But what he doesn't have is the luxury of space in which to store them.

So the result is a salutory lesson in the benefits of order and organisation with every available space in his compact garage, from the ceiling joists to the skirting boards, allocated to a tool or piece of equipment.

Mr Francis, 68, is disabled and retired. A botched spinal operation has given him an extremely painful nerve condition which burns down his legs and intensifies as the day progresses.

Keeping himself busy is his best distraction and that can be anything from tending the three market gardens in his local community to changing the oil on his Harley Davidson.

His collection of tools numbers in the thousands and range from panel-beating dollies to metric and imperial spanners, both ring and open, and needle-nosed pliers in eight different sizes.

It's a result of his many and varied occupations from chef to butcher, firefighter, spray painter, pilot and owning many different types of businesses, including a large printing works and a motorcycle dealership.

As his lifelong passion is motorcycles, many of the mechanic's tools have been with him since the 1970s when he raced sidecars in New Zealand and won the national championship "across the ditch" in 1976-77.

A potential storage section of his man-cave wall has been sacrificed to his so-called "rogue's gallery" of photos, showing the dozens of motorcycles he built and raced successfully on circuits across New Zealand.

Sidecars are three-wheeled motorcycles raced using a "passenger" who needs the agility of a spider monkey to constantly move from side to side across the bike and out on the single-wheeled platform to keep it balanced through corners.

It's a fiercely dangerous motorsport but Mr Francis says he never had a racing accident "although I may have flung off my passenger once or twice".

His racing passengers were his brother, Gary, and his brother-in-law, Steve, which must have made for some interesting family dinner discussions.

He has had his licence since the age of 15 when "you just ticked the box as how many types you wanted". The first tick was for a motorcycle licence.

His earliest heroes were motorcycle and sidecar racers because "those guys were just mad and bad".

A close examination of his tools reveals another curiousity: some are not bought, but made.

When challenged about how useful his hand-made, long-shanked sockets were because they were racked down at boot height, Mr Francis quickly replied: "Oh, those are fantastic for getting into awkward places; I used them just the other day to remove the bolts from under a washing machine".

He stores his tools according to their extent of common usage with most of the mechanical items at the front, and the woodworking gear neatly packed and stacked in cupboards at the back.

Which begs the obvious question: can he indeed fix anything?

"I can go close," he said.

"The older stuff is reasonably straight forward but not so much the newer stuff, which is packed full of electronics."