would seem.
The purpose of this article is not to separate you from your hard-earned cash, but to share a few tricks and provide some information to make an informed choice when buying equipment.
Everyone knows that the best soldering iron is some large lump of material that you throw into the fire until it is red hot and then apply to the job and hope that some of the exploding material fuses the bits together.
That might work for joining two bits of metal together but it is not going to work for electronics.
Soldering electronics is not only mechanical bonding, but also making an electrically conductive joint. The solder used has a particular temperature range and too hot will ‘cook’ the joint and make it porous, while too cold means it sticks to one or other part but doesn’t bond.
From Rust to Rrroarrr Part Two
As featured in The Shed magazine, February/March 2025 issue 119
A six-part magazine series on the restoration of a 1952 AJS Motorbike
PART TWO – Metal plating:
The secrets of successful nickel plating
In part one of this restoration series, Peter described how he started rebuilding, as cheaply as possible, an old bitser AJS 500 motorbike, and discussed the start of his nickel-plating tasks.
For this Rust to Rrroarr project, he has decided on a nickel-plating finish instead of chromium for his AJS. In this part two of the six-part series, Peter describes his nickel-plating process
The Shed magazine is eclectic, informed, and always fascinating. Aimed at those with a few tools and perhaps a few clues: this is the magazine for real sheddies.
Packed with ideas, projects, advice, and peeks into other people’s sheds providing inspiration, ideas, and techniques, or just for the sheer enjoyment of the sheddie’s endless inventiveness, The Shed is the project enthusiast’s bible.
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