63 Rue Lavaud, Akaroa Aotearoa NZ
Bonjour, kia ora, welcome to Le Petit Atelier. We’re turning a cottage built around 1868, on Akaroa’s main street, into an open workshop. Inside: a repair café, a small recycling line, tools for the people who protect Banks Peninsula’s wildlife, and lessons for any age. Every design is published free.
We’re not open to the public yet, and the first repair café date is still to come. Here’s what we’re building, and how to join in.
The house rules, all four
If a project breaks one of them, we don’t build it.
If it doesn’t fix a thing, give a thing a second life, or look after the Peninsula, we don’t build it.
Plans, files and code are free to download, rebuild and improve. Nothing held back to protect a product.
Dead printers, offcuts, bottles and boxes before anything new. We buy new only when salvage can’t do the job safely.
No closed, unrepairable or throwaway brands, and no claim we can’t check in the workshop ourselves. Every sponsor is named on screen.
Six tracks, three levels
Six strands of work, one small workshop. Each project lands in one of them, and each comes at three levels — beginner, maker, expert — so the same work serves a nine-year-old and an engineer.
Levels
du déchet à la matière
Bottles, boxes, print waste and dead electronics turned back into useful material.
réparé ici
A free Saturday session, once a month, to fix broken things together — and print the parts nobody sells.
pour la presqu’île
Cheap, tough electronics for the people protecting Banks Peninsula wildlife.
pour tous les âges
Every project at three levels, so the same work serves a nine-year-old and an engineer.
l’atelier
Fitting out an 1868 cottage without putting a single screw in its walls.
en direct de l’atelier
Every build filmed from the first day, failures included.
Recycling, starting with one bottle
Plastic waste leaves the Peninsula on a truck. We want to turn some of it into material we can use here. We start small — a bottle machine, Le Nez the plastic identifier, sorting bins — and grow towards one modular line, the universal recycler.
Step 1: A bottle
A clear drink bottle from a local café, washed, label and glue off.
PET 1, wall ≈ 0.30 mm
then, cut
Step 2: A ribbon
The MK6’s cutter peels the bottle into one long, even ribbon.
strip 8 × 0.30 mm
then, 210–220 °C
Step 3: A hot nozzle
Pulled through a hot brass nozzle, the ribbon curls into a thin tube of filament.
die drilled Ø 1.6 mm
then, 900 mm/min
Step 4: A spool
Wound onto a spool, then dried before it goes near a printer.
≈ 5–9 m per 1.5 L bottle
then, dry 4–6 h, 65–75 °C
Step 5: A spare part
Printed into something that’s missing: a new knob for a repair-café toaster.
print at 260 °C
Town plan
Rue Lavaud, Akaroa
Across the street from the organic refill shop, about 800 m along the waterfront from the Main Wharf.
Elevation: LINZ / Environment Canterbury, CC BY 4.0. Streets and buildings © OpenStreetMap contributors. Dashed offshore lines are drawn, not soundings.
Heritage NZ List No. 5337, c.1868
The workshop is one tenancy in a timber-and-iron cottage built around 1868. It has been a church, a lawyer’s office, a house and visitor accommodation. It’s a Category 2 historic place, so nothing we add is fixed to it.
Every bench, shelf and panel stands on its own and can leave in a day, with the building left as we found it. Repair before replace, applied to a whole building.
The loud, hot machines — shredding, melting, pressing — run off site, in a garage. The cottage stays quiet.
Status, 28 Oct 2026
Right now we’re finishing a machine that turns drink bottles into filament — the plastic thread a 3D printer melts to make things. Safety comes before any machine runs, and we’re sorting the electronics we already own.
Now
Oct–Nov 2026 / Recycling
Print the last parts of the Recreator3D MK6, fit the hardware, run the safety checks, then pull the first filament from a clear bottle.
Nov 2026 / The workshop
Smoke alarms, extinguisher, fire blanket and an electrician’s check before any new machine is switched on.
Nov 2026 / The workshop
Photograph and sort the electronics we already own into labelled bins, so we don’t buy what’s already in a drawer.
Next
Impact, counting starts now
Every kilo is weighed and every repair counted. Estimates are labelled as estimates. A quarter with poor numbers gets published unchanged — that’s the point.
Kept out of landfill
Our headline number. Counting starts with the first weighed bin. Only what is actually repaired or reprocessed counts.
| Measure | Count so far | When counting starts |
|---|---|---|
| Things repaired | 0 items | Counting starts at the first repair café. |
| Plastic made into filament | 0 kg | Counting starts with the first spool from bottles. |
| Devices harvested for parts | 0 devices | Counting starts once our battery and e-waste routes are confirmed. |
| Designs published free | 0 designs | The plans are being prepared for publication. This counts up when they go online. |
| People taught | 0 people | Counting starts with the first session. |
| Traps instrumented | 0 traps | Not before the trappers ask for it. |
On the bench
Twenty projects, from a row of sorting bins to a wildlife camera. Each one has an honest status.
Recycling
One modular line for household waste and e-waste: identify it, take it apart, sort it by physics into clean streams, then make something new.
Architecture and most modules drawn. Nothing built yet beyond the first machines.
Teaching & kits
Two touchable 3D maps — all of Banks Peninsula and the Akaroa town centre — printed as tiles from open elevation data.
The map-making pipeline works and two test tiles are ready to print. Nothing printed yet.
Repair café
A free monthly morning where neighbours bring broken things and fix them together. When a plastic part is missing, we measure it, model it and print it.
Planning. The first date is not set yet; it will be announced on the mailing list.
Recycling
A small machine that cuts a drink bottle into a ribbon and pulls it through a hot nozzle to make 3D-printer filament. Built from an old printer.
Print pack ready, donor printer inventoried. Hardware still to buy; no filament made yet.
What was built, repaired and published, the first repair café date and the honest numbers. No spam, no tracking.
Broken electronics, clean bottles, caps, offcuts. Batteries out at the door.
Tell us what you still do by hand.
Repair café dates and launch news, about once a month.
Volunteers, schools, trappers, partners.
Every build filmed, failures included.
coming soon
Free, open-licensed.
being prepared