Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Hero Prop for TV Show!

Adam Savage here for tested with another one day build today's is actually pretty cool a few months ago I was reached out to by British actor Matt berry who was preparing to make a show called rabbit run in which he plays a nineteenth-century British policeman named rabbit and he was reaching out to me to ask if I was interested in designing and building the hero prop for his policeman and back then those policemen just like today they don't they didn't carry guns they carried truncheon they carried small batons that are about a foot long and they wore them in a leather holster on their belt and he wanted his character rabbit to have a very specific truncheon that was his it would have an image of a rabbit in it and it would be like this hero talisman for his main character and I took that job and that is what I'm going to build today now we went back and forth on a lot of different designs for trenches because there were some really amazing ones and a huge variants some of them had steel and some had lead some were made of wood some had ivory-inlaid brass the works and I was thinking about this for several weeks and then I realised I think I knew the perfect shape for this truncheon now to tell you about this perfect shape I have to go back and mention that a few years ago my wife and I decided to follow Diana Kennedy's famous mole a recipe for Oaxacan molé a and give out moley to everyone for Christmas the thing about this recipe is that it's like 9 kinds of chilies each one that gets prepared at different ways and we were mortaring and we were pestle and we were blending for days and days and days there are still spots on the ceiling of my kitchen from that Molay extravaganza and once we were done I was thinking we need a better mortar and pestle and I started looking online for one and I found this crazy gigantic mortar and pestle made of marble that was like this big seriously like 18 inches across I've never found another one this large made by a company called Acme in the mid century it's a long way of saying the pestle for this is this puppy look at this beautiful gorgeous object this is it's too big to be a police truncheon it's got to be a bit smaller and perhaps just a little bit narrower and I am going to use this as my guiding principle for rabbits truncheon I'm gonna follow the shape I'm gonna follow the overall design I might change some of the proportions but it's gonna be wood down here steel up here it's not gonna be real steel I'm going to replicate steel with aluminum so let's get started okay so this is my overall shape this pestle I am going to redraw it as a smaller object perhaps slightly but with slightly less of a bulbous end and I have some materials here that I'm going to use so this will be for the handle this is a nice chunk of ash that I have I like ash it's easy to machine I can darken it later with some stains and some paint I have a chunk of aluminum that will be the end of this truncheon now truncheon --zz were I believe I don't know my British police history very well but I believe they were issued by the crown because most of the truncheon Zhai found pictures of that were antiques had a little British crown symbol on them I'm going to replicate that and I'm likely to fetch it using some acid using a technique that was told to me by Peter Lyon from what a workshop I also plan to put a little insignia in the end and to that end I bought some British police buttons that I am going to polish to weather them a little bit and I'm going to machine a little bit of a recess in here so this sucks right in there and makes the whole thing look a little more official I bought these on Amazon for like a buck fifty all right so first up we're gonna get to drawing here we go I think I have roughly the the layout of this it is it follows the shape it is narrower obviously it's got to be able to be carried in a holster on someone's belt and this is ridiculous but what I like about this is there aren't many British trenches shaped like this so this definitely makes it a kind of unique I'm going to do the handle out of wood just like the pestle the Front's piece out of aluminum and I'm going to have this middle collar in brass I'm going to age some brass a brass ring and put it in there first and foremost I got to get this handle right so that's the first thing I'm going to turn out of this ash you know good I'm gonna get covered in dust during this but that looks promising ooh promising I could do this on my machine lathe but I've got a wood lathe why not use a wood lathe for blazing wood I will eventually move this piece of ash to the machine lathe to do some of the final finishing but this will get me mostly in the room in terms of the overall shape that's the overall widest width I'm hoping to get this wood - and I only need about that much of it so we should be pretty good here we are going to do what I personally refer to as climbing the sandpaper ladder we're going to I have machined everything I have lathes everything about a sixteenth of an inch over my critical dimensions and I you know I'd have a little bit of a rough surface on here you can see it in this close-up and I'm gonna try and remove that rough surface by starting with an 80 grit and working my way up to a hundred and eighty grit that should get this handle nice and smooth but the shape is starting to take form and I'm really pretty pleased with it move from 80 grit to 100 grit now it's starting to become really smooth I'm starting to get rid of all the little marks you can start to see a shine as showing up here and if you could feel it it's feeling pretty smooth like a bottom of a baby's foot norms and knows what that feels like he's got a fresh one back home I mean a fresh pair of baby feet I bet he'd agree like oh yeah that feels like every sweet I'm very pleased with that ah yeah look at that beautiful my hole is roughly Center all the way through the handle that's really great this allows me to actually sink a piece of all thread all the way through this into the end of the truncheon to give it some extra strength get a little nick here there's a little nick but I don't mind that I'm actually that's that's that's part of the history of this handle it got nicked yeah so I don't see any reason to worry about it this is his talisman this is rabbits right hand and you know it gets into some scrapes and it gets scraped itself one of the nice things about drilling into a big heavy piece of aluminum like this is that it acts as its own heatsink the pulls heat away from the cut which keeps the drill bit cooler can't do this endlessly eventually a drill bit does heat up the aluminum does a great job keeping it away parting off big chunks of aluminum is always a really fraught and potentially dangerous operation because it's a lot of friction and things can get caught and it was a pretty big change in my life when I realized I could do it at a nice slow speed on the lathe rather than in high speed it's a much safer this way here it goes boink wow that is a that's a heavy object is what that is okay yeah oink-oink obviously when he's swinging these at other actors he's not swinging the aluminum one I know need to darken that piece of wood but I'm this is really shaping up to be a thing that is you don't want to mess with a guy who's got this on his belt I don't want to mess with a guy who's got this on his belt okay good I'm feeling very positive about all of this I need to make some small cuts in some adjustments in here we are we are moving a pace I want to do a little more polish on the end of this guy just to get rid of some of these little lines here so I'm going to chuck this back into the lathe and grab it right give it a little bit of a swak with this puppy yeah look at that it looks ding it looks beat up it looks like it's got a little history to it I love it ok now let's get a polish on this puppy I'm very pleased with that it is time to H the titular character a rabbit right here in the end how am I going to do that you wonder I'm gonna do that with a bit of ferric chloride yeah you want to be able to see it for camera its narrative device that is clearly a rabbit and if I edge that a couple times if I see an old I think the rabbit should be a little bit smaller yeah okay so let's do it like that now I could have loaded this file into my Cricut cutter and I don't need these anymore I could have loaded this file into my Cricut cutter and made a mask but frankly given that this is a piece of 19th century hardware I didn't want it to look too neat I wanted it to look a little bit rough around the edges and that is why I'm going with a hand-cut mask I wanted to feel if you looked at like actually go right now Google Paul Revere's plates and you'll see his etching on it and it looks really crunchy if you like bought a replica of it at the Paul Revere Museum if they have a gift shop I mean I've been there but I can't remember if they have a gift shop you they would do this edging that looked really clean because they can do that with computers and with lithography and stuff like that these days but back in the old days it was all done by hand and it's so clearly obvious you can see it so to me that's a kree part of the veracity of the prop Wow sorry about all the squeaking there we go there's my rabbit outline ferric chloride is an etchant it reacts with various metals the most common one being copper and it's used to etch PCBs custom computer boards for various projects but it also apparently does just fine on aluminum so the byproduct of the etching is hydrogen so it's not like it's poisonous but it is flammable so I'm just gonna want to get some on here and start to let the reaction happen a couple weeks ago off-camera I did some of the very first steel etching I've done here in the shop I used some diluted nitric acid to Etra sword blade this is an etch I'm gonna do on camera but this is the first time I've edged aluminum and apparently you're supposed to just wait for the reaction to stop and then you rinse it and if you want to go deeper you go again this is the first time I'm itching stuff it's really exciting hey while this is etching I'm going to add some stain to the handle here so that I can make it look a little darker and I'm gonna try and choose a dark stain red mahogany dark walnut I think that's where I want to start I've got some of my hand dirt on there before I stained it normally for fine woodworking you'd want to clean this thing really nicely but I'm making an old thing I'm making a new thing that looks old so I'm gonna leave some of those him perfections and let them tell some of my story and let that sit on there and soak in I'm gonna let you think about what you did looks like it's itching nicely I'm gonna keep continuing to go a little deeper bubbling up nicely awesome all right I'm going to clean this off wash it out and see how deep this five or six passes that etching has actually gotten let's see how my rabbit looks if after I peel off the tape I can still fix this if I've gotten it wrong it's a very forgiving process let's see Oh ladies and gentlemen there's a rabbit in the end of that trench look at that that's a nice dimensional edge right there I'm gonna wash it out with a little more water just to make sure it's no longer going through its edging past that I'm really really pleased with that that's a nice rabbit yep grass is so delicious yeah okay I have one more mark to put on this these trenches were often made they were government-issued it seems and each one had a little crown so I want to etch a little crown into there and a little RR that's the rabbit run there's my drawing I'm feeling pretty good about this my first time edging get like it's going pretty good alright I'm gonna peel up the tape and I'm gonna wash this off and got a little bit of extra a little bit of extra itching lurking about oh look at that yeah all right to the sink Boy Wonder might spray paint in there and in there too it's time for final assembly here we go that goes there there okay oh right mm nut goes on there that's it look at that that is oh man I am so psyched about this all right so then this guy lives in there and I'm gonna put that in with a dollop of I'm gonna put it in with just a little bit of butyl so when you guys get this on production you can just pry it out you can glue it back if you want do however you want but just know that you pop out that little coin and I'm gonna send an extra coin you pop out that little button and you have access to be able to take this thing apart into its component pieces what is butyl I'm not sure I've covered butyl and tested before okay butyl is effectively it's like what they put around your windshield when they pop a new windshield in your car it is a flexible petroleum-based gasket material it comes in rolls like this Jamie Hyneman introduced it to the Mythbusters production he said that when he lived in the Caribbean on a charter boat that he owned he could repair leaks in this boat from outside underwater using butyl and it is one of his go-to materials it's a little like blue tack it has a similar type of consistency but it's a little more tenacious I will tell you that butyl is like half of the Mythbusters and Mythbusters junior and camera teams rigging hardware half of their rigging hardware has big chunks of butyl you need to put a camera on something weird like a dashboard you lay down some masking tape stick a big chunk of beetle on there jam your GoPro into the butyl and it will stay and it's got its own little sort of vibration and dampening Mount butyl is amazing and it should be in every maker shop so I'm gonna just plus a little bit of butyl around the edge of this thing and it allow me to stick it down in a way that it's not going to appeal itself back up again but it will be easy for someone who wants to to take it back up so here we go there this was a really fun build and it is a rarity a one-day build that took less than one day that just never happens we got the Kings mark RR for rabbit run we got the rabbit in the edge oh that's gonna leave a mark wouldn't handle brass ring police button in the bottom it's time to kick some 19th century butt

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,132,222

Rating: 4.9386315 out of 5

Keywords: tested, testedcom, adam savage, kit bashing, modelmaking, one day build, mythbusters, adam savage one day build, one day builds, adam savage tested, model kit, adam savage kitbash, tested kitbashing, tested adam savage, model kit bashing, adam savages one day builds, tested adam savage one day build, one day builds adam savage, adam savage one day builds, one day builds tested, adams one day builds, year of the rabbit, matt berry, hero prop, channel 4, amc, bbc, ifc

Id: YZV4A4Kl0yM

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ChiefFlavorOfficer87]

Very curious, given the time period of the show. Would aluminum be available in such a quantity, or are we supposed to assume for the sake of the show, it to be lead or tin?

[u/YOUREABOT]

Great video, always love these segments! Thank You Adam.

[u/floydasaurus]

ooooh shit he even involved a wood lathe, I can see this being a favorite here lol.

seriously like that tiny wood lathe he had tho.