In the case of Bondi Barbie it was a 50-kilogram windmill gearbox.

"I thought, well, that looks like a healthy woman's abdomen," Mr Whitehead said.

"That one object told me what I was going to build and the whole scale of it."

After a 20-year career in the army, Mr Whitehead completed an adult apprenticeship as a mechanic with the Urana Council.

"They were good enough to take me on as a 40-year-old and I'm pretty grateful for that," Mr Whitehead said.

"I learnt skills I never had and they put me in contact with a lot of the scrap around the shire."

His first work was a half-tonne cow made from an old metal tank found lying at home.

"We'd been driving by it for 20-odd years and I said I'm going to do something with that one day.

"I'd just finished it and someone said why don't you enter it into that sculpture competition over at Lockhart."

He entered the Spirit of the Land festival and won.

"So I thought maybe there is something in this for me."

Last year he finished a $25,000 commission, a shearer and two sheep, for the township of Muttaburra in Queensland.

And he's just been commissioned to make a swagman and a dog for Boree Creek, but needs to look further afield for material.

"I've pretty well cleaned up what I can around here, now I have to go to Wagga and buy it from scrap metal yards."

Mr Whitehead had hoped to become a full-time artist but said the art market wasn't strong enough to sustain him.

"That shearer probably took the equivalent of six months full-time work, so $25,000 is not a lot when you take out overheads for the materials and electricity and all that.

"But it's a great hobby, I love it."

As for Bondi Barbie, Mr Whitehead built it on the "theory of divine ratio".

"She was built to that exact mathematical ratio so if it's true, men are hard wired, genetically programmed, to like her," he said.

"I've sat and watched the husbands walk by and the wives are going 'don't look at that, come on let's go,'"