A life-size plane – in schoolboy’s garage
Part the tarpaulin curtain, duck the washing line, and enter the world of Nic Beca, 15.
The dyslexic Ka¯piti College teenager may struggle with reading, writing, and particularly with numbers, but he easily makes up for that by what he can do with his hands. ‘‘School can get pretty hard with dyslexia but it is positive in some ways.’’
In his Raumati basement, he is creating a life-size plane out of corrugated iron and parts from scrap-metal dealers. It will become a piece of garden art.
The basement – shared with his father, artist Jason Beca – is a museum of projects that catalogue his lifetime of remarkable skill. There are the tiny toolboxes he made out of iceblock sticks and clay when he was 5 or 6, and the 1976 Star Trek game an electrical engineer couldn’t fix but he did. A more recent project is the scaledup Dr Who dog that can be sat in and moved, with the view to the outside via cameras wired to screens in its cab.
And there is the lathe part he has meticulously restored. In fact, anywhere in the cramped room and there are more examples.
After homework and dinner most nights he heads downstairs to keep tinkering – often until word comes from upstairs that the banging is getting too loud.
Apart from the dyslexia, which he believed helped, there was a good chance he would show an engineering bent: his greatgreat grandfather started the engineering firm now known as Beca, and his dad was an artist who did a lot of engineering. ‘‘I have mates coming around asking if he can do a job for them – they are bypassing me for him,’’ Jason Beca said.
Nic did an eight-day fabrication and engineering course at Whitireia in Porirua, where he finished the assigned tasks in 11⁄2-sessions. Tutors set a new challenge: they gave him a piece of steel, a file and hacksaw and told him to make something. ‘‘At the end of the lesson, he had a beautifully-crafted hammer,’’ his dad said.
It was so good that the school planned to frame it to give others an idea of what to work towards.
His tutor at Whitireia, Punesh Grounder, said the hammer was ‘‘designed and built to a standard that I would have expected to have been produced by someone who had been in the industry working as an engineer for many years’’.
For Nic, his projects are never drawn first. Instead, he works from a picture in his head.
He has planned a World Of WearableArt (WOW) project that will take months to make but the event’s rules state that entrants must be at least 18 years old.
His projects are never drawn first.