Every Saturday morning for the past month and a half, we have been gathering at the Nothing Wasted Shed for a session we call Hang Out & Tinker. It’s a space to practise creative reuse, repair, and upcycling – a place for redesigning and repurposing waste and discarded technologies into tools for resilient, convivial, low-energy, and local ways of living.
Each week is energising because we never know who will turn up, what kinds of projects, questions, skills, and ideas they will bring with them and what kinds of things we will find in enormous bins destined for the landfill. Alongside a growing group of regulars, new people continue to weave in and out of the space. Every session has had its own flavour, bringing fresh challenges, unexpected discoveries, and new sources of inspiration.
We’ve been fortunate to partner with Tipping Point on this project. We’d also like to extend our gratitude to Martin Smith, whose support has been instrumental in helping launch this initiative.
Below are some stories of transforming waste at the Nothing Wasted Shed:
Motoko’s Steadycam
Motoko Kikawa is a Dunedin-based artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture, and experimental sound. She arrived at one of our sessions needing a “steadycam” rig for her video camera. She was scheduled to film the performance A Black Line is a Black Hole that Went for a Walk, an experimental performance held in Silo 6 the next day. After some rapid prototyping, Martin and Adam set to work helping Motoko transform a discarded walking frame into a camera rig.
The finished result was smooth, stable, and manoeuvrable! We also added an LED ring light, discarded by a hair salon and in need of repair. We powered it by a 18v Ryobi powertool battery. Motoko testing the rig the night before the Silo 6 performance:
The Many Projects of Chris and Sam
Chris is an electrician who has become a regular at our sessions. His presence is valuable beyond measure and he helps with a wide range of projects.
Chris helping to diagnose and fix a toaster (left). Helping Kristian Larsen to circuit bend an electric keyboard (right).
Sam, another invaluable volunteer, computer programmer, and maker extraordinaire, took home some of the discarded keys from Kristian’s keyboard and turned them into a key hanger (bottom)!
Hannah’s Lamp
Hannah-Lee Jade is a textile artist and designer and Resourceful maker in Residence. She is working on a series of lamps.
Chris helps Hannah to braze a lampshade (left & bottom left). Hannah painstakingly rewires a dead LED energy saver light bulb which will make its way into a lamp (bottom right)
Tansy’s Hand-woven Wire Lamp
Tansy is an undergraduate student at the University of Auckland, studying Design and Physics. After taking Xin’s DES212: Local Making class in 2025, she was awarded a Local Making Fellowship. She joined the inaugural Hang out & Tinker session to develop her hand-woven wire lamp:
We look forward to seeing the outcome of Tansy and Hannah’s projects at our annual celebration, A Year of Resourceful Making.
Bringing Benny’s Dehumidifier Back to Life
As Benny walked in the door, his eyes lit up. Five minutes into our session, taking in the space and the people working away around him, he exclaimed, “I can’t believe that something this good exists in the world!” Benny brought in a malfunctioning dehumidifier, and our regular volunteer Chris, helped him open it up.
They quickly diagnosed the fault as a damaged humidity sensor (right). Benny ordered a new humidity sensor online for $3, and a few weeks later emailed through a photo of the functioning dehumidifier.
Ziyu’s Furnishings
Ziyu has recently arrived in New Zealand and has been joining our sessions, slowly repairing things to furnish her flat. Repaired lamp (left). Repaired coat rack (right)
Xin’s Sewing Machines
Xin noticed that vintage sewing machines are often thrown out, along with the occasional vintage iron.
In 1980, Howard Hutchinson wrote in The Complete Handbook of Sewing Machine Repair:
“Unlike many consumer items, sewing machines appear not to have built-in obsolescence factors, nor have they been traditionally designed to self destruct when the last payment is made.”
With the help of YouTube videos, online service manuals, Facebook groups, and local suppliers, Xin has been painstakingly repairing these machines and getting them ready for use in upcoming workshops.
James Sonic Sculpture
James has been collecting as many speaker drivers as he can for an interactive sculpture about a Pōhutukawa tree – updates to come!
Neil’s Performance Hat
Neil Feather is a remarkably talented, internationally renowned inventor of experimental musical instruments. We were lucky to have him join some of our sessions where he took apart a malfunctioning massage chair in order to harvest motors and linear actuators from it to create musical instruments.
Neil also turned up with a strange electronic rotating hat which he planned to use is one of his performances. In a short time he had completely transformed it:
Maria’s Solar Lights and a Rescued Brazier
Maria has been joining our sessions to design and build a solar-powered lighting setup for her outdoor potting shed. In between working on this, she has worked on other projects. Here she found a brazier with a missing bottom in the scrap metal pile.
With the help of Martin and Sam, a new base was cut from steel plate, and the brazier is now functional again!
Sarvar’s Vacuum Cleaner – and His Boys’ Side Projects
Sarvar arrived in the space with his three boys. He quickly set to work repairing his faulty home vacuum cleaner.
While he worked, his boys stripped down a faulty electric skateboard, replaced the batteries in two discarded ride-on cars, and experimented with other interesting things in the space.
Alex’s buy nothing E-Bike
Alex joined us with the question of whether he could build an e-bike using only materials he could find.
Adam remembered a talk from the Chaos Communication Congress by Niklas Fauth on how to repurpose the powerful motors from “hoverboards” and how to reprogram the built in motor controller for new applications. Alex immediately set about deconstructing a hoverboard and learning to identify the various internal components.
Alex 3D printed a new bevelled wheel/pulley that fitted onto the original motor in place of the tyre. He fashioned a sturdy bracket from angled steel that holds the motor, battery, and motor controller, and attaches elegantly to the seat post using bicycle seat post clamps.
This video shows the inaugural run. Everything worked better than expected -Alex had built a functioning e-bike. The only issue was speed. Adam and Alex have already started working to address this, and the bike is now coasting at between 15–20 km/h. This project will form the basis of a series of workshop later in the year, teaching others what we’ve learned and supporting others to build their own e-bikes.
Each week, we update the whiteboard in the space, documenting all of the projects that have been worked on that week and adding to our tools and materials wish list. The project is iterative and evolving. Our plan is to take everything we have learned and apply it to a new series of workshops in the Nothing Wasted Shed over the next 12 months. We’re there every Saturday. Come and join us!
