Adam Savage's Hellboy Mecha-Glove Replica

Adam it seems like we're in a familiar place we are we're in my shop and even more familiar we're circling back to one of the original tested build video this was I think the second video we shot with you guy with you here yeah on the pool table yeah and it's your hell blame every glove yes those no go ahead it's an always want this one and it's a it's a project that's now back then it was going on for a couple years now it's five years and it's an incredibly complex build for a prop that's in the movie for what maybe like thirty five fifty frames something like that one and a little more than that it's a couple minute long scene Rasputin births' Hellboy holding onto this glove so you get to see it come out of the box put on his hand lightning bolt stood out of it he opens the portal to the a Garuda HUD and Hellboy sneaks through exactly so simple so simple I haven't even counted up the number of separate parts in this but it's well over a thousand separate pieces of hardware and types of materials there is so in cloth work leather work padding blown glass soldering brass machining knurling 3d printing casting mold making wiring electronics lighting glue I mean it is every process I've ever used in any model making project all in one this is it that for this you're done you know it all backing away but one of the things that happened over the last two and a half years is every time we came in here met maybe not every time but often we would come in you'd be like hey look I figured out how to do the windings on the fingertips or look at this look at this frog guest I finally found and and it's been kind of kind of a it's been a always in the back of your mind it's not something that you're constantly working on well and it's sort of with a project this complex if I was on the clock I'd be solving the problems perhaps differently but because it's been an open-ended I do sort of sit and gestate on things that I haven't solved and think about them for sometimes weeks or months before I realizing oh I give you that really simply this way I mean just this central ring spins in the whoops spins in the movie prop right well how do you spin a ring like that you could and I figured this out probably used six inch internal diameter quedan bearings which in fact it turns out that spectrum motion used um except that there's $600 apiece Wow yeah I didn't spend that I found a reseller on eBay who had some of these used for about $100 apiece but still I mean that's not an extensive bearing but it's beats $600 I don't even want to think how much money and also time I have sunk into this because you know I had the glass tubes blown by atoms in Chittenden there a scientific glass company and Berkeley they do all the scientific glass for cow mm-hmm I had some parts farmed out but most of this I had to actually do myself and I did all the leather work all the sewing the quilting on this can I just show you you hold on you did the quilting I did this quilting and there's a reason I had trouble finding someone to do it quilting is mind-numbing so you just you just sew in straight lines it over and over and over yes but but I have a material here that's that's the right twill accurate to the prop but it's a two-way stretch and that meant that it was bunching in weird ways and just was it was really really really difficult and took hours and it's really boring well and then I mean you did the leather work as well so this is an in progress for another one yeah yeah well so I knew I wanted to make two in the end and when I ever I want to make two of something I'll start out by trying to make four because I'm gonna ruin parts I'm gonna break things I'm gonna mess things up as I try and solve certain problems so it's I've found so much less pain doing it that way well it takes away that fear of the first cut if you know you don't have to get it perfect the first try exactly and it's not that much harder to make to two or three or four of a part when you're making one so the line from contact what is that oh yes it's only a little more expensive to make but they're like two so yeah this is a great example of the leather work where I learned when you're doing stitching around the perimeter of leather it's better to do the stitching first and then cut the leather to the supposing now see when you say that it makes perfect sense but it probably took a couple of tries to figure that you're sitting there with a sewing machine it's wandering away from the line neither did that well so just sew it and then cut your line to it and then you look like you're a genius so I also had some parts 3d printed by a user on the RPF who goes by the username Joe a trash he's a friend of mine we've done a couple projects together he 3d drew these parts of what I call the scorpion cage so that's the back of the hand here and he did a beautiful job so I took his 3d print cleaned it up had a friend of mine Eric make a mold of this a friend of mine I paid him he's my mother and then we had them vacu metallized now there was a certain point in which I felt like well this is this is my mecha gloves I'm making too so this is great for one of them but I want I wanted a hero one so I challenged myself to hand machine this and I'm pretty I'm pretty happy with the results you describe that as one of the more challenging machining jobs you've ever done the most challenging I've never done anything that's come the number of steps and having to think backwards through this to get it going so did you start it on the lathe by turning and cutting the the dome out and then well let me turn on the lights okay and see the internal wires yeah there we go so this is all 12 volt what you call grain of wheat bulbs okay like from model train sets so there's 18 slices here through this visible us slot around the perimeter so what I had to do is I had to machine the inside first and then put it in the mill into an indexing head and cut the slices and then put it back onto the lathe to laid the back and cut in until I got to the slices Wow ya know it was like kind of it was amazing just like getting the registration right to get it back on the lathe after you've taken it office like this is not an easy job no no it wasn't and I mean in every way this is this is you know they asked an 80 year old cellist why he still practices every day and he said because I think I'm making great progress and it's a beautiful illustration of yeah you know I've had now 20 years of experience in making things and this one project radically increased my skill level at making things I hadn't tried machining something this complex and that's not that complex but just even managing a project like this you do the knurling around me I did I'd say pretty I know I love knurling know that cross-hatching pattern that you find on dials and stoves or flashlights oftentimes yeah yeah and knurling tool there's nothing complex about it you think oh how do you cut those things it is literally like these two wheels that you put on the lathe and you press into the aluminum and they they give it a texture so yeah knurled and then machined out the knurling to the to the prop okay so what else what else have we got here there's a ton literally I don't think we can go and do it all we talked about the windings on the top really pleased when you figured that out so the fingertips are I was going to machine them but it just it's a very common other-- complex piece of machinery thing and then there's indexing so I had to make a holder for it to chuck it into my mill to do the machining around the outside and drill the six concentric holes but then there is this magnet wire which is basically motor winding wire and it's 0.030 I think and I had to wind ten fingers so I made a holder that chucked into the lathe as well and drilled a pilot hole and then sat there with a lathe on slow letting it wind up and then had to glue them in and then put on the the blown-glass fingertips these guys here so next up you're gonna be winding motors and generators yeah no no there's also these two mummified frogs on the hand and I particularly love those here is another one so the Frog is one that I actually sculpted this from scratch and sculpey then I made a mold and cast a bunch of them then painted them then I put them inside the glass tube and glued in a plexiglass ring which I then talked around so it was watertight okay then I drilled a teeny tiny little hole in the Plexiglas and used a syringe to put water in right up to the hole right there okay and then there's no air bubble no air well there is an air tiny little window and then epoxy around the ends just like the way they make a compass if you ever look at the back of a water-filled compass there is a hole in epoxy over the top of it that's exactly how I did it and it worked beautifully I'm really pleased with the water stuff this part here is a ball that was hand designed by Mike Mignola with like runic signs on it like the Hellboy universe and the early versions of this in the hand had the ball there but caramel swap that out for a more the silver liquid that moved and gyrated I'm practical it was price okay yeah I know it was crazy and in the movie this turns out to be sort of like the on switch I went back to the ball because I really liked it and here as you can see exactly my process I again epoxy over the hole so I filled it full of stuff with the syringe and also unlike the film I actually added lights in two places there weren't lights in the film okay this was me making it I think a little bit better well sometimes sometimes when people are building a prop for a film you I mean this is yet hundreds and hundreds of man-hours and they were batting features you know just all this incredible stuff in the movie this opens and closes there's all this incredible stuff so yeah so I think there was a motor on there Adam it there is a servo on there and this actually can't can activate oh right the I've have got it a little bit but yes there is a motor on there and it can active okay so I put lights behind the ball okay and I put lights inside what's called the demon gauge and this is a this is a gauge in the film that actually points to many of the names of the Lovecraftian monsters the augs Rajah HOD and Hellboy is the last one so that so they're they're like you set it to whichever demon you want to I guess so okay and just like in the film I actually have a servo back there so I will that dial will actually move oh nice when I have the microcontroller in this and a piece de resistance I will say I made a machine label for it it's it's called a guru jihad the Summoner and I translated this from German date of manufacture serial number part number and then yeah I wanted to figure out who we build this right well who in Germany would build a string noir so I chose the guys who build the name we built the Enigma machine beautiful yeah well of course they're gonna put a makers mark on so where you gonna put the maker's mark I'm not sure I might put it just just out of sight somewhere tuck it in yeah I might go here so the the the millon motivator that Shawn built was there maybe this goes under there you know so it's slightly hidden but feels like it belongs there so we talked we did a whole video with Shawn where you talked about the motivator yes we won't get into that here but like how are you gonna control this whole thing you're gonna have this presumably so you can wear it around well wear it around is a relative term it's very very delicate it you can knot chunks off of it because some of its residents not all made of out of aluminum it is gonna have a microcontroller a little Arduino board that will make the lights pulse like this okay a good PWM modulation exactly it'll make the servos activate there's a servo there and like I said there's a servo up here in a scorpion cage and it will activate sounds I've actually I bought some OEMs speakers from laptops which have kind of a nice loud sound response not a lot of bass but I don't need a ton of bass I just want this thing to kind of have a low machine hum when its operating and then enterprise engineering sound yes so we're building my friend of Mines helping me build the Arduino control board with the sound effects and everything and I'm actually gonna put holes back behind here so that the sound works and not many people realize this but there's no um it's even though it's giant it's actually your fingers controlling your movement of just go right into the hand yeah it's fabulous it is it has turned out when you started out on this it looked like an enormous project when we first saw this this club two years ago and it was yeah the exterior wiring the fact that it's all outside the the glove is amazing to me yes because I mean most of that's functional I assume right no good but some of it I'd say only about a third of it is actually functional but let's Wow let's put it on are you gonna make it actually spit lightning and summon demons from beyond Adam I am NOT no no demons no demons will be harmed during the course of this that's probably best and now I can't turn my head over because the servo arm is missing from their butt hole no no that's all right there you go this is a oh isn't that pretty it's fabulous and of course we have a ton of stuff about this untested all the build progress shots have been taking shots the whole hundreds of pictures yeah if you're at comic-con and you're watching this video I don't know how that would happen but we're actually gonna be showing it on Friday night so you can see that and and I mean I just I'm beyond words at how well this has turned out I'm beside myself I couldn't be happier this is the most complex prop I have ever replicated so what's next after this one no this is done time to finish something else that's been going for 10 years I don't know I have several to choose from beautiful well of course we have more untested talk to you soon thank you as always on thanks guys [Music] you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,040,046

Keywords: Hellboy (Comic Book Character), adam savage, man cave, inside adam savage's man cave, best of, mecha hand, mecha glove, prop replica, the rpf, replica prop forum, rasputin, rasputin's mecha glove, prop, mythbusters, making of, how to, adam savage (tv producer), inside adam savages cave, film (media genre), hellboy prop, inside adams cave, hellboy mecha glove, tested mecha glove, hellboy mecha glove scene, hellboy mecha-glove replica, prop replica making, sean charlesworth

Id: HJd4sJfpOLU

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 24 2014