How a PhD student on a tight scholarship accidentally stumbled into car flipping, learned to wrench, and funded skiing, surfing, and road trips across New Zealand.
Moving to New Zealand for a PhD sounded straightforward on paper. The scholarship covered tuition and a living stipend, but the reality of Auckland rents and a student budget made it clear pretty fast that the numbers didn't quite add up.
The first instinct was to lean on what I already knew: electronics. Picked up broken phones, laptops, and gadgets from Trade Me and Facebook Marketplace, fixed them up, and flipped them. It worked well enough, but the margins were thin and sourcing good buys took real effort.
Around the same time, a car needed to go. It was a Honda Integra, a DC2 acquired because it looked cool and was cheap. Once it was cleaned up and listed, it sold faster than expected and for a decent return. That gap between what was paid and what was received felt significant. And unlike electronics, nobody was really competing at the rough end of the car market.
That accidental profit from the Integra kicked off something that ran for the better part of three years.
Learning to wrench
There was no mechanical background to speak of. The first few cars were mostly cosmetic flips: detail, clean, photograph, list. But curiosity kept pulling toward the broken stuff, because that was where the real margin lived.
YouTube became the workshop. For anything that came up, timing belts, suspension bushings, brake calipers, head gaskets, there was almost always a walkthrough online. The New Zealand car community helped too. Joined a few club forums and Facebook groups where people freely shared advice, sourced hard-to-find parts, and occasionally loaned tools.
The learning curve was steep and occasionally expensive. But over time, the kind of cars that could be rescued and resold started to become clear. Rough, low-mileage JDM imports with cosmetic issues were ideal. Aussie imports with deferred maintenance were worth a look. Badge-engineered variants of popular models that most buyers overlooked were consistently undervalued.
What the money paid for
New Zealand is an unreasonably good place to be if you have a bit of money and free time. The garage funded skiing at Whakapapa, surf lessons on the West Coast, camping trips through the central North Island, and a long road trip around most of the South Island.
None of that would have been possible on the scholarship alone. The cars made it work.
This collection
The garage on this site is a record of some of those vehicles, not a showroom, but more of a logbook. Some have proper write-ups, some are just photos and a few notes. A handful have stories worth telling in full.
If you're here wondering why a tech person has a collection of cars and motorcycles: now you know.
