Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Dinosaur Skull Lamp!

hey Adam Savage from Testim in my cave with today's one-day build which is the lamp and not a super versatile lamp like these things I built a long time ago why are you flickering no today's lamp is a super custom job meant for a specific location to do one thing so strap in it's time for a hyper custom lamp a lot of visitors to the cave after being overwhelmed wears off after a few hours start to ask me things like what are your favorite things in this space and this right here this t-rex skull is one of my all-time favorite objects this is a foam and resin model of SU the t-rex dug up in in the Dakotas and I believe currently at the Field Museum I was able to obtain this about 10 years ago and it is such a surpassingly beautiful object and also kind of amazing to spend time thinking about what it's like to be this low on the food chain but it's hanging here for a reason I wanted it to have a pride of place in the shop above one of my other favorite objects my pool table so you don't know this about me but I spent a significant portion of my late teens and early twenties being very serious about the art of billiards and I want this t-rex skull to be the lamp for my pool table and everything I've bought to achieve that has kind of sucked so now it's time for me to make a custom one and the first step of that is to make a cardboard template of the inside of the jaw and that will determine the shape of my land this right here is a store-bought one of my failed attempts it flickers I'm not even gonna subject you to how awful its flickering is I'm just tossing it in the trash so here is where my lamp is going to go I don't want to see the light source from outside of the t-rex skull I just want the light to be emanating from it and the jaw here the lower jaw hides that perfectly it's nice and wide it's like eight inches wide at its narrowest point but I'm going to need to cut a piece of wood that fits pretty closely in here and that will be the body of my lamp now making a template for that piece of wood is where a lot of people get flummoxed in a project like this like how do you transfer the irregular shape of the middle of this jaw to this piece of cardboard well I'm about to show you just how fast it can go because it's a simpler process than you might imagine let's see here first step is to cut some strips you're basically going to use these strips to get close to the outside edge and then tape them together and they will make your overall shape you see what I'm saying now how quickly that can how quickly that can go all right let's see here so try start with that and I can see and then I need to cut back alright so that's our first strip I'm gonna okay I'm gonna hold these in that aria oh that's where this gets a little that's where this can get a little bit a little bit tricky solving these problems is of course a little easier when you have a helper but I also really like the challenge of figuring it out Oh much better much better okay if I do that that's level and that gives me some dropdowns of about two inches all the way around is that two inches I'd actually say yeah two inches is safe barrier and I think I gotta make a couple of marks great I think I can cut there and only there I think that's fine oh yeah maybe ologist okay cool I think I've got it really close I'm gonna tape it in tight so it can't move cuz the last thing you want is for your template to change shape after you think you've got it locked I only know to say that than to accommodate for it because I've done it beautiful perfect marvelous that's my template normally I'm gonna use MDF as the main body of the lamp normally I wouldn't use MDF because it creeps it's not very stable it doesn't have a lot of tensile strength but for this build doesn't need it it's actually being held in by the topography of the jaw itself so MDF is fine and then I don't waste a nice piece of plywood on this so I'm gonna first draw out my template which isn't exactly the final shape I'm going to cut out this is just my main guideline so I think that I can actually I need to make one mark here just a sec yeah that's what I wanted to see I want my I want my back-end of this to be orthogonal to the direction of the pool table and the template doesn't reflect that so here we're going to transfer that parallel this was that pretty good yeah that's pretty good okay well double check that once we cut the piece of wood and adjust it as needed also the actual borders of the lamp will not follow this exact contour I don't need to work that hard I'm just going to make them long straight edges it's gonna be a long trapezoidal lamp yeah I guess that will be one border we're gonna say a strip 31 inches and this one will be 23 inches 17 I might be able to get all of this out of this single piece right and I can glue and screw in it okay so first things first is to cut this out okay oh nice clean cut down the backside yeah yeah there we go and that's up yeah now we cut the piece of wood out from our template the first thing we do is we make sure it still fits and adjust where needed and the answer is looks freaking perfect I'm really happy with that you know I'll need to put in a screw here or there to keep it in the job but very little in fact just it's really pretty straightforward how well this is gonna sit in here that's awesome all right and that clears that clears that glare is that clear okay great and I need to transfer these lines to the other side there's a lot of different ways I can do it but the main way I'm doing it is by drilling little holes at the two apex is where the lines meet and I should allow me to draw this same pattern on the other side which will allow me to properly staple and glue the lamp depth together so let's see here so now I'm going to rip my two inch border all around here and staple it in place and I'm gonna do it out of all this scrap MDF these are these strips are everything that I need but I cut the last chunk of MDF I had square and that makes it way more useful the next time I need a little bit of MDF first one up it's 31 inches there we go I'm gonna yeah I'm gonna leave that like that this one like that I think I'm gonna do this on the bandsaw that way I can get my angled cuts okay and there's this one okay I cut that one a little high I see okay so that goes to the inside of the line which it does terrific and this is on the inside of that line Oh fabulous that only leaves this bad boy which frankly he wants to sit kind of like this let's see if that mark happened oh I did okay I recognize that all sorts of different carpenters and makers will have all sorts of different techniques for achieving these angles including chop saws and actual math and those things are great I work in a quicker and dirtier fashion but there's no really wrong way to do oh there are plenty of wrong ways to do it but there's no specific right way did that help did that comment help you at all hey he's doing a different than I thought all right so now now it's time to break out the 22 gauge pin nailer Jen Schachter's favorite yeah I was debating whether to use wood glue or Krazy Glue sorry cyanoacrylate glue and I'm gonna use cyanoacrylate glue so I'm gonna glue this thing in piece by piece and then I'm gonna staple it and that's actually going to be plenty stable enough for the kind of abuse this lamp will receive sigh no acrylate isn't cheating in fact CA glue has been a woodworkers secret weapon for decades Jamie likes to use the thin stuff as a kind of quick and dirty furnish I find that absolutely terrifying but he gets great results he's a braver man than I line up there there yep yeah yeah and square off' occation just double-checking square fication on that everything will make your life easier later okay add a little bit of strength here on joints so now we do the backside we do each piece individually from the backside so right now I can see that I'm about 75 now so when I do this line I'm gonna go in a little bit so that I don't have any blow through and I'm gonna try and make sure I'm shooting super straight down 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and 11 let's see how many of those blew through - not bad not bad I'm gonna redo those to pull those out okay this one as you can see is a full like 3/16 mm maybe a little less inside the line so I'm gonna try and guesstimate that with my eyeball and get close let's see oh I missed three one perfect okay this one right on the line so it's gonna go all the way down no blowouts that is it that's the main body of our lamp the next step and I probably should have done this step before nailing it is to retest fit it into the dinosaur perfect works great love it very happy good next steps beats gone dead fusion it's almost like this is what I want is my diffusion oh I guess I could do that I guess I could tape that in yeah I could totally do that okay let's make this what's the prettiest angle on this sure okay so terrific that's a nice piece of diffusion I'll use some aluminum tape on the edge to attach that now I need a reflection surface which I'm going to use foam core for right yeah our fate look at that nice and close so I'm gonna attach my lights to this bad boy see this is tempting there's a nice bright RGB addressable LED kit but I'm not sure I don't like the spaceman they're a little too far apart I think I'm gonna redound to my basic warm white that's warm white there we go that's my baby cool oh it's even got a thing all right I thought 1.5 amps was enough of a power supply for a full strip of these but no I had to break out one of my 8 amp power supplies which I'm sure is more than I need but for here it's just enough all right so now I'm going to attach these lights in an array here yeah this is 12 volts right yeah DC 12 volts okay kind of warm okay what's the underside that's the underside and so if that's the underside that's the corner yeah that is the corner I want this stuff to go through so it's gonna go here yeah so these self-stick LED strips man they're amazing they they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and at all sorts of different price points got to be careful my local hardware store when these first came out was charging ten bucks a foot for them when you could buy them on Amazon for a dollar a foot if you work in film you might be buying the color balance non flickering kind which can actually run you a pretty penny because you don't want any flickering in film but for the most part these these amazon ones are just plenty of power and brightness I have these on several pieces of furniture in my house I'm not worrying too much here about being super Precious about the spacing and what it looks like in the corners because my diffusion will take care of that and I can keep on testing to make sure I haven't over bent the circuit when you're doing lighting stuff I can't stress enough that you want to be double-checking your circuit constantly as you're building because there's nothing worse than testing your circuit and then installing it and gluing it into your build only to find that it doesn't work so at every stage you're about to add some level of complexity to your build test your circuit make sure it still works it's the cost-benefit of analysis of how long it's gonna take you to find to troubleshoot the problem you're having versus troubleshooting it as you go now I'm going with a full roll of this because I want a lot of light but you can cut these to envy any length you want if you look closely here yeah we're cutting to a close-up here you can see that there's this little mark every like three inches or so with a little scissor symbol and a couple of copper pads well you can cut your LED strips to any length along that and solder your power to those two copper pads and you could make it six inches long as instead of sixty inches long and it will draw commensurately less power double-checking this is also stunning for theater sets and film sets where you need a little light in a specific place you see lots of cosplayers use these to light up their costumes and there we go you don't need these last two red wires and cut those double check our circuit yeah that's a nice amount of light okay great that being done I need to drill a couple more holes in this thing for some of the later fitment what I'm doing with these will become super clear okay now remember how I said I wanted this thing to disappear well the primary way I'm going to do that is with paint I'm about to paint this whole thing jet-black using just some primer I know technically it's not a smart idea to paint electrical contacts but I figure I hit it from the side enough and they're deep enough and the copper will wear that paint off when I plug stuff into it look I think it's time we talk about what kind of build this is there are the kind of builds you do at the pursuit of your aesthetic interest there are the kind of jobs you do for clients who are paying you money to make something permanent and awesome and then there are these kind of builds which are the kind of builds you do quick and dirty for your space this is way different than I would build this lamp if I was building it for a client this is much more akin to a theater build than a than a client construction so when you see me cutting all these corners I'm cutting them because I don't care I'm adding this as some functionality I want to have on the pool table that I can have an external power source then plug it into the back of the Dinos head this guy back here and he is also okay so that goes to the main power and this guy comes around here and plugs in yeah like this so then if he lives back here right around that comes through there okay great clean up the wiring a bit put this guy on there sometimes if I have a build I know I want to do really well but I'm still not sure about its final form factor this will be an interim pass in a project like I'll do a super quick and dirty really poorly built thing just to see the proof-of-concept like does the light work how do I like where the switches and stuff like that and then once I like made those decisions then I move on and remake it for real oh okay right right right my attachment method that's totally critical but we're now okay in terms of yeah I don't think I need the king of all wires baling wire to a three he these are overly long that's way better than being overly short so here's how this is gonna go see wires gonna come through here and then come back up through here and I'm gonna wrap it around the tooth and hold on to it see what I'm saying see it's really straightforward that's all the main mechanical connection and wiring I think it's time to do the final assembly I'm going to aid my reflectivity here with a little bit of a little bit of aluminum tape if you like me you like to get the most bang for your buck out of your photons which means yo want I'm just making one trip you want to make it many that's why he's a real ectric on tape reflective tape and then those photons move back around and do a lot more work for you all right so now I put the lights in awesome okay we're gonna hold this in with a couple more t-50 staples so that I could repair it and remove it if I needed to ooh what's this yeah I only just figured out this exists this is a pneumatic stapler 4050 staples like the kind you used to stretch a canvas or fur upholstery work normally these are applied using something like this which I've been using for 40 years and only just looked up and see someone makes a pneumatic one I'm never gonna work this hard again great okay now I've got the lights in I got the reflection in I got the diffusion here comes the diffusion and now I want to take that on again think theater not retailer that's the kind of build this is this is a theater build it's funny because I like I remember at one point I built this set of shelves in my loft it's like the early 90s and I knew this rich guy and he came over and he's like you built those shelves today and I was like yeah he's like can you build some for me and I'm like no and he said why and I said because I'll accept this build quality and you won't and I don't want to work that hard there you go that is a quick and dirty I mean we started this two hours ago quick and dirty pool table light I'm about to install it and we'll turn it on see how much it turns us on all right this is the moment of truth this is either the most fun part of the build or the point at which you realize you're not in the middle of act 3 you are still in the middle back to come baling wire honestly you should just always have a couple hundred feet of baling wire sitting in your you're sitting in your shop it's just too useful to not moment of truth hey dude that's the pool table lamp I have wanted forever and I can turn it on and off from here which is great and I've got a power strip that allows me to plug stuff in that I want to power up on the pool table for display I've had computers up here and everything alright so there you have it our table is ready for a good game of pool

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 758,765

Keywords: adam savage, one day builds, adam savage's one day builds, tested, testedcom, adam savage one day build, one day build, tested adam savage one day build, one day builds adam savage, one day builds tested, adam savage tested, adam savage one day builds youtube, led, pool table, diy lighting for room, diy lighting ideas, diy lamp ideas, pool table light ideas, pool table light height above table, pool table light installation, adam savage light, adam savage one day build lamp

Id: x8YTMPuvTGw

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RobertBorden]

Where are you folks buying your LED/ LED supplies?

[u/pumpernickel_mcnasty]

Stupid post... I spent 3 hours searching for the best replica t-Rex skull. Didn't realize they make museum quality reps for public purchase. If only they made an outdoors version for the life size full skeleton. My dog would love that shit

[u/VitoRazoR]

from about 18:30