When you are pulling apart engines, machinery, and hydraulics, and you need protection to plug off or cap fluid lines, ports and threads, throw away the rags and the tape and contact Hi-Q components.
They stock the Stockcap range, manufactured by Australia’s Sinclair & Rush, who produce hundreds if not thousands of protective plastic caps and plugs for applications including high-temperature masking, shipping protection, contamination control, and health and safety.
For more information or to request a catalogue, contact [email protected], or phone 0800 800 293, or buy online at https://www.hiq.co.nz/
Child’s play
9 May 2025
When you are a carpenter by trade with an interest in cars and still young at heart, making wooden toys has to be the perfect retirement occupation—although many of Alan Gray’s “toys” are not the sort of playthings you would put in the hands of small children. His meticulously crafted vintage vehicles, fashioned mostly from native timbers, mahogany and macrocarpa, can take around 60 hours to make and are more collectors’ pieces.
To keep the real kids happy, he has a more robust range mostly made from pinus radiata— diggers, trucks, pull-along hippos and the like.
Alan, 71, and his wife, Lesley, have been living in Cromwell for the past six years. Originally from Dunedin, Alan trained as a carpenter but turned his hand to fishing after moving to Stewart Island. He then spent the best part of three decades skippering boats for the Department of Conservation.
