Sometimes you never know where a story is going to come from. Most of the time, I do the leg work and go hunting for articles and I often get leads passed to me on interesting people or cool trucks. Occasionally I stumble across a noteworthy opportunity by pure happenstance.
What you are reading here is not any of those – in fact this was never meant to be a story. What all of this started out as was me looking for a cool wedding present for my fiancée, but during the process of preparing my epic wedding present I discovered a whole community of amazingly talented truck fanatics with incredible skill and immeasurable patience. I am going to focus on the man that made my wife happier than me on our wedding day.
That could be interpreted wrong, I am going to focus on the man whose skills made my wife happiest on our wedding day. Nope, that doesn’t sound much better. I am going to focus on Mark Wikaira, the man who designed and constructed a one-of-a-kind Drake model for me to give to my beautiful fiancée on our wedding day.
My pathway to the young Kiwi dad’s Melbourne workshop began way back in the COVID era. Don’t worry, I won’t drag this out, I’ll stick to the cliff notes, but you do need to know a bit. When I met the amazing Michelle Williams, now Aitken, she was working in insurance. That role had little to do with trucks until she got a job with the country’s leading transport insurance specialist, NTI. Working for a company passionate about all things transport, and living with my overabundance of trucking fanaticism, it naturally started seeping into her life and, before you knew it, she’s shooting alongside me, joining me at shows and, most importantly, stealing my Drake model collection for her work desk.
MORE OWNERDRIVER TRENDING STORIES:
- Don Watson Group announces shock closure
- TOTM: Jamesy’s special milestone Mack
- Major NSW highways remain closed due to flooding
- Transport for NSW justifies budget blowout on Dubbo safety station
- Slow burn – inside the ongoing HVNL review
Anyone who has purchased a Drake Collectible knows very well about the Pringles effect – ‘once you pop, you just can’t stop’. My lovely lady was no exception. Her NTI desk was becoming a Mecca for all things Drake. She even ended higher up on Bruce’s Christmas card list than I ever got.
Jump to March last year and Michelle was sympathetic enough to agree to my marriage proposal. It may have been the alcohol intake, but I held her to the yes. To lock in my spot as number one hubby, I went and visited Bruce, Dianne and Mike down at Drake Collectibles to see if they had any really cool, hard to find models that would be great for a wedding day present.
Seeing as everything on the Drake Collectibles shelves classifies as really cool and often hard to find, it was a difficult choice, until Bruce showed me a special edition he had in the office – a custom modified Drake Collectible. This was an entirely new concept to me and opened me up to creating something really special for my beloved. Bruce put me in touch with another model maestro, Len Fletcher, who heard out my idea and he steered me towards Melbourne and the home of Mark Wikaira.
At this stage, this project still wasn’t registering as a story option. I was thinking about a couple of printed stickers on the side with our wedding date and, if possible, a picture of the two of us. Sure, it’s not fancy wedding jewellery, but I knew it would still win me brownie points. The idea of this becoming a story started to germinate when I had a phone call with Mark to discuss the project. He was bouncing around ideas that involved almost rebuilding a brand-new model. Spider rims, extra fuel tanks, recolour the chassis, different bull bars – the options he was throwing out was unbelievable.
When I questioned him about how he did all these things and where he learnt it all, he quite simply said “I’ve just taught myself, with help from a whole heap of online model groups and other model makers”. When I asked if he works in the diecast industry, he informed me “nah mate, I work in railways signals as a supervisor, running projects, doing maintenance, that kind of thing”. Ok, now we have a story.
A railway worker who spends his time pulling apart already perfect diecast models and customising client specific single orders. with a 3D printer, a miniature spray-painting booth and the attention to detail required to assemble three-piece 1/50 scale spider rims and hubs. Yes, there must be a story there.
When I went and visited Mark, I was blown away by the level of dedication to what he attests is just a hobby. The Te Awamutu born Kiwi grew up around trucks and has always enjoyed making models.
“As a kid I was always building the plastic model kits, I loved doing those,” he says.
“I did think I’d end up in a truck, but I shifted over here at 18 and ended up getting a trade with Queensland Rail.”
That job led to plenty of upskilling and enough work that the truck driving idea never eventuated. However the model building was still a huge part of Mark’s downtime.
“I think doing the trade work, the skills and patience that came with that transferred over to the model stuff,” he says.
By the time Mark’s wife bought him his first Drake Collectible, he had all but used up the plastic kit options and Mark started looking at modifying a Drake collectible Kenworth.
“Everyone keeps saying to Drake, you should make this one, or make that one, but the money involved in doing different trucks means it’s not as easy as that for Bruce,” Mark says.
“So that’s why I decided to start doing small modifications, taking the stock models and turning them into custom ones. Bruce has been very supportive of guys like me that are able to customise them and start making our own parts, I’ve even done one for him.
“The second Drake I bought was a black 90h and I wanted to change it to three tanks rather than the two and box. So, I started investigating how to pull them apart – there are a heap of online group where you can learn all that stuff.
“Then I bought a 3D printer and taught myself Fusion 360 and creating my own CADs. I had thought it would be as easy as downloading the designs online, but it wasn’t – I had to do it all myself.”
Once he had some success designing and printing his own tanks and other parts, the world started to open up as far as ideas went. More tools were added to Mark’s workshop to ensure when he was making modifications they were as close to the Drake quality as you could get. In no time at all Mark was tackling full projects.
“I’d been doing small modifications and stickering, but the first one I fully pulled apart and re-did was the DRT one, I designed all the decals from photos and had a guy in Brisbane print them,” he says.
“Now I can do my own. I also stripped the cab back and resprayed that in the DRT Blue. The Drake Fat Cabs are on a longer chassis with heavy haul diffs, so I had to mount the cab onto a highway chassis. I had to 3D print new guards as well.”
After that first one started to leak out online, requests for Mark’s services started to skyrocket. When photos come out of the SRV trucks that Mark created, B-double sets and all, he was getting plenty of requests.
“It has been difficult because they do take a while, especially as I am still working and have a family, but I love doing it,” he says.
“I get lots of offers for the trucks, some I do for people, others I just do because I love the trucks, like the SRV units.”
When he says it takes a while, he means the quality takes time.
“My printer is set at 0.2mm layers, just to avoid any lines, so it can take about four hours to print a fuel tank,” he admits.
It was amazing to look around Mark’s workshop, which resembled an old school toymaker’s lair, with a production line from tear down, to finishing school.
However, it isn’t just replicating on road rigs – Mark’s skills and attention to detail in creating ideas is also impressive. When I gave him what I thought was a simple request, he took it and ran, customising the truck with separate ‘laser cut’ wings down each side, Nikon on mine, along with the Kiwi flag and a signpost displaying the distance to my hometown. On the other side of the truck, the sleeper wings show Canon and it’s the Australian flag and signpost to Michelle’s hometown. The B-double set – well you can see for yourself how personalised he made the entire unit. It went above and beyond what I envisioned and with such skill and detail.
As a kid who would try and assemble my Italeri trucks in less time than it takes to read the instructions, I can’t help but admire the work of folks like Mark. My models rarely ended up resembling the front cover images, yet guys like Mark are replicating some of the coolest gear on the road, down to the coloured spider hubs.
As I mentioned, this whole undertaking was not intended to give me a story to share. I was just happy to have an amazing woman who gets excited by a model truck on her wedding day. However, once I started to learn about the capabilities of model modifiers like Mark, and the passion and dedication they have for their craft, I just had to share.
And before you ask, yes, he is taking orders, but you’ll need to wait. I’ve got my list in already. Well, I should say, Michelle has her orders in.
Subscribe to the weekly Owner//Driver newsletter here.