The man who sailed the Herald
Some baked during lockdown and many ate baked goods. But a world-famous Westie created a paper canoe.
How was your lockdown? Did you bake stuff, maybe even make stuff? David Parker, 32, of ra¯tia in West Auckland, made stuff. It’s what he always does. It’s his thing. And the world comes to watch — he’s a YouTube superstar, with over a million pairs of eyes looking at the stuff that he makes in his workspace. “I’ve got half the garage,” he said.
When lockdown began, Parker decided to build a canoe out of paper mache. It wasn’t his first canoe. Neither was it the first thing he made that could take him places. He said, “One day I saw a photo of a wooden bike. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful. I want to make it’. I didn’t really need a bike. I didn’t need a canoe, either. In fact, I’d never really been canoeing before.”
Parker works for a musical instrument wholesaler. He also does sound for the band Avalanche City, and worked as an engineer at Little Monster recording studio.
And so it kind of made sense that the first thing he decided to make was a guitar. He took an old macrocarpa beam lying around the house, and made a lapsteel guitar. And then he started making electric guitars from mahogany and maple. “I’ve got a Telecaster,” he said, “made from recycled rimu weatherboards that a mate ripped off his house.”
He moved on to other things. He made wooden spoons and spatulas, and then found a YouTube site devoted to people who restore hammers. “It’s a big trend,” said Parker. “I had an old hammer head, so I thought I’d try restoring it, and film it really just as a test of my camera.”
That was his very first video. The film of a man in
ra¯tia fixing a hammer attracted 400,000 views.
His video of making a
bicycle out of walnut got 200,000 views. His video of making a knife out of a farrier’s rasp — a tool used for shooing horses — was his biggest hit, with 1.4 million views. A million people watched him build a pizza oven from cement and a volcanic rock called perlite. “I’ve fired it up five or six times, and made great pizza,” he said.
He was inspired to make a canoe after seeing an instruction video made by Parks and Recreation actor Nick Offerman. “It was just one of those things that I couldn’t stop thinking about.” He made it out of cedar.
The canoe he made during lockdown was from fibreglass and paper — one layer taken from the pages of an instructional manual on how to build a canoe (“It’s quite meta”), and about nine layers from that greatest of all paper stocks, the New Zealand Herald.
He said, “I would much rather there wasn’t a global pandemic but I’ve really enjoyed the time at home.
“I always have projects on the go. Usually over Christmas, instead of going away to the beach, I’ll head out to the garage and get on with projects.”
Parker doesn’t drive. He said, “I drove a car once when I was 16 and I thought, ‘I don’t really like this’.”
He’s planning to take out his papier mache canoe when lockdown is well and truly over. In the meantime, he’s got another project in mind.
“I’ve ordered some brush fibres because I want to make some nice wooden sweeping brushes,” he said. “I saw some pictures of one and thought , ‘I need to make one of those’.”
The world will be watching.