Ask Adam Savage: "Do you ever just chill out in your shop?"

and now let's see what kind of questions you guys have Carissa T asks I'm curious what three movies personal karissa t wants to know what three movies I'd recommend for some quarantine binging that inspired my special-effects style cosplay style or prop collection theme that might offer me some inspiration to this is a wonderful wonderful question because people are always asking you for your four favorite movies your five favorite movies your five best your Desert Island Discs etc and over the years I have come to conclude that it's not a it's not a we don't have favorite things we have things that are important to us for different sets of reasons that's that's my that's my that's my elevator pitch for why that question should be unasked but Carissa T is asking about movies that inspired my cosplay style or prop collection theme and in that I think Carissa T you're asking the right question it is something like there are these movies that are so important and there are aesthetic things that that have happened in movies that are really important and I mean if you if you looked at some pictures of some of my very early sculpture you would see you would see in some of them a distinct aesthetic influence from H R Giger the designer of alien german-swiss actually Swiss I believe incredible painter who designed the alien for Ridley Scott worked on jordão skis doom dune not doom and when I first encountered gigas work in Alien and then all the subsequent material about alien it altered me it was super important and part of the way in which I processed how much his aesthetic moved me was I explored it I made sculptures that felt like pieces not necessarily exactly like his aesthetic but that were certainly in the universe of and inspired by and in doing that I sort of processed the work I processed what about his work was interesting and important to me so along these lines here are some movies that are super important to my makeup of Blade Runner obviously Blade Runner 100% Star Wars but really specifically Empire Strikes Back there is an aesthetic consistency to Empire that has just hasn't hasn't been matched honestly to me Brazil have you not seen Brazil and you should see Brazil in fact if you'd like to watch it we here at tested in an unauthorized commentary of it what you should know about my history of Brazil is that it is deep and long I Brazil opened famously the studio that made Brazil didn't want to release it Terry Gilliam snuck it into the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards and it won I think Best Picture and that shamed the studio to release Brazil but they hated it and they they hated it so much they took Terry Gilliam's dailies and cut their own version of Brazil that has nothing to do with Gilliam's version and it's a remarkable document I when Brazil did open it was 1985 86 86 80 yeah right around 86 where it played in New York City was at the eighth Street Playhouse on 8th Street and 6th Avenue right below the Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland studios where Ric Ocasek and Deborah Harry recorded all the time and I was the projectionists at the 8th Street Playhouse so not only did I project Brazil for its entire seven-month run but I sat through it probably once a day for that entire seven months run seriously that's how much I loved the film I still we were using hour-long reels not a platter system but we would take our 20-minute reels that we'd get from the studio and we cut them three at a time onto our long reels but Brazil was two plus hours so Brazil had a 20-minute front reel and then two hour-long reels and I still so just to know this when you're projectionists they talked about it in Fight Club there's a little dot you see that shows up on the right side of the screen it's almost doesn't happen anymore because we're watching everything digitally but back in the film days this dot and the dot was a warning to the projectionist that it was soon time to be changing over from one projector to the other so I got a 20-minute reel on this one I got the second the third second third and fourth wheels on this projector and I'm looking at those dots and as soon as those dots happen I'm doing this trunk and switching to this other projector and then I'm taking off the 20-minute reel rewinding and putting on the second hour so I still when I watch Brazil I still know when those moments are despite the fact that like the criteria and copy doesn't have those the dots in the corner and when I say that there's a version of Brazil cut by the studio that's bizarro amazing weird the delightful thing is it's on the criterion collections disc if you buy Brazil or I I am not sure if you can do this pseudo criterion Channel mmm I have to check with them but if you buy the DVD you can actually watch multiple versions there was a different version released in the in the US than in Europe and then there was the studio cut Brazil super super important sorry I went on a long tangent there but Brazil is like yeah one of the very first cosplays I did at a con was Terry Gilliam's baby masked torturer which is since I didn't get any pictures of that that was just how John Landis and I walked the floor one year I'm planning to resuscitate that at some point in the next you know in the next few years later honor Brazil Raiders Raiders super important super important for the objects right like the movies all about its MacGuffins and there's a way in which when I'm like holding on to a convincing MacGuffin just this very morning speaking of Raiders I have this beautiful cross of Coronado from relic maker on the RPF that I was making better literally I just came in this morning and I was like you know what I've never liked that the nails in this crucifix were actually in molded so I drilled them out and use straight pins and reattached it and then I use some oil painter whether this down like it's never stopping with me I didn't even film this this is just like personal thing there's a few I I maybe this is also something for us to talk about on the podcast cuz it's a good question alright let's see here Empire asks what are the best insights you've learned from fields you weren't initially familiar with that is that's a big question I love the way I love the efficiencies that different disciplines obtain through it's their institutional knowledge you know how do you have let's see here I'm not sure I have a distinct answer to this question I'm not sure I have the distinct answer that you're looking for except that every time you encounter a new discipline and you learn though the efficiencies that that discipline has developed in order to be able to communicate you learn about efficiency in general ok so here's an example I'm Jamie and I built a touring show back in 2012 we toured around the world for a few years a few years later I also did a world tour with Michael Stevens from Vsauce and when you when you're taking a show out like that you're putting it in 18-wheeler trucks you're putting your crew on a bus and you're driving from one city to another every single day so you're doing a different show in a different city every single night usually on six-day weeks for efficiency and to pay for to make them to make money right you don't want to take too many days off and you could imagine that these theaters around the country that receive a new show every single day like how do they accommodate the difference between I don't know a one-person show from Craig Ferguson touring around doing comedy - like lamia's shows up right how do you how what are the ways in which these theater unions all across the country standardize to know what to expect and when Jamie and I show up like they don't know us they don't know what we're doing so how do they know what to expect it turns out there is one metric in the touring industry that they care about how many trucks do you have how many trucks that's it it's like you have to 18 wheelers we know how many folks we need to unload those trailers unless you tell us we need more that like that gives us a ballpark from which to build how we know that day is gonna go and I I love that there are so many variables for a theater show for the complexity of a performance and in the theaters themselves they care about nothing except how many trucks you have for reference I think that you to one of their later tours back when we were first touring in the in 1213 the tour they had just done was a hundred and eighty six 18-wheelers and I think that might have been the biggest tour ever yeah so that gives you a range from our two to you two's 186 yeah it's a fairly big Megillah it's like a freaking army oh man okay okay pythor asks when you were working on your aviators you had a slab of material on top of your desk it honestly looked like concrete in the close-ups what was the material could have been two things one thing is this which is a this is a granite surface plate this is what's called a reference surface machinists we use these to do layout and to do measuring and checking machinists I say we I I'm a machine operator I apologize however this is a granite service plate and I often use it sometimes when I'm working on hot stuff but I don't think that's the one I was using that day I was using that day my firebricks because I was doing some soldering and this is something you should have this is something any maker who's gonna work with fire ever should have this because these are these are fire bricks from like a kiln and you can purchase them for very little money and they they just like they don't hold their heat very well they insulate incredibly well and I have like three or four four different soldering and assembly projects for doing brass brazing and silver soldering and they're super lightweight and not that expensive thanks I didn't know I didn't know that needed to be a tool tip but I think it does now core fain asks thank you so much for doing these streams you're welcome my question is do you your family play board games if so which do you like best we don't we don't and it's not policy it's not like we don't play board games it's just that we haven't played board games I have lots of friends who play board games and have invited me to come play them and I have not done that I particularly love over the past year my friends Kim and Clark and Chicago have over the years introduced us to this great game called sets and runs I'm often referred to I found online as Russian rummy it is a brutal brutal slog of a game in which luck matters so much and you have huge swings of your luck as you go a very very enjoyable game that is the sort of main play with other people game that I engage and up until the lockdown and I gotta tell you I missed that game got to play I wouldn't when I was in Chicago for c2e2 I got together with cam and played with our friend Dan that was awesome and we play here in San Francisco with some friends all the time but we haven't and Kevin Clark even figured out how to do it online but we haven't it's it's it's tricky you get I yeah it's a whole thing that being said it's not like I'm against games at all and my son's tell me that Settlers of Catan is something that we should try because they say it's like epically great I've also heard about El Dorado I think I actually have that here I don't think I've brought it home yet because somebody told me what an amazing game it is Tim Lee asks do you ever lose anything in your shop and how do you go about finding it I lose stuff here all the time the worst is when you're holding on to something small and it drops and it goes because this floor yeah that floor is built to hide small crap and then when you start to go look into the corners of this shop the underneath of everything is it's a horror show in there there are a few there are few coping mechanisms if you what you've dropped is ferrous and can be attracted by magnets I am NOT above taking a magnet and putting on a stick and waving it around underneath some of the cabinets I even have some magnetic pickups up there there is a really really cool technique I learned years ago from a friend of mine from MIT and he called it sending out a search party so let's say let's say so let's say you're working with a couple of tiny screws like these little like these little wood screws and you drop one and you have no idea what you're looking everywhere you can't find it oh and let's say that and let's say that it fell off the table like this like you you like you've you bumped it ok so now you can't find it sending out a search party is take a second part put it in the same location knock it off the table and watch where it goes here's the thing it's not necessarily gonna go next to the other one although I have had that happen but it will give you some idea of how far the other one might have gone because if there's one thing that typifies all of the looking for tiny little things that I've done here in the shop is that things can move a lot farther than you give them credit for I oh my god yesterday yesterday I was finishing this machine I've been building for weeks I actually finally shot the last bits of it this morning and it has four little rubber feet on this machine so that it's stable and they were my last four rubber feet in my rubber feet bin I need some more oh I gotta make that note for myself gotta buy some more rubber feet anyway these are my last four rubber feet and two of them had to be customized to fit inside and underneath this machine and I'm installing them I've customized them I'm figuring out where they go I drilled and tapped the holes and now I'm installing them I found the correct size bolt and I can't find the fourth one I have three but not four and I've been looking at at the fourth one only minutes before but I'd also move all over here really fast I move around it's hard to look in the last place that I looked and it was round and rubber and black which means it's gonna go somewhere and not be very visible oh my god it was driving me crazy in those cases sending out a search party might have worked although I didn't have any more of that specific one in the end I got down on my knees and I crawled around my shop in concentric circles and I found it over behind the drill press but hells bells margaret things can really move when you drop them they can roll and they can skitter and they can they can travel way farther than you imagined and sending out a search party is a great technique for figuring out the radius that your search should encompass let's see here the strike today says I've become obsessed with sewing your EDC bags for friends and family so much so that I don't want to work on anything else how how do you handle the desire to focus on a new skill or discipline without continually ignoring the other areas of making again I just as a point of protocol with your question I I don't necessarily desire to focus on a new skill as much as I'm always interested in what a new skill could give me so it's always project base the skill acquisition is always project based not obtaining the skill for the skills sake but that's just a minor point that I felt like making your bigger question you know I have gotten a lot out of my life by focusing on the things that are obsessing me so I do end up ignoring a lot of things that I should be working on because I'm working on stuff that I'm kind of obsessed with and I can cope right I I'm a functioning human being and I'm a professional I work with other people so I get my stuff done eventually I deliver the things I said I'm gonna deliver eventually but yeah I do a lot of ignoring of the stuff that I ought to be doing because I want to keep working on this one thing that I'm totally working on yeah I'm not sure what you're going through is a problem I really appreciate that you're making a ton of them I'm you should send some pictures we'd love to see them and you know at a certain point you may see some new thing that you I mean this is what happens is you dive into an obsession and eventually you use it up it's not like you don't become obsessed anymore with that thing but on a project based on a project based why do you say this on a project-by-project basis I would imagine that there'll be a point at which you've reached your limit of making EDC bags and at that point you may have a different point of view about them about this or that feature look that line of exploration is always really useful like I say I can count a lot of the features of my life right now and I can say there that that following my obsessions has been directly responsible for those features of my life as it as it as it plays out right now and I'm very grateful for that because I also think that when we're obsessed with stuff we become more granularly self-aware yeah it's that right you the first time you make something it's just this mystery it's a cloud of facts and you're just kind of like ah this seemed that seemed doing it and then you start you get you make one now you've got some knowledge and you make five and now you have a different set of knowledge from those five than you did from the first one right and each time you're doing that you're expanding a knowledge base and you also expanding your point of view right so there's a certain point at which something that may have been acceptable for the first copy it's not for the fifth and some brand new thing shows up for the 20th copy that's that's right there that's that's self exploration man that's that's that's the whole point we're here so keep it up fake blood says I noticed you talk to yourself while you build a loan I do the same it seems to help how critical is your internal monologue though do you curse a lot when things inevitably go wrong my internal monologue is very kursi and how negative how critical is your internal monologue a very critical very critical yeah it's hard to turn that off it's hard to not turn that anger about doing something dumb or making a mistake it's hard not to turn that on yourself one of them so mistakes let's talk about mistakes for a second because they nobody escapes them they all happen everyone has them and one of the things that a lot of you who are watching this right now our regular Watchers of the tested videos so you've noticed and you've commented on the fact that over the past two-and-a-half months we've been sheltering in place I seem to be making a lot more mistakes in the videos of stuff I'm building here at the shop I'm not I'm not making more mistakes you're just seeing more of them because I'm shooting everything with a single camera and it's all just playing out there are so many times when I will like mess something up and they'll be this pause and I'll just be like oh oh you stupid idiot I'll say to myself you stupid idiot oh my god I can't believe you've done this and I'll look up and I'll see Gunther or Joey holding the camera and I'll be like give me five and now said okay no give me five minutes but I don't think I should do that anymore I literally think that like I gotta let those play out so you do see mistakes in the old videos there certainly showed up but there are certainly plenty of times and good there and Joey can attest that they that I asked for some space to kind of work something out and I think like you know I'm really glad I didn't expect that there'd be more mistakes in the videos that I'm shooting during lockdown has it even occurred to me but of course that makes total sense as for how critical one gets it's hard it is we are our own worst critics and we could all be a little more gentle with ourselves yeah we could all be more gentle to ourselves and we could all keep realizing that it's not about us it's not about us it's not about you it's not about me it's not about us the more you realize that oh my god they have or you will be and I say this to myself the more you realize this I say to myself in the mirror the happier you will be it's not about me would you consider an episode on how you sharpen your tools and why it's important well sharpening your tools is super important because sharp tools cut well and unsharp tools are dangerous things that want human flesh and they want to drink your blood that being said I am such a sharpening neophyte and I am such a sharpening I mean I have a whole set of different sharpening stones and I certainly can take like a chisel and wow that one needs some real help I can certainly take a chisel and put a reasonable edge on it but somehow like on my Japanese chisels here I just can't quite get that edge that's on this and it's you know if a chisel has an excellent edge and you don't abuse it it'll keep that edge for a long time shifted sharpening is super super important in sharpening your drill bit sharpening having your saw blades be sharp replacing your table saw and bandsaw blades once they're dull once it takes a lot of work to push stuff through makes your work so much better but the reason that I have never done a sharpening video is because I don't feel nearly any expertise about it I don't I don't and I tend to try and stay away from stuff that I don't have a distinct point of view on like every time I go to sharpen something it's like alright let's see if we can keep from screwing this one up too badly that's literally how I think about sharpening stuff and I watch videos and I've seen that beautiful Russian knife sharpener that's 500 bucks and I have a version of one from Craigslist I bought years ago and I I can bring in a blade to a fairly high degree of sharpness but sharpening stuff is such a specific discipline and such a specific zone and I even have done watch tons of videos on them the makeup of different Steel's and and different metals and how they sharpen and what's going on on the molecular level and still I would feel weird doing a video about it I got plenty of a point of view about how to put two pieces of wood together or to put two pieces of aluminum or steel together but when it comes to sharpening I still feel so much like a like a like a babe in the woods that yeah it's not that I wouldn't it's something I wouldn't make a video it's more like what I need is a real a real a real sharpener human a human who's an expert at it says teach me a bit because the problem with when you go look up sharpening as a discipline the signal to noise ratio is practically one it's the same for like making a good cup of coffee everyone has an opinion and all their opinions are like the only opinion you could have and everybody else is an idiot and there's no way to weight these things because there are efficiencies there are ways to do some things quickly and some things with great meticulous slowness and not everyone needs a one thousand five thousand ten thousand fifty thousand eighty thousand grit sander for surface for sharpening stuff like you see online like there are grades but it's really hard to figure out institutionally from a knowledge standpoint what's important and what's not important in this main when we bought our house here in the mission it had been owned by some commerce and they had a they had a single station full on steam espresso maker plumbed into the kitchen this is kind of kitchen item I would have never bought and I stared at that thing for three months and then we hired a barista from ritual coffee to come over to the house and teach us how to make a cup of coffee I had spent hours and hours and hours online looking up how to use one of these things and again signal-to-noise ratio one and it was a nightmare and the barista came over and was like yeah fill the milk up to about here you want to make sure this happens and this happens and with this the more you do this the taste like this and you can experiment with what you like and here's the sound the milk should make once it's done and it was like done this is it it's it doesn't have to be this mountain to climb of total perfection and yet so many people kind of stake out these territories of like I am the master of this discipline and I'm gonna tell you the only way it can happen that nothing makes me run for the hills more than that kind of gate keeping my goodness it's already 2 p.m. good lord okay who was your most influential teacher I have been lucky to have several influential teachers my great uncle Paul Sheldon had a workshop near the house my family has a house on Cape Cod that my great grandmother bought in 1900 and we've been my family has been going there every summer for 120 years and near the house that we have was Sheldon's place and uncle Paul had wooden wood which up and I learned my first hole drilling hand sewing tying knots and making things at his knee and that was a lovely thing that he did to let the kids on the point come to his shop and mangle his equipment and you know he also saw I remember being like 10 years old and making something wrong I wrote about this and every tools a hammer and making something wrong and getting all bent out of shape about it sitting there kind of trying to fix my mistake and someone comes in how's it going and my uncle Paul said to them well Adam screwed something up but he's really getting angry at himself over it no it's like oh he can see me I'm gonna see all this stuff that's going on inside my head I didn't realize how visible it is on our faces so Paul Sheldon oh hey that's the timer saying that the money might be dry I'm gonna finish this story about the teachers I also had a couple of I had several great great wonderful teachers in high school I had an art teacher mr. Benton let me really do anything that I wanted in the art department anything that they had I could pull it out and figure out how to use it it's the first time I used in airbrush the first time I used a vacuform machine so many things I got to learn because mr. Benton was just like do you go with your you know go do your own thing whatever you want to try my freshman earth science teacher Dan fair a force of nature and the first teacher to whom I asked a question that said I don't know which is one of the most powerful things a teacher can say to a student especially when you're 13 14 when you're a young person like that you think the teachers hold all the authority and so the idea that they don't know something is actually quite surprising and there are a lot of teachers who don't want you know that they don't know something but Dan had a healthy enough ego that he would he would say I don't know and so I would go during lunch I mean I didn't get along with my peers very well so during lunch period I would go sit in his class and and and watch some great papers and ask questions about like candle flames and things like that I had a creative writing teacher in junior or senior year named missus courts ma and she also you know what typifies mrs. court Simone was amazing I was we were doing a class exercise in which we got separated into different groups and I was finding myself like always with the outcast group right take a class of twenty kids there's like three popular ones there's a whole bunch of in the middle and then there's the bottom three and there I was always with the bottom three that the boneheads the losers that was me I was one of them right and I'm sitting there doing this exercise with these other two kids and like I'm just feeling like crap and I went to her after class and I was like is this my life is my life always gonna be like this she said like it's so important she said sweetie you are going I don't think she said sweetie but like that's the it's the vibe all right it was a sweetie bond she said you're gonna leave here you're gonna go to college you gonna walk through the front door and five people are gonna be walking towards you and they're gonna be the most they're gonna end up being your best friends for the rest of your life and she wasn't far off she wasn't far off that was in that first year at NYU I met many of the people who would end up being so important to me in my life and what typifies all those teachers is that they saw me they saw me and they gave me a view of myself this is this is a really really really important thing and when we talk about class size this might be for me the greatest argument about keeping class sizes small and it's that my remote learning as much as we'd love it to work is look it might work for some students it sure probably works for some students but kids need to be seen that's what all kids are trying to do trying to figure themselves out and when someone shines the light of seeing them on them they blue they photosynthesize right they it's real and each of these teachers saw a facet of me and reflected it to me in a way that still abides that still teaches me about myself and teachers love doing that teachers love seeing into their students and helping them understand how the world works even incrementally they all signed up to do that they all signed up because of the endorphin rush of getting a kid to go oh then right like that is real and when you have 30 kids in a class there's no freaking time for a teacher to do that yeah I did have some lucky Peters now what a maroon asks if you could have one Mythbusters event or myth mom or immortalized in a Lego set which one would it be what a maroon it's one of my favorite Bugs Bunny jokes what a maroon what a gullible what an in-cab all cow based puns and I ran into a comedian years ago I'm just gonna go off on a tangent about your username I ran into a comedian years ago I think his name was hymen Caston and I'm pretty sure and he said somebody he referred to somebody as a maroon and I was like ah I love that maroon it's like it's oh it's a cow pun because it's more on but it's maroon and he was like that's not a cow pun it's just a funny like it's almost moron but it's not and I was like no it's a count point because the other two puns are named cow poop and go a bull and he was like yeah I still don't buy it and I'm like I got laid out all the facts this is a trio of jokes that are played in order of course it's a cow based pun I clearly I'm still upset about it and I gotta have one Mythbusters event immortalized in a Lego set it's hard to beat the cow catcher making all 20 of the cars fly apart like a ballet then that was stunning some of the scariest driving I have ever done rocking car there are three actually you could do it you could do the Mythbusters place that you could do rocket car you can do the cowcatcher and then what's the third one you do moon landing but that's not that interesting stuff that Jay Mina oh you know do the water waterskiing behind the excavator I loved excavator myths those were so much fun I recently drove past one of the barges we rented on that episode for Jamie and I to use two excavators to basically paddle swim a barge back to shore that was great that was really great that would be a fun Lego technics build right yeah those three there you go let's see do you ever just chill out in your shop like sitting around having a beer not really but that's the kind of space it is right like this space is for me this space is for working if I'm here I want to work like both of those things are true I didn't realize that spaces couldn't gender their use until I was staying so back in the early 90s I was living in the Western Addition and working as an art assistant for Chico McMurtry of a morphic robot works there now in Red Hook Brooklyn and I was chicos I was one of she goes assistants for a couple years pull a lot of all nighters making dog monkey robots I made dm2 which i think is still around now built dm2 for Chico and at one point Chico went off to do a set of shows in Czechoslovakia but then Czechoslovakia and I stayed in his in his shop down on Yosemite Street in the Bayview and I was a mate so like that shop that living there was horrifying right like the bed was a shipping crate seriously it was a foam mattress in a shipping crate and it was every bit as dirty as you might imagine a foam mattress and a shipping crate might be and it was a great space to live in cuz I had welders I had a lathe I had a baby mill I had all sorts of tools but what amazed me was there once I was actually sleeping there was that that shop wanted you to work or get out like I saw Chico in a different way once I lived in his space because there was not even a couch to hang out at there was a single espresso machine for making a little espresso and like a toaster oven and that was it and that's where I understood that shops can have an attitude about what you should be doing them and thus this shops attitude is you should be working now I do have a leather chair over there in the display area where sometimes when I want to break when I need a break to kind of clear my head I will sit in that chair kind of surf the web check Twitter or something like that but for the most part I barely do any computer surfing computer just like vegging here in the cave yeah it's like I I need to leave here to go do that that being said there's certainly been some lovely late afternoons when like simone's around Sean Charles were marked above sorry our deboned comes over and like you know there'll be some people hanging out here but that's rare it's funny it's rare it's rarer than I thought it was all that being said I really like one of the things about the lockdown that I miss is having people around is having people move through the space because you know when we're filming forecasted there's always people kind of moving around here and it's like a it's a little cultural it'll work culture and that I love that culture I love seeing those people every day so I miss that so that to me feels like hanging out right like sitting there and going over the things that you made with somebody or talking through a problem or someone comes through oh yeah let me show you this thing I've been meaning to Oh take this thing you can you know work for this yeah I don't think that was actual answer to your question no no that was it was I yeah I I this shot wants me to work and when I'm here I want to work or it gotta go it's very true um so sometimes I'll make a mistake so egregious I'll just leave that's rare but that definitely happens like I'll make a mistake and I'll be like and I'm just like I gotta go home yeah and I've definitely done that this time is passing so fast what tool or tools do people off overspend on what cheap version is just fine that is a nifty and awesome question what tool to people overspend on while I am thinking about an answer to that I will say that within like this is a common frame of question I get and the frame is how much should I spend on my tools which is every maker grapples with this I grapple with this I've been working on accurate izing my lathe and it's like I could go I could eliminate those last two thousandth of run out just by it spending fifteen hundred bucks on the best chuck but I don't want to I don't that's the way too much ego man that's I'm not gonna invest it for an extra mm right it's diminishing returns so the question what should I wear should i allocate the funding I'm gonna spend on my makerspace and again I like this I think and this is advice that could work for musicians or dress makers or carpenters or anybody who works with stuff in which you need to buy material help right tools my advice is if you're not sure a tool is going to be useful to you buy the cheapest possible version of it and if it is useful to you then buy the best version you can afford and the best example I have of this is my heir is my you know how much I love pop rivets I built my first suit of armor using pop rivets and my toolbox is using profits and somewhere in around 1999 I learned that there are pneumatic pop riveters and I wanted one and yet they're expensive like over a hundred bucks 150 bucks and now that was money I couldn't afford back then for a tool that I wasn't sure was awesome and then Harbor Freight came out with like $25 air Riveter and it maybe lasted for a hundred rivets but that was long enough for me to know that that was a tool that I needed and I purchased this one I think in the early 2000s and it is a freaking fantastic tool sounds great feels great none of this uh using a hand Riveter and just wrecking your hand and then when we went when we went and made savage builds Milwaukee was our tool sponsor one of our tool sponsors and they sent me a catalog and I discovered that they have a cordless they have a cordless Riveter this thing is not bad I still prefer the air Riveter I still I still like this one a little better but really the point of the story was once I understood that this was useful to me its value to me increased and therefore I didn't necessarily go buy the two hundred and seventy five dollar pro-1 that's used on factory floors or something like that but I bought one that was like reasonable to me so I think that anybody who buys it like somebody goes out is just learning carpentry and goes and spends seven hundred bucks on a jointer that strikes me as like I'm not sure you need a jointer I've never used one in the carpentry they're done I totally understand how useful they are and I would love to have room for one in here because I would use it but for the most part for most of us honestly a table saw is pretty darn sufficient there are ways in which again like that people know the you know that signal-to-noise ratio of people saying you can only do things with this where you can be led to believe that there are that you have to have X Y & Z in your shop for instance I don't have a chop saw in here I've had a chop saw in my shop forever but about 4 or 5 years ago I was like I don't need a chop saw here I had it stored under something because what I might need it but I use the crosscut sled on my table saw and that supplies all the cross-cutting that I need I don't need a time three chop saws in storage actually I think I gave one to Simone and I think I lent another one to Ryan but yeah like chop saw is not something 10 years ago if you said to me you don't need a Chubb so I'd be like yeah of course I need to chop saw no I don't it turns out it's a process it's an ongoing process fellow floater asks are you still getting out on your one wheel between builds during this craziness I did I took a nice long one wheel ride just Sunday afternoon yeah Sunday afternoon I recently yeah it was lovely I went from the mission over I went through the wiggle up men nests through the Presidio all the way out to the coast around to the Golden Gate Bridge lookout down through Crissy Field and across the marina up Columbus down to Market Street and home it was fourteen and a half miles and I ran out of power about two blocks from here which to me is like that's as good as making it right like that's to me is like that's awesome the absolute exterior limit of what the one-wheel is capable of and the only reason I didn't make it this is because I went too fast for the first half of the ride and that's the thing is like you get better at it and you go faster and you use more power but if you really want the long ride you really want the 17 miles that expect that you got to go out like 1012 miles an hour or not 17 or 18 miles an hour I wear a helmet for those long rides and it's yeah it's actually really nice because there's a lot less traffic in San Francisco so it feels a lot safe and San Francisco's a great bike city now I love the bike lanes on South fed nests that are raised it feels really great I love the protected bike lanes on Valencia we are at 224 thank you guys for joining me I know I've already said that but feeling very grateful have a wonderful week and I'll see you guys next Tuesday at the same bat-time at the same bat-channel all right have a great one bye everybody now I'm gonna turn this camera off you get back to work

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 607,821

Keywords: tested, adam savage, ask adam, tools, workshop, cave, tested adam savage, inside adam savages cave, ask adam anything, ask adam savage anything, adam savage jamie hyneman, adam and jamie, adam savage answers, ask adam savage, adam savage cosplay, adam savage tested, mythbusters, mythbusters tv show, adam savage lego builds, adam savage lego

Id: H4-jGNoMlWU

Length: 49min 7sec (2947 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020