Adam’s Favorite Build of Jamie's

well it is 4 20 here in san francisco so you can imagine what it smells like in the street hi everybody adam savage here in my cave testing out a microphone um so i guess i don't have to yell uh and i've just finished aldo rayne's knife from um inglorious bastards which will be a video that goes up maybe before this or maybe after but it's just sitting here so i can have it nearby um i am taking questions from tested patrons today i'm answering questions from tested patrons today and uh this one comes from david griffiths he says i always appreciated your and jamie's different approaches to problem solving and learned from both of them he said i thought jamie's appreciation for your lead balloon build came through very clearly in the edit what was your favorite build of jamie's aw inspiring or terrifying or both yeah i so lead balloon was a really interesting progression uh we had we had that idea and it was probably 18 months or more before we were able to execute that idea so when you think about producing a lead balloon a lead balloon the first thing you need is really thin lead and the question is how thin and i started to do the math on this and i started to think well look if we're gonna make a lead balloon we need to have a certain we need to be able to encompass a certain area of helium and so there is a minimum sort of lift ability and i it was about adjusting all of these parameters like is the lead two thousandths of an inch thick or is it one thousandth of an inch thick and in the end after boiling through a whole bunch of different possibilities right because there's a there's an absolute minimum size your balloon has to be for it to contain enough helium in order to be positively buoyant and that was really like don't get me wrong from a from an experimental standpoint all you really need to do is to tape out two squares of lead and fill them with air and you've made a lead balloon but that's not good enough i think we can all agree it's got to float and when we started looking at it we started to look at it floating i came up with the math that uh if it was one thousandth of an inch thick and the balloon was about 10 feet in diameter that would be just enough helium to be able to hold itself up and so in order to give ourselves some wiggle room i think we made it 12 or 14 feet on the side um and in this early stages jamie was really skeptical he was like lead that thin is really awful to work with and we had some samples that were three thousandths of an inch thick which is maybe no it was even thinner it was two thousandths of an inch thick but at two thousands of an inch thick the balloon would have to be ridiculously large like it would have to be like 19 feet in diameter so i it doesn't quite work out i know the math is sphere circle volumes and stuff suffice to say we had a sample that was like two two and a half thou thick and that was just not going to work in any circumstance that we felt confident we could get across the line and we had ordered lead from two different factories in the u.s and both of them said yeah we can you know normally they just keep rolling and rolling it and rolling it thinner and thinner and thinner and they said yeah we can we normally do three or four thousandths of an inch thick for shielding inside of computer cases but we can go a little further and both of these companies like months apart broke their rollers trying to get that last they broke their machines or something went wrong and like we thought monday we're going to have some lead and monday morning the company calls up and like yeah you're not getting any lead we're we're yeah so eventually at this point jamie is like complaining about the fact that it's um you know that is a terrible material to work with totally to be fair and he doesn't think it's going to work and at some point in there i was able to convince him that i had this idea that was going to work right we're going to make a cube and we're going to encompass this amount i just needed to be a thousandth of an inch thick and to his credit he got he i don't know if he got excited about it but he caught he he was like okay i think i can find a place and he found this place in germany called epstein foils um and epstein foyles man came through like nobody's business they didn't deliver one thousandth of an inch thick lead they decided in a classic teutonic fashion to give us sixty percent of that it was seventy percent of that it was seven ten thousandths of an inch thick thirty percent thinner than one thousandth yeah um and so once we found that and i figured out the cube construction uh jamie was jimmy was appreciative and that was a delightful episode to execute because once he once i had figured out that structure and the size he jumped in with both feet and we started trying to prognosticate exactly how this thing was going to fail the ways in which it was going to tear itself apart the fact is when you take lead that's that thin and you crumple it and you uncrumple it if you look at it's like a lace curtain you can see all the way through it that meant that we would have to take this lead off of these foil rolls and that would be the only operation we did we'd bring it off and tape it together and bring it off and tape it together and we had i think it was like two foot it was so much work to get this thing together and that work was preceded by like a week and a half of me and jamie just like really thinking through how this is going to screw up and coming up with methods for mitigating the ultimate failure of this balloon and we succeeded we succeeded uh i'm really proud of that episode i am even more proud of that episode because when we were turning out episodes full-time uh we would first turn in an outline you know i'd work with our our production team would work out an outline of how the episode would likely go and then the edit team would be like okay we've got an episode coming in carrie grant and tori are going to do this episode adam and jamie are going to do this one i think this is the a story and that's the b story you'd always try and figure out which was going to be the lead story because you're going to give it a little more cut time and that you know alters how you're going to digitize the footage and what you're going to prioritize and so lead balloon absolutely in the outline phase was the b story and then we turned in the episode and the first cut came in at like 55 minutes just to get through all the narrative beats and that was the episode that helped me understand that we could tell thrilling beautiful stories that had no explosions no guns no fire no bomb bass just two dudes and a bunch of people helping trying to make a completely useless thing out of the worst material imaginable for it yeah um i do have a favorite i'll just touch my nose i do have a favorite jamie solution and there were so many over the years but underwater raising a boat with ping-pong balls that so there was a there was a myth a story that it had been done and then there was a disney cartoon with pluto or goofy not sure i could tell you the difference right now between pluto and goofy i know that makes me a bad disney night but um there was a comic book of a disney comic book of raising a boat from that is sunken using only ping pong balls and oh yep all right uh raising a boat with ping-pong balls and we started to ideate how to get tens of thousands of ping-pong balls into a boat under water how do you drag them underwater how do you take these buoyant things and push them into the water and we sat there for like a day drawing the most elaborate devices using trash pumps but they didn't quite work using centrifugal force using um we even at one point drew up a a chain belt with little hooks on it that would pull them out of a hopper that we'd create on the on the water's surface and then and then jamie came up with the solution which was to use uh water pressure itself uh and as he described it look if i take a pipe that is a mile long and i stick it into the ocean and i have this the tip of that pipe just like a few inches above and i pour water into it water is going to come out the bottom no matter how far down it is it's that's what water's gonna do and so jamie was like well if i pour water in that but also add ping-pong balls will the water pressure bring them down and the answer was yes times a thousand times thirty thousand uh we had thirty thousand ping pong balls and amazingly our production team led at that point by eric haven was the i think the lead uh producer on that he managed to get us permission to sink a boat in monterey bay a protected wildlife sanctuary we had to clean it within an inch of its life and scrape all the paint off etc but once we had done that and made sure it had no dirty things on it they allowed us to sink that in monterey bay off the end of a dock and then we got thirty thousand ping pong balls i built this giant conical hopper out of clear plastic and welded steel we filled it full of ping pong balls and we started using a fire hose to get to get a whirlpool going and low just ping pong balls started shooting out the bottom it was totally amazing um that's one of those that's one of those things where like you hear jamie and i spending a whole day going back and forth in front of a white board coming up with different ideas for getting some getting ping pong balls down to the bottom of you know 40 feet down below the surface and then jamie's like what about just water head what about the pressure of water and i say oh yeah wow let's let's see if it works so we took a 55 gallon drum and we took a pipe and we took it to the top of m5 which is about like 27 feet high 30 feet high and it worked that's one of those things of like we like to say that we would argue vigorously over various ways to execute an idea but the fact was was that when the right idea showed up in the room it was always apparent it was always obvious that that was the right idea and then it's just time to abandon all of your other preconceptions because well that's the simplest the cheapest the fastest it requires no moving parts except for water and i was delighted to give up all of the things i'd been fighting for all day you know because there's no point of fighting anymore once you've heard the right solution this is i use this as an example of uh of the ethos of how we made the show um and that infused us and also our whole team which is like you know work hard to ideate fight for your ideas and really you know make sure that they survive that fight but when the right idea shows up give up everything because there's no point to there's no point to argue there's nothing more boring to me than arguing with somebody because they want their i their idea to be the one that gets used they want the credit who cares i you know frankly i'll tell you there's many solutions that we came up with on mythbusters that i'm not sure either jamie nor i could tell you whose idea it was um yeah that was a good one one funny story about filming in monterey bay we had to have uh we had a wildlife expert consultant in a kayak on the chute to make sure that otters weren't going to get harmed because the otters are the apex i believe they are the one of the apex predators of the monterey bay watershed they are super important to the watershed you've got to look into it because it's totally amazing in the reintroduction and revivification of the population of otters in monterey bay has substantively changed the ecosystem because they eat the urchin the sea urchins that would kill the kelp forests that allow all these other amazing things to happen in monterey bay so as such there are very specific and important restrictions to interacting with otters in the wild and we had a wildlife expert there to help make sure that we were holding to that um and what we did not count on is how playful otters are and how much it turns out that this one otter we met loved ping-pong balls and the otter kept on going and grabbing the ping-pong balls and like had this little stash of them and the wildlife guy is like you know we don't want the otter to choke the idea of an otter choking on a ping pong ball is like our worst freaking nightmare so we work hard to separate the pink moguls we had oil booms all around the site so that ping pong balls didn't get away and not a single ping-pong ball got away i'm proud to say but there was this point at which the otter had been successfully separated from all the surface ping pong balls and at this point the otter realized that the source was down at the bottom so one point jamie is in scuba gear on the bottom of monterey bay about 40 feet below the surface and he is swimming down with the fire hose to add more ping-pong balls to the boat and as he gets to the port in the boat this otter swims out the one we've been dealing with and he's holding on to two ping pong balls and he's got one in his mouth and he swims up and he sees jamie he goes oh and the ping-pong ball leaves his mouth and he swims away and jamie comes up laughing hysterically which is not common um and describing the scene we didn't get it on camera it's still like one of my favorite mental images from the shooting of mythbusters that was a lovely question thank you for asking um you're not always going to work with people that you like jamie and i were not friends and not friendly even really we never had a meal alone together but boy making stuff together that was real special i like telling stories from that time david griffiths thank you for that excellent question tested patrons if you'd like to become a tested patron and give us more support we'd appreciate that um the instructions are in the uh description and keep submitting your questions and i'll keep answering them thank you guys i'll see you next time

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 903,530

Keywords: tested, tested adam savage, adam savage and jamie hyneman relationship, adam savage talks about jamie hyneman, behind the scenes mythbusters, adam savage tested mythbusters, adam savage jamie hyneman, jamie hyneman, ask adam savage jamie, adam savage mythbusters, ask adam savage mythbusters, lead balloon mythbusters, adam savage mythbusters questions, mythbusters behind the scenes, adam savage, boat ping pong, mythbusters raise boat ping pong balls, mythbusters ping pong rescue

Id: MztikUm9T1c

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022