World Urban Art

Alex creates with various metals, including steel. His technique can be spur of the moment, decisions are sometimes on the fly, coupled with some brute force, but not with ignorance.

His desire is to create a beautifully crafted object – whether that is a car grill, rebuilding a car from bits and pieces, or building a kit car and many other objects between, from stair rails, house gates and much much more. Each creation stands alone, requires unique skills, nous and the abilty to work with the metals. There is no mass production in his work.

All his work is beautifully executed, the end result always a stunning piece of engineering. But what gets us at World Urban Art is that his work is always beautifully designed and crafted, yet he does not consider himself an artisan and he surely is.

We are encouraging him to provide photographs of his extraordinary work and will post more of his story here as we extract it from him. Then he will surely set up his own web presence.

Meantime we have his Lotus Gemco piece to marvel at – but trust us there is more.

This is the latest metal jigsaw puzzle completed by Master Metal artist and craftsman Alex Rohde, in New Zealand.

He was given a pile of metal parts and bits along with a few post card size photo’s, from which to replicate the Lotus Gemco which had raced successfuly in New Zealand in the 70′s, with an Olds V8 motor & Hewland transaxle. The original vehicle started it’s life as a Lotus 18 Formula 1 car and came to New Zealand where it was built into a V8 racer by the Glen Eden Motor Company (GEMCO).

To confuse things just a bit more the few photo’s of the original Gemco chassis showed modifications made when it ran a 4 cylinder motor after the V8 was removed and prior to being converted back to the original Lotus.

The remaining parts after it was changed back to a Lotus were eventually collected and a reproduction Lotus chassis purchased.

Some modifications were done to try to recreate the Gemco chassis but were not that successful and the project stalled.

Alex was approached and thought it would be an interesting puzzling job and he agreed to do it.

It took a lot of thinking coupled with the “it looks right and logical here” (or not sometimes!) along with using a magnifying glass to try and see some detail on the small, old and sometimes grainy photo’s.

The rear suspension was set up very differently to the original Lotus and he had to reach a point where he could confidently say how it was set up – before starting to cut off the rear 1/3rd of the chassis to make a new one.

The rear was cut off and set up on a bench and as he figured each bit out, he cut away the old bits piece by piece, until all the old chassis was gone and replaced with the new design.

It became a case of one little step at a time but the result looks right and the wedge shaped chassis line, when he joined the two pieces together was spot on.

He also had to work out how the steering rack needed to be set up as this, again, is different to the Lotus. The correct mounts were established by wondering what the bits he could see on the chassis in the photo’s actually did.

Alex had the details on how Lotus modified Triumph steering racks for their cars and worked out the method from that that he needed to use for this car. It was trial and error, so much so that he nearly machined to the wrong size before he had a sudden flash of insight which saved the day.

All in all it was a challenge and he is very pleased with the result. It still needs othercompletion work such as the roll bar and finishing but the basics are right.

This Lotus Gemco is currently for sale.