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.
Build an Almost Ready to Fly Warhawk
Then there is the relatively new kid on the block: the ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) model.
These come all packaged up in a huge box, beautifully built and packed, with all the hardware. But you do need to assemble them which can take up to a week. It isn’t quite ‘instant plane’ but it does provide some building satisfaction and a sense of achievement, albeit a rather shallow one, a bit like a healthy walk down to the bakery to buy a pie or taking Viagra.
To the supplied kit, you need to add various glues, an engine and electrical components (servos, relays, wires) to operate elevator, rudder, ailerons, throttle, flaps, undercarriage etc. The engine these days could be glow plug, 4-stroke or 2-stroke, electric or petrol.
This part of the hobby is now huge and the range and quality of products is astounding. ARF aircraft kits are readily available from many hobby shops and certainly online from within New Zealand and from lands far away.
Mac N Sea
Piopio in the heart of the King Country – a landlocked area with a village population of about 400 – is the last place you’d expect to find a boat builder. Boat builder Max Laver, however, is well settled there and business is thriving.
Boat repairs, restoration, and making small craft by hand is the speciality of Max’s business, where he works with fibreglass and timber, and specialises in custom-built dinghies.
“We focus on how well we can make a dinghy, not how cheaply,” he says.
Max is a marine surveyor as well as a boat builder.
He spent two years in Lowestoft in England learning City and Guild-level wooden boat building, and finished his time doing two more years learning in New Brunswick, Canada.
In 2009, after many years boat building, Max decided to study marine surveying and the two qualifications work hand in hand.
“I didn’t excel at school as a kid, but I loved to build,” he says.
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