Here’s something quite unique that you don’t see every day. This is a one-of-a-kind automobile from 1925 designed by French aeronautical engineer Jacque Gerin called the Aerodyne. When he was 24 years old, he decided to design an automobile and when he applied for the patents in 1922, he had a lot of innovations in automotive engineering that we now use today such as hydraulic shocks, hydraulic brakes, rack and pinion steering, adjustable steering column, conical valve springs, and roller rockers to name a few. It uses a 2.0L inline 4-cylinder engine and dual spark plugs per cylinder with a distributor on one side and a magneto on the other. Each rear wheel is gear driven. Gerin made the main platform out of cast aluminum and the exoskeleton out of oak wood sandwiched between cast aluminum, he made the car drivable but never fully finished the vehicle. He never completed the body, and later dismantled it and either hid or destroyed a lot of the key components that made the car operate as he didn’t want anyone to steal his ideas.
I work for the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum located in Pinellas Park, Florida, and I’ve been given the privilege and honor of creating this truly unique automobile and bringing Gerin’s vision to life again almost 100 years later. Using a few prints of Gerin’s renderings as well as prints of his patents, I have spent the last 2-1/2 years off and on fabricating the body out of sheets of 0.063” aluminum with an English wheel, planishing hammer, TIG welder, and my talents that were passed down to me by my father who was an aerospace engineer and brilliant fabricator on race cars, hot rods, and custom motorcycles. I hope to have this completed by the end of this year so it can attend Retromobile in France in 2023.
