Screening Saturday July 14 at 5.30pm:
This week: Motorcycles and Mountaineer's Legs
This is the inspirational story of Wayne Alexander.
New Zealand engineer Wayne "Cowboy" Alexander has a list of achievements that would make your head spin. Wayne - or "Cowboy" as his friends know him made the revolutionary artificial legs that double amputee mountain-climber Mark Inglis used to ascend Mt Cook.
Wayne also worked with the John Britten team to help develop what became known as "the world's most advanced motorcycle." And he was an adviser on the hit New Zealand film "The World's Fastest Indian."
In his spare time, Wayne made a prosthetic limb for a kiwi that lost a leg to a gin trap, invented a mussel de-shelling machine, and created a retail clothing store for which he designed his own clothes.
But Wayne, 45, doesn't just invent and make things, he's a bit of an action man too. When Mark Inglis climbed Aoraki Mount Cook in 2002, his mate "Cowboy" was there with him. Wayne also traveled to Nepal to oversee another Mark Inglis project - the Mt Everest climb. He was on hand to make the necessary adjustments to the latest artificial legs he had made for him.
The legs came with built-in crampons and were a modified version of those that Inglis dubbed "The Terminator" legs when he climbed Aoraki Mount Cook.
Wayne often quotes Ernest Rutherford's "boys, we don't have much money to do this, we're gonna have to think" as a great piece of advice for any financially-challenged Kiwi looking to get the job done. And he has coined his own version of the same philosophy:
"It's the grey matter, not the green matter that provides the solutions."
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Originally Posted by zrxer
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