Naomi Arnold meets a Collingwood man embarking on a community project of Leviathan proportions.

In the late 1970s, a bicycle mechanic and bookseller called Lee Post moved to the coastal Alaskan town of Homer to run a bookstore with his mother. Post was also a natural history junkie, and volunteered at Homer's museum. It had recently come into possession of a set of beaked whale bones, but staff were too busy to assemble them. Post thought he'd have a go. Couldn't be much different from bikes, could it?

That led to 15 years of building up the osteology collection at the museum by salvaging, preparing, and often articulating animal skeletons, and in the 1990s he turned his experiences into the definitive bone-builder's manuals. The guides, which have now expanded to include nine volumes, instruct people on how to turn a dead animal - moose, bear, sperm whale - into a clean set of bones, and then how to assemble the bones into a complete articulated skeleton.

Naomi Arnold Alan McLean and a pilot whale vertebra he is cleaning as part of the process to build a skeleton for the Golden Bay Museum.

These books have become Alan McLean's Bibles. And, in fact, McLean often finds himself in need of divine intervention on his quest to build a pilot whale whale skeleton for Takaka's Golden Bay Museum, which will be the first small provincial museum in New Zealand to have a complete whale skeleton on display.

The process is expensive, frustrating, fascinating and, he doesn't mind admitting, sometimes completely daunting. He's learning it all as he goes, from the tail to the beak: dead whale selection, flensing, soaking, scraping and eventually wiring the cleaned bones together.

McLean, 58, a self-employed electrician and amateur photographer, lives in the country near Collingwood. "I couldn't live in Takaka," he says. "Too many people."

He got into the whale-building business – though he's certainly not making money out of it – when an old friend called up and said she was in town gathering the bones of a rare pygmy right whale that had stranded at Pakawau. The bones were destined for the Otago Museum, and McLean, who has taken photos on nature expeditions all over the world, said: "You'd better have a photographer."

In the process, someone mentioned that the Golden Bay Museum would like a whale, and after going through the correct processes with Manawhenua ki Mohua, the Department of Conservation, the Collingwood and Golden Bay museum societies and other interested bodies, McLean found himself volunteering to turn a bloated, stinky whale carcass into a gleaming museum quality specimen to fire the imaginations of Golden Bay children for decades to come. There was no question what breed he wanted. Though DOC staff told him there was a veritable larder of whales to choose from out on Farewell Spit, McLean wanted a pilot whale, because pilot whales are Golden Bay.

Pilot whales are actually dolphins, one of the largest in the family. Also known as blackfish, they regularly strand on Farewell Spit in their hundreds - so often, and so many, that Golden Bay is known as the pilot whale stranding capital of the world.

The mass distress and the refloating attempts draw everyone from quiet, practiced locals to hysterical animal lovers who croon to their charges as the long tide washes around the whales' hot flanks. Some are refloated successfully, but many don't make it. The Spit is one massive whale graveyard, and though the bodies were once left on the sandhills for wind, rain, animals, and bacteria to take them back to the earth, authorities now tether them in the bay and let the tides take them away instead.

John Ward-Holmes, of Manawhenua ki Mohua, says pilot whales have been stranding there for as long as anyone can remember – forever, probably. It's likely pilot whales were an important early food source for local Maori – a large hangi pit has been recently discovered, whalebone and oil residue scattered around.

"It's a really sad occasion to see them dying by their hundreds, and I don't think anyone knows why it happens," he says. "People and DOC do their best to get them out alive, but you can't do any more than that."

It took McLean nine months after saying yes to getting his hands on a whale. Once it was all sorted, he organised a container in the grounds of Rockville Museum, filling it with baths in which he would soak the whale's dismembered remains.

He then went out to pick his specimen. The bones of the first whale he chose – "I picked the one with the nicest eyes" – was a 3.2m female teenaged long-finned pilot whale, a victim of the February 2014 stranding, her body abandoned among the remains of 71 others. He did not name her. "I don't speak whale," he says.

He went out and built a fence around her to save her from wild pigs, and before he disturbed it, John Ward-Holmes said a karakia for the beach, the whales, and the body.

McLean's 15-year-old neighbour Jonathan Franke helped him find the finer bones that had been lost in the sand and gathered dimensions for him. Then McLean and a few others washed her bones in the tide and brought her back to his container, where he put her bones in the heated baths to start the long soaking process.

A whale expert from the Netherlands happened to be in Golden Bay and heard what he was doing, and came along to check out his operation and offer advice. McLean, conscious he was a beginner whale builder and his setup was humble - the museum driveway is fenced with a length of blue twine to stop cattle roaming into the carpark - stood before his container and made a little speech.

"Now look," he said to the Dutchman. "I don't mind admitting I'm not an expert but I have a system, and if you can see a better way of doing something it would be very helpful." But when McLean opened the door, the whale expert said: "This is amazing."

All was going well. But he had her ribs out of the baths, her vertebra just about ready, and her skull and flippers still soaking when her bones started turning black in a mysterious, unstoppable, excruciating process he has yet to identify. He couldn't put a black-boned whale on display, and he couldn't bleach the bones – that would destroy them. It was Christmas, and he couldn't get hold of any experts to give him an inkling into what might be happening.

"At that stage I wanted to crawl up into a ball and cry," he says. Two weeks later, there was another stranding. He said: "Oh my God. Here we go again."

The tides were wrong, and his container might still be contaminated with whatever bacteria caused the blackening, so he scrubbed it down in the morning, and in the afternoon drove 45 minutes to Farewell Spit. He walked 18km down the beach, well beyond the point where the public are prohibited, and inspected every carcass. The stranding was massive - one group of 52, another of 72, and 20 or 30 more all dotted along the beach. Then there were the whale bones that have been there for decades, slowly sinking into the sand.

He chose another female, 4.3m long and at first breeding age. University of Otago paleontology lab technician Sophie White, who has family connections with Motueka iwi, showed him how to flense her. He rang up "wonderful" Collingwood Area School science teacher Garry Lewis, beseeching him for help. Lewis sent out two 17-year-old biology students, Pearl Maddock and American exchange student Molly Bolt, who donned masks and lab coats and crouched on the Spit, among the muck, maggots, and blubber, to help butcher the four-metre carcass.

"They were great," he says. "Just the fact that someone was there helping me was enough. It's a pretty grim business. But it's life. Or death. However you want to look at it."

The next day, DOC mentioned that he might want to reassess his occupational health and safety procedures. That was fair enough, McLean said, who by then was struggling, overwhelmed with the heat, the smell, the size of the whale, and the complexity and responsibility of putting her back together.

"I said: 'I appreciate completely what you're saying. I'm way out of my depth - I can't even see the surface'."

On the third day, DOC rangers Mike Ogle and Simon Walls came out and the three of them finished off, scrubbed the whale's bones in the sea, and dropped them off at his container. A few days later he went back and there was a bone lying by the door. That's odd, he thought. He would never be that careless – and then he realised a wild cat had got into his container and made off with two decomposing ribs.

"I said: "I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to cry".

He spent the rest of the day cutting the meat off the bones, telling himself he'd find the ribs later. He put all the scrubbed bones back in the heated bath, and got his system going again.

Today, he's still got a way to go before he can start assembling his second whale, taking each vertebral disc and twisting it gently to see which one fits into the unique grooves on the vertebrae. He'll pop the dense little ear bone into a prong on the skull, and wire together the flippers its the wrist-like bones.

He's discovered the smell of soaking bones is not that bad – rather like leaving out a pot of pea and ham soup for a couple of days. McLean tests the bones to see how well they've been cleaned by leaving a few in his hallway. If he comes home, sniffs the air and can smell whale, he knows has to go back and work out which one still needs its oil removed. The project is all-encompassing - he has bones in his conservatory, whale-soaking water feeding his monstrous tomato plants, and Lee Post's whale building Bibles scattered on his kitchen table.

"It's a community thing I'm doing – it's nothing for me," he says. He's involved the local kids as much as he can. Central Takaka School students painted a smiling blue whale sign to adorn his container, and he's got a grid of printed-out photos posted on the inside of the container door for when he opens it up for education purposes.

"That's what it's all about," McLean says. "I try and involve them as much as he can." The kids, he adds, ask the best questions, including: "Why is it dead?"

The Pakawau Rural Women's organisation has come to have a look, and he's visited every school in Golden Bay as well as hosting classrooms and school holiday programmes. He even took a flipper to Collingwood Area School and dissected it for them in class; most held their noses and walked out.

He is paying for much of it himself, though the Golden Bay Museum is set on raising $17,000 to cover some of his costs.

"I'm always one for a challenge," he says. "It's been absolutely fascinating, the people I've met and what I've learned. It has just been really wonderful."

It may also be the beginning of a lifetime obsession. Three sperm whales stranded on the Spit at the end of 2014, and DOC has had the bright idea to make a display of them at the entrance to Takaka. They asked McLean if he wanted to have a go at it, and he did not hesitate.

"I said yes. What else could I say?"