Nic Beca, 15, may be dyslexic but easily makes up for it with his remarkable skills with his hands.

Part the tarpaulin curtain, duck the washing line, and enter the world of Nic Beca, 15.

​The dyslexic Kāpiti College teenager may struggle with reading, writing, and particularly with numbers, but he easily makes up for that by what he can do with his hands.

"School can get pretty hard with dyslexia but it is positive in some ways," he said.

ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF Nic Beca's projects are never drawn first. Instead he works from a picture in his head.

In his Raumati basement, he is creating a life-size plane out of corrugated iron and parts from scrap-metal dealers. It will one day soon become a piece of garden art.

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The basement, which he shares with his father, artist Jason Beca, is a museum of projects that catalogue his lifetime of remarkable skill.

Ross Giblin The basement, which Nic Beca shares with his father, artist Jason Beca, is a museum of projects that catalogue his lifetime of remarkable skill.

There are the tiny tool boxes he made out of iceblock sticks and clay when he was five or six years old, and over there is the 1976 Star Trek game an electrical engineer couldn't fix but he did.

From more-recently is the scaled-up Dr Who dog that can be sat in and moved with the view to the outside via cameras wired to screens in the cab.

There is the lathe part he has meticulously restored. In fact, look anywhere in the cramped room and there are more examples.

ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF Nic Beca, 15, may be dyslexic but easily makes up for it with his remarkable skills with his hands.

After homework and dinner most nights he heads downstairs to keep tinkering - often till word comes from upstairs the banging is getting too loud.

Apart from the dyslexia - which he believed helped in some ways - there was a good chance he would show an engineering bent. His great-great grandfather started the engineering firm now known as Beca, and his dad was an artist who did a lot of engineering work.

"I have mates coming around asking me if he can do a job for them - they are bypassing me for him," Jason Beca said.

STUFF Nic Beca's dad Jason Beca is also an accomplished artist.

Nic recently did an eight-day fabrication and engineering course at Whitireia in Porirua where he finished all the assigned tasks in a session-and-a-half. So the tutors set him a new task to challenge him - they gave him a piece of steel, a file, and hacksaw and told him to make something.

"At the end of the lesson he had a beautifully-crafted hammer," his proud dad said.

That hammer was so good, the school planned to frame it to give other students an idea of what to work towards.

His tutor at Whitireia, Punesh Gounder, said the hammer was "designed and built to a standard that I would have expected to have been produced by someone who had been in the industry working as an engineer for many years, rather than a 15-year-old school student".

For Nic, his projects are never drawn first. Instead he works from a picture in his head.

He has already planned a World Of WearableArt (Wow) project – one that will take months to make – but Wow rules are that entrants have to be at least 18 years old.