Adam Savage Baffled by Obscure Armor-Making Tools!

hey everybody Adam Savage and I am in a beautiful place in the world for I am currently in the armor conservation Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City this building is where armor first infected my young brain and now I'm in the locus of where it gets restored and repaired Sean so nice to see you nice to see you as well um and in front of us here is a RAID some uh uh blacksmith Stakes is that right so these are armorer sticks our first armor who first came to the mat was gentleman named Daniel tasho okay so he was a Frenchman operating out of Paris uh tasho himself had trained under a previous armorer named Ludwig Klein when Klein passed away tesho inherited some of his tools uh so these are well well over 100 years old at this point uh it is the largest single collection of actual armorer stools in the world no yeah there are some that may be over at the older at the Royal armories leads uh but this is this is the largest and it's okay for me to touch it absolutely um who is JR we don't know oh really that's how old it is that's how old it is a lot of these have marks and they're different marks so we're sort of unsure at this moment which are owner's marks from previous armors which are manufacturers uh the Jr stamp in particular shows up on both large tools and small ones so it's possible he was another Artisan uh and tasho ended up acquiring his tools uh so tasho came over here in 1908 and when he retired from the museum we were able to purchase the tools from him which is why they've stayed with us here today we're very happy we have kept this this set together so they're both part of the collection and part of yeah they are part of the actual art collection and then they are also part of our Workshop as well oh yeah and so we have some very interesting pieces here that are I mean a lot of these you'll you'll notice when the hammer heads they're just sort of upscaled versions you would find in any silversmith shop uh and then there are some of the more unique things that are sort of really just uh just used by armorers so this is one of the things I love here right so uh when you generally think of an anvil using the giant Looney Tunes you know Anvil with the horn on it uh armors would have used anvils like this and you'll notice it's not a flat top no it's actually a little convex yeah and that actually helps with uh when they're stretching the plates so you put down a you know a big Billet or plate and you start stretching it out you're sort of uh um stretching it from two sides rather than one side against the Anvil you know you want that curved surface amazing yeah so uh I think one of the best ways to explain forging armor is uh it's it's a lot like a pinch pot right you start with a clay pinch pot okay yeah and you you pinch down you squeeze it and it stretches it and then sometimes you also need to compress it in order to prevent it from folding over and you're doing that in steel just on sort of a different scale and a lot of times hot as well right because you're annealing it so that it softens up your work hardening it as you stretch it yeah right and some some like really deep curves that you absolutely have to do it it has got to be very very hot while you're hammering it um so some stuff can be done cold other stuff needs to be done hot yeah uh and so we've got a lot of the tools for sort of each of the different stages right so we'll have initially uh and you can do this over an anvil sometimes you can do this over a stump we have a dishing stump over there made out of a um I think a piece of telephone pole oh and uh it's just a it's just a big concave depression and you put this hot piece of Steel in there and you can wail on it with this round face and that'll like deeply stretch it that's where you're really starting to get your your deep stretch and then when you start getting slightly more refined use an oval faced Hammer like this and the reason you're switching from the round to the oval is you are stretching it more in One Direction than another so you're sort of controlling the direction in which you are stretching this piece of Steel well then you also have raising hammers which are like this one over here uh you've got a sort of a a more drastic face there and that you can do from the interior but also often you're doing it from the exterior of the ball so you're less likely to Nick anything because you're on the outside of a curve a lot of this is done over these sticks right right so you'll be working the hammer like a helmet right you'd have it over this large mushroom here but when you get into doing things like uh uh the like the crest the comb of the helmet you would put it over a crust stake like this and you'd be working sort of along the sides to try and get that Ridge uh if you wanted to do tight fluting you would also put that over another sharp edge and you'd be working with a very fine headed Hammer like this tell me about these crazy shears so uh these are these go into the same kind of stakehold yeah they go right in uh they are our shears we still use them they work great you can trim your fingernails with them yeah they're spectacular and this will cut through like it look after your sheets still yeah no problems like butter still plate yeah I mean they're not even really sharp it's just sort of two flat ends and they just right right to wrong okay I gotta let this down one of the things that we're really fortunate to have is also all the uh Associated uh chisels punches tools rivet sets like you can see some of our chasing tools behind you which definitely comes in handy when you need a very particular piece we've got a vast resource here just hundreds and hundreds of small tools and chisels wow these are like little tiny Stakes for imprinting details or fixing little yeah for like uh for like reposee and for chasing uh if you need a really crisp line or something like that you know it's it's sort of hard to build up a set of the scale have it as a resource and of course in our old toothpaste a lot of character in the shop this whole all of these things came as one part of one whole collection we have a few things that would have come afterward uh but the vast bulk of the collection all came from tasho and he probably got the bulk of that in uh the 1880s when Klein passed away um so yeah the vast majority of this uh game with him we've got like a large a large anvil in the Forge room is made in Brooklyn you know there have been a difference right sure sure do you know do you have a knowledge of what may be the oldest tool in here we don't I mean we don't even know exactly how old these are because we don't know how long Klein had them and Klein himself had come from a line of armorers operating out of Germany and so I mean we really don't know uh now we'll learn a little more because we actually uh starting in a couple weeks we have an intern whose sole internship is going to be researching the history of these tools trying to well document everything get photographs weights measures and then research the armorer's marks and or the Maker's Marks and the names and see if we can't get a little more history out of these I I really appreciate it in a room where you are so committed towards the preservation of things and handling things carefully and making sure they're preserved that these objects are as precious but they are precious because you're using them that you're they're actively in in you know it's one of the things about being in the arms and armor department is that we're very proud of is we know the names of everyone who's worked here before us every single one we know what they did we're very much a living part of our own history um so these aren't just like oh it's our shop tools yeah it is these were brought here by tasho these were used by Leonard Heinrich this is like this is part of our own history and so we we sort of cherish them beyond their their function as tools and it's a part of our history and it's like a legacy of what tools an armorer should have too yeah I mean we have we have blacksmith and armors come here and are just like oh wow and like you know piecing through the drawers and finding unique tools and uses um yeah it's it's a great resource and we're gonna be happy like having a better documented means we can share it better yeah people can get to see it do you have any tools you don't know what they were for we do actually so uh here's one of them right here uh so this in uh tachio's files is called a hollow peen hammer I don't know what a jalapen hammer is used for you've got uh it's a flat polished surface inside of which is a a hole obviously to accommodate a shank or something but I don't know what it's used for um we did you know rough rough searching online couldn't find another example of it and we sort of stopped there because we're hoping our intern can figure that out reach out to some people um it's just it's an interesting thing and it's uh we suspect it has something to do with riveting in the list these jalapen hammers are interspaced with the riveting hammers maybe that's a red herring I wouldn't say it's the best organized list yeah uh or a logically organized list but possibly has something to do with that but I would expect something like this to be able to hammer it on the other side but it's also polished there yeah I love being at a garage sale I'm seeing a tool I don't recognize and just getting it and wondering what it is for a long time yeah often it gets answered when someone comes through the shop like oh that's a blah blah but the like the mystery you know it's when it's been used by somebody but you don't know for what that's a really interesting mystery yeah and you know you're looking at it like well I see little chips there is that from you know a blow-off angle like you're trying to see the tool marks to try and figure out what what it was from and no I see this piece of a helmet here is this a sort of a a sacrificial practice piece of Steel uh so this predates me this is um this is a face defense uh sort of in progress and is this in this is a reasonable thickness for what it would have been about what is that about twenty thousand yeah I think you probably want a little thicker than that but it's it's in the ballpark amazing [Music] yeah you really can see all these different areas of different kinds of blows and then this would be uh because this is pretty rough The Next Step you do is you planish so you take you know really flat polished surface and you'd work over another polished stake and you just kind of knock out all those Hills and Valleys get everything flush and then you'd grind and polish it up and puncture the holes for your your breaths so much grinding and polishing well the planishing takes care of some of that but uh yeah I certainly do not envy medieval polishers working on giant Stone Wheels it wouldn't have been a fun job when I look at stuff and I researchers I'm like man there's so much filing and the file you have to make by hand it's every step do you have some old files too so I took a picture of that because I had no idea what that is so this is um this is your original tap and die set what yeah this is a handmade uh handmade die a Threading die yeah [Music] um make your own screws uh we've got a handmade draw plate for drawing out your wire making it thinner yeah successively thinner and then of course all the punches you would ever need for uh decorative washers uh any kind of fluoretted rivet head you can imagine we've got a lion headed one in here somewhere that's crazy oh here's nice [Music] oversized rivets um 50th Century salad and you've got a negative here too yeah so you would have uh so these were caps to replace missing ones in a helmet that's actually now in Philadelphia and they would have taken a piece of piece of Steel and stamped it into that floret shape while it was hot presumably well presumably uh and then they use that to replace the missing ones on this on this helmet and is is this another Jr it's a j jrjb yeah got it yeah it looks like a JP doesn't it yeah and you can see a little flower headed rivet and you can see it's a very similar matched in the positive here oh wow so actually that's another interesting one so we have these uh these things for making uh these sort of decorative rivets we don't have the tool they go in so this is clearly some sort of thing that held the rivets you mean the thing that held these tools so these are designed we have Shanks on them that are designed to key into something some large lever type and we don't have that so we're sort of guessing as to how they uh they were able to produce this oh and I see some evidence of casting and oh yeah just to get the shape yeah I've been doing a lot of work on these on rivets like a whole article coming out and this is what you would end up with yeah you would end up something very much like that wow foreign [Music] oh that is super cool yeah and of course scale that up and you've got visor pivots right right right you know bolt Heads This Is So Exciting is there a is there a repository of the of a catalog of all these tools yeah but it's handwritten um and the main one is actually written in French and then we have a handwritten sort of rough translation so unfortunately our intern speaks French is going to be able to actually dig through and uh do some translation of the original documents yeah I mean there can't be that many other collections that are even close to this not even close yeah yeah there's like I mean there's uh some really good tools the Royal armories that make make be older and may go back to the Royal workshops at Greenwich sure but this is this is the largest in the world I what a thrill thank you so much for walking me through this oh my God I just want to touch every single one please Sean I just zoomed out in my head and noticed these wooden calipers what the hell yeah I mean if you got to measure a horse armor you need some big calibers oh my god of course so this is yeah for transferring measurements from one thing to another [Music] that is incredible do you know how old these are I don't know um there's even a chance these were made in-house uh because we have an in-house carpenter shop that has made some pretty spectacular things wow

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 476,118

Keywords: tested, adam savage, tested adam savage, adam savage tested, adam savage armor, adam savage (tv producer), metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum of art, metropolitan museum of art tour, arms and armor sword, arms and armor, MET, knights, real suits of armor, best suits of armor, tested adam savage armor, adam savage knight armor, armor tools, armor conservation, museum armor, the met armor, met arms and armor, adam savage met, adam savage armor museum

Id: 6F643XUqJ-o

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023

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https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/arms-and-armor

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