EDITORIAL

Anyone who has perused the pages of this magazine over the years will undoubtedly know that I have an obsession with workshop spaces. To me, this is almost as important as the projects that reside within, and I think you can tell a lot about a person by the shed they keep. It’s something that has dictated the living situation for my ever-supportive partner and me every time that we’ve shifted.

I’ve been lucky to have had some pretty special workshop spaces over the years, from the Kerikeri party pad, complete with garden bar and huge gravel skidpad, to the Remuera mansion where I soda blasted and painted shells — much to the neighbourhood’s dismay — to our Penrose shop, where I built the rotary E36.

When building the Penrose shop, I was under strict instructions that we would have to leave when we became parents, which happened. Anyone who knows the Auckland property market will know that it’s a real struggle; getting a house within budget is hard enough, let alone focusing on the shed size over the state of the white picket fence. But we took the risk on a site that no one else wanted, and it just so happened to have a rather large, yet quirky, shed on it.

The last year-and-a-half has been full-on building a house to live in, so setting up the shed was neglected. I kind of just gave it a lick of paint, slapped up some artwork, and existed in there. However, with the house now coming to completion, it’s finally time to dig in and get it set up and looking/functioning the way I have it pictured in my head.

Far from your typical garage, it’s been built on poles due to its location, which means it has a rather thick wooden floor. While that might give it an aesthetic that recalls the car shed in Days of Thunder where they build the Daytona car, it’s certainly not the ideal floor surface for chassis set-ups. I had a ton of larch plywood offcuts, so lining the walls has been my most recent project, before chucking up my Initial D wall art from the old shop, as well as some other artwork that I’ve been hoarding.

This will be a work in progress, as I’m kinda fussy about this sort of thing and want it all to mean something to me personally. As with any workshop, keeping the place clutter-free is the biggest challenge, but two mezzanines now hide away most of those parts I’m hoarding ‘just in case’.

To keep the metal mess confined, I’ve built a small fabrication room off to the side, something I’ve long wanted in every shop; seriously, that crap gets everywhere. Long term, I’ll make use of the large unused space under the shop that has internal stairs by building a machine shop. Lighting is all LED — long gone are the days of big power-hungry fluros — and I even managed to score some vintage shades out of an old ’50s-era factory to focus light in the shop’s centre where the midget will live between race meetings.

The shift to racing speedway means that I needed to be more mobile, so everything is on castors, from the tool boxes to the wheel rack, work benches, and obligatory pit cart. That means we can ship out for some late-night hype on a Saturday and then roll everything back in the shop come Sunday, ready to get repairs under way.

I’m about halfway through finishing the space, and, with a full summer of racing coming up, it’s going to get very busy. At least this time my bedroom doesn’t have a direct door to the shop (eh, Michelle?).