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Mirror, mirror on the ball
Kids tinker. Adults tinker. In the Raikes family, serious tinkering has led to the invention of gleaming stainless steel spheres with industrial and artistic applications.
Lincoln Raikes heads up Global Stainless Ltd in Normanby, South Taranaki. The company produces graceful sculptures now resident in South Korea, Singapore and New York. It's now producing a fourth artwork for world- renowned artist Anish Kapoor with ball No 64 being polished on site when the Taranaki Daily News visits.
Global Stainless is down a long rural road, south of Eltham. The only hint you've reached a commercial, rather than a residential, property is a temporary building alongside a big shed with an inconspicuous "office" sign on its outer.
Raikes, born and bred in Okaiawa, started the firm in 2004 after leaving Robert Stone Engineering (now FNE Engineering) in Hawera. Son Bergen had given him the push. Bergen, then 17, was due to leave school and he was set on becoming a welder and fabricator like his dad.
"He'd mastered all these skills while he was at school and he said, 'When are you going to start your own business because I'll come and work for you', so that was enough of a trigger."
For many years, Raikes senior cherished a dream of creating stainless steel balls with no weld shrinkage, leaving a seamless orb with a mirror-like finish.
The first five years of the business were hard yakka. Little money was made as father and son trialed techniques and worked to get the word out.
Hooking up with internet pioneer Mick Elmes, of Engineeronline, boosted the marketing, says Raikes, who knew they had a product to offer architectural artists.
"We started from day one doing industrial work - mainly agricultural applications which were farm water stainless steel pressure tanks, but also in the back of my mind, I hoped we would get it into the art world."
As he describes it, the gloss and lustre of these giant balls are "exciting". Wanting to share that breakthrough creation drove him on.
"It's shiny stainless steel, it's neat. It was an exciting time, being able to produce these spheres with an appearance of there being no weld seams."
A DIY dad had provided part of his inspiration. Father Keith Raikes invented one of the region's first motorised large-scale hedge-cutting machines from surplus World War II machinery and old car chassis. He provided land and finance for Lincoln to start the business, although he suggested his son stick to general engineering as creating spheres was considered a crazy pursuit.
"A lot of people said I was eccentric. I guess a lot of inventors tend to be. I had this long-term goal and mission that we'd get there one day."
Getting the Global Stainless name on the Engineeronline website enabled Indian-born, English-educated artist Anish Kapoor to find them.
In 2009 the innovative artist was looking for test spheres for work commissioned by the Royal Academy in London. He came across Global Stainless' name and product online and requested a sample.
Global Stainless created one, having produced other orbs for artists on a smaller scale.
Shortly after, the order for 74 came through. Within several months, Global Stainless had doubled its staff to 11 and began much larger scale manufacture.
The company made the balls, packaged them up - one, two, three, at a time - in big cartons and transported them to Auckland where another engineering firm mounted them on three masts with hidden cross bracing positioned so that they appeared weightless. They resembled, according to a magazine feature, giant bubbles erupting from the ground. All up, the sculpture stood 15 metres tall.
Made from marine grade stainless, the balls were expected to withstand wind and movement from potential earthquakes. The balls weighed 4 tonnes and the internal structure 7 tonnes.
While being exhibited, the work was bought by South Koreans. But the Guggenheim Museum in Spain had booked it for an exhibition, after the show in London, so the Koreans waited a year for their own replica.
"That was very good for business," says Raikes, explaining that a third sculpture of 28 balls was then custom-built for a location in Singapore.
Global Stainless is now on to the fourth model: 77 globes commissioned through Kapoor for a private art collector in Southern France.
This glamour work is all well and good but Raikes is realistic. "Unfortunately 99 per cent of people in the world don't have the money to pay for work like this."
Good business advice has turned the company around "from making a loss". Raikes says it's a balance between research, development and training, and steady productionThe industrial work ticks over. Global Stainless produces domes for tank ends such as those used in the dairy, transport and food industries.
In addition, it fabricates large radius elbows for pipework and ducting used in the production of food and beverages. It has patented a process that allows it to produce the uniquely formed elbows in a much wider diameter than had previously been available. Both the tank ends and bends are sent around the country.
The only complete fabrication it does is its production of 60-litre and 100-litre teat sprayer pressure tanks, marketed directly to farmers.
Those initial developments evolved when his unique forming process was an early method of shaping stainless steel into lightweight pieces. Now industries are demanding domes, half-spheres and piping with thicker walls. Global Stainless has invested in equipment such as an extra wide hydraulic press and a heavy knuckling machine.
Recently, it has produced half-spheres for a Hamilton firm constructing vessels for pharmaceuticals manufactured in Australia. Raikes sees that as an exciting initiative - breaking into a "high level industry" with potential for further growth.
"It's case of marketing from now on. We've only touched the edge of the iceberg. There's no reason why we can't get our domes into Australia, selling to other steel fabricators."
As Raikes see it, Global Stainless has developed cutting-edge technology that others should not need to replicate.
"We specialise in the spheres, not the complete fabrication. We want to be offering our services to industry so they can come to us rather than attempt to do it themselves and go through the failures and heartache we went through."
Industrial espionage is an issue, alleviated by staff confidentiality agreements (there are seven workers) and an out-of-the-way location. "Secrecy is a huge thing for us. We don't want others to try to copy because of the enormous amount of development work we've put in".
"We have had other engineers try to copy what we do and a warning letter that we would take court action has put them off."
Aside from that unpleasant stuff, the gleaming orbs are captivating.
Then there's a small observatory created for Hara, Tokyo, with lenses in the roof that split daylight into rainbows. It's a piece of technology as well as an artwork, says Raikes who's building a bridge between creativity and engineering that others may once have scoffed at.
"I suppose the dream now is to grow the business and lift the whole professionalism of it, to expand it and make it from good to great because I believe the potential is there."
- © Fairfax NZ News
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