Rust to artwork, homebuilder finds new talent

The old saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” could certainly hold true for Chuck Richman.

A homebuilder and machinist, Richman began assembling old, rusty cans and welding them into works of art.

Richman moved to Pahrump recently to build a house for his mother and picked up the art by accident.

“It’s a fluke, really it is. It’s just something that all of a sudden I was able to do. I have never really done much artist-wise. I’ve built houses and stuff like that most of my life. I’ve done welding and such, but this is something that just came — just happened,” Richman said.

“I was just sitting there one day and I noticed a pile of rusty cans. I saw something in one of them and just started sort of zapping them together. It just happened,” he said.

His first sculpture was a miner. He put a pair of eyes on a rusty oil can. Richman said he was going to use it as a model, but a woman asked him to make it for her. Then after three days of work, she thought the $175 price tag was too high.

Richman met Lloyd and Carol Hohl at the Pahrump Farmer’s Market. They bought the miner, the mule and a pair of mannequins sitting in an old jeep and added the pieces to the front of their house in the Rogers Estate Subdivision. The miner contains such details as glasses, a scraggly beard and other features that Richman welded together.

Richman scavenges sites in the California desert to find his rusty cans.

“They’re all dumps that are getting ready to get run over by the BLM in California. They’ve been destroying the mines left and right out there and I’ve been getting things right before they get there, picking them up and using them, because they’re running over the stuff and just making junk out of it,” Richman said.

Ghost towns contain lots of rusty cans from the old miners, but he won’t touch objects in areas with public viewing.

Richman’s next project is a mining cart.

“It looks like a real one but it’s not. I got old, riveted steel, with the old rivets on the top and I got some real wheels out of an old thing at my dad’s place and some track.” He said the piece will be the mining car entering a mine portal.

“I’m going to build a stand-up guy next to it that looks like he’s running the cart,” he said.

“The hard part is getting the weld on the rusty stuff. You have to have a little bit of basis to it and welding the rusty metal is pretty hard. It takes a bit to get it into,” Richman said. “I don’t use an arc welder on it because it’d be impossible. I’d burn through it every time.”

Lloyd Hohl is a retired employee for the now defunct Western Airlines. The Hohls moved to Pahrump three years ago after 47 years in Las Vegas.

He owned the Cactus Valley Ranch, transporting cacti from Vista, Calif., to Las Vegas every three weeks as gifts for tourists on the Strip. Hohl and his partner Larry Pool of Fallbrook, Calif., met up in Twentynine Palms, Calif., in the Mojave Desert to exchange the cacti. A sign at the jeep notes they dealt with flat tires, washouts, cactus thieves, 120-degree heat, busted equipment, tumbleweeds, sandstorms and rattlesnakes during their journeys.

The two purchased mannequins, dubbed “Dusty” and “Rusty,” are in memory of Hohl’s days driving through the Mojave Desert in the cactus business.

Carol Hohl said her daughter Deseray didn’t want them to get rid of the old Willys Jeep, which she learned to drive in the Mojave Desert with her six friends. It’s nicknamed “Old Dan Tucker, too late to come to supper.”