Portrait of an artisan

18 year old Johnny Mines with his 180kmh JRM special in 1962.

After nearly fifty years of on and off car racing Johnny Mines has won the Sports Car Club of NZ’s 2011 series in a sophisticated racing car he designed and built himself. Along that journey Mines, a cheerful petrolhead,  has revelled in his considerable talents as a designer, engineer,  yachtie, electrician, and metalworker.
For a young fellow the odds didn’t look all that good. Johnny Mines is dyslexic and as he cheerfully confirms, was not easily able to absorb school education. When he was young he found reading and writing extraordinarily difficult. Dyslexia was not recognized as a problem in those days, they just thought he was thick. So after primary school (Miramar South), he spent a couple of years doing engineering at “Tech” (Wellington Technical College) until he was 15, and then set off on an electrical apprenticeship.
For a man with little formal education he’s left quite a mark.
Most noticeable are those nikau palms which decorate the airport and support the Wellington Public Library.  When architect Ian Athfield designed those,  he chose Mines to make and erect them.
“The man is an artisan. It was an extremely difficult job, which he made look easy,” says his friend John Goldswaine. “Part of making the palms included wrapping the trunk in copper sheathing.  It looked like an impossible task because it had to have no sharp edges.“Johnny dreamt up this machine which folded an edge of the copper sheathing as it came off the reel and wrapped it round and round the trunk so that each layer overlapped the next and made the trunk look real.”
Goldswaine describes Mines as a superlative engineer, practical designer, and superior welder all in one.  He mentions that years before hydraulic pipe benders were available, Johnny Mines had  designed and made one for himself so he could bend stainless steel pipe without it wrinkling.
There probably weren’t too many people optimistic about Mines’future when he left Tech. But he built his first two seater racingcar, the JRM Special all by himself at the age of 18 out of bits, and still has the certificate which shows it could do 111mph (nearly 180kmh), pretty fast in the early 1960s.
By 1967 he’d built his second JRM Special which he kept for a year before he sold it because he needed the money.
Work as a marine engineer at the Shelly Bay boatyard added to his skills as did buying an 11.7metre hull and singlehandedly turning it into the keel yacht Tortuga which he sailed and lived in for a couple of years. (It’s still going strong and for sale again on Trademe as this is being written).
He sold the boat he loved to buy a house and start a business fabricating stainless steel parts for the marine industry and industry in general. Mines says now “Selling the boat was not a bad thing because you don’t often make money out of selling cars and boats, but at least with a house you’ve got a chance”.
The stainless/engineering  business has lasted for the best part of 30 years.  He kept on making things, - land yachts were a temporary phase. On land there are remarkable stairways and balustrades standing proudly in Roseneath and all round Wellington which attest to the quality of his work. “Ian Athfield  has no trouble making wonderfully complicated drawings” says one of Mines’ customers, his friend Graham Moore “but executing them takes a craftsman. The stuff he did at my house is a work of art.” And as the years went by he confirmed himself as the man to talk to for tricky jobs like the nikaus.
Ten years ago Mines thought he’d get back into motor racing, and he found the JRM2 he’d sold 35 years earlier hanging in the ceiling of a car museum in Te Puke, bought it, fixed it, and raced it in the NZ Historic Racers series.  But he didn’t take too long to decide he needed something more competitive.
In 2004 he bought a 200hp motorcycle engine, made a clever modern chassis out of a design he had somewhere in his head, and singlehandedly built himself the third JRM Special.
The first three seasons in the NZ Sportscar division were learning how to make it go faster  then he came second in the series two years in a row and this year he modestly admits that won the series.
Fellow car racer plastic surgeon Dave Glasson, has nothing but admiration  for Johnny Mines saying “He’s a good driver, highly experienced, very competitive, keeps modifying his car to make it go faster, is very generous and falls over himself to help other racers who’ve got problems.   He’s got an ability to put a finger on a problem, and know what to do about it.”
Mines has now ‘retired’ though not from motor racing. He makes intricate bits for Sir Peter Jackson’s vintage aeroplanes,  specialized parts for John Goldswaine’s air rescue support systems, and takes private jobs that interest him.  What’s in the wind? A couple of years ago someone said “I’ve got something of yours.” The something was the 1963  JRM1 special, in bits in an Auckland shed, some 25 owners down the track. It was all there including the original gas welded front wishbones still looking sound. He bought it, and might even put it together again.
John Bristed