If your shed is larger – much larger – than your house, is it still a shed?
This is a question Marty and Zoe Radford might well ponder in their spare time – if they had any. Their house, a well-furnished, modern two-level dwelling, is built into a corner of the sizable factory unit that is their shed.
Let’s start at the beginning. Marty’s petrolhead father had a strange love affair with the German automaker NSU, home of the Wankel rotary engine. A frugal man, he worked two jobs and would never pay for something he could do or make himself, meaning he had little time for the kids (or for the wife, who left) – although that does not seem to have stopped Marty from turning out in a similar mould. Through car club connections, the young Marty, driving his massively overpowered Capri V8, met Zoe, a young solo mum in a luxurious, throbbing Camaro. A petrol-soaked romance became a 23-year relationship, and still counting.
NSU forever
Relics of the Radford Snr’s NSU enchantment can be found amidst the overwhelming array of projects, from finished to almost started, that literally line the couple’s giant shed from floor to ceiling – a shiny NSU Quickly moped, still in regular use; another Quickly gathering dust, parts on the shelves somewhere; and the erstwhile pride of the fleet: the NSU Prinz 1000, still functioning, but hoisted to a high storage shelf with the family forklift (an old Datsun called Tetanus, beautifully refurbished) because it’s not up to the requisite standard.
This was the car in which Marty’s mother drove him to school, a former showroom sample that failed to set New Zealand alight back in the ’60s. It had its virtues, staunchly defended by Marty, but the fact that hot air from the air-cooled rear engine was cycled to heat the interior meant that a leaking exhaust manifold or head gasket could give the passengers a knock-out dose of carbon monoxide. Sub-optimal, can we say?
The to-do list
The Prinz was restored in the early ’80s by Marty’s father, and is now showing its age.
“The last time we used it was at Caffeine & Classics. We went off somewhere and came back to hear two old geezers just grilling the car. ‘How on earth could someone let a car like that get in such a condition, blah blah blah.’ They didn’t know it was ours, obviously. So we took it home and stuck it up there with the forklift.
