Ask Adam Savage: Savage Builds Wheel of Death Re-Do and Unrealized Ideas

thanks for joining me today uh i really  appreciate it i just i love these live streams   and i love the themes you guys come up with for  questions so uh just to reiterate from the top   of the hour i'm answering questions about my  show savage builds on the discovery channel   which is viewable on discovery's streaming  service right now there are 10 episodes of   goodness we did everything from making a working  zf1 gun from the fifth element with some help   from the inimitable and unbelievable gary oldman  and we also made a suit of working ironman armor   what do i mean by working i mean it was made out  of titanium it was bulletproof and it flies yeah   savage builds was a lot of fun um so uh the the  the the first question we have is from john hess   who says in the wheel of death episode if  you could revisit it and had unlimited time   and money what would you do differently  oh i do lots of things differently so   to uh to give you guys an understanding of  what john's asking about the wheel of death   is a incredible world war ii weapon called the  panjandrum and one of the big issues for the   allies in breaching german beaches in france  yeah that's correct for world war ii breeding   breaching the german defenses on the coast of  france one of the biggest issues was that the   germans sent out all these things these these  giant uh things of rebar called czech hedgehogs   they had hundreds thousands of miles of barbed  wire and mines and stuff um and then they had   this huge seven foot thick super tall sea wall at  the end of the beach and the allies thought about   making a device that could roll over all of those  blockages and get to the sea wall to blow it up   and what they designed was a i think it  was like a 12 foot tall wheel here actually it didn't look too different than this wire spool  here uh two wheels 12 feet tall with a payload in   the middle several thousand pounds of explosives  and to power it rockets attached to the wheels   right uh uh carrie grant and tori uh approached  this uh story for white rabbit project if i   remember correctly um savage builds it was  always on our list and we actually built one   um we built one with help from my friend adam  stelzner from jet propulsion laboratories he's an   unbelievable engineer and project lead uh adam  was when you saw the uh uh uh the amazing lander   of uh some of the mars rovers adams and his adam  and his team are the geniuses that let us land   things on mars and actually be able to use them  um so adam helped design this incredible device   and we built one to spec and it didn't work that  well so we built our own and again we used rockets   with the right propulsion the right amount of time  uh and it's a spectacularly weird invention but   it's also from an engineering standpoint a really  beautiful idea because if if what you have is a   whole bunch of blockages between you and your goal  just make wheels that can ignore blockages that   that large that that's a great that's genius it's  so crazy it's genius it's i dare i say it is a   jamie heinemann type solution so i'll just make  some bigger wheels yeah um so our second execution   adam stelzner's amazing idea was to was to  put a pair of fly wheels on either side of the   of the panjandrum and spin them up and  then use the breaking of those flywheels   to transfer that energy to the rotational movement  of the panjandrum in theory it was a great idea   in execution we underestimated how  much braking power we would need   we needed a lot more than this standard pair of  uh caliper brakes from a truck we thought that   would be plenty turns out it's not plenty not for  the kind of energy transfer we were interested in   so it didn't work that's fine that's what happens  when you experiment um i i do want to tell you   one story from production which is that  we lost the panjandrum at one point   um so we built we built two of these things 12  foot tall two wheels like six feet apart they're   gigantic and we mounted them to a flatbed to drive  them down to this farm in half moon bay where we   were filming and on the way i'm just going to  say it this way on the way one of the panjandrum   panjandra one of one of the panchandrans   fell off of our flatbed and spent a little bit  of time rolling down a california road yeah   luckily it was like 4 45 in the morning there was  nobody else on the road amazingly the pandemic   rolled like i think a few hundred yards before  hitting a tree and not being damaged we were   able to actually use it only a few hours later i  just remember my producer quasi apparent calling   let's go i'm running after the panhandle  running down the highway down the road yeah   luckily no equipment no people no  vehicles were harmed or injured   oh my goodness that was kind of scary um if i  had my druthers i would totally build another   pan tantrum i would totally if savage builds got  picked up for another season i would be pitching   redoing panjandrum as one of the episodes uh i  think the idea of using spun up flywheels and   braking force is a really really clever idea  it's just it from a physics and engineering and   energy standpoint it was surprising how  much braking force we required to start   transferring that braking energy into  forward momentum forward movement energy   so yeah if i had time and budget i would do  it again hopefully it would work this time uh all right let's see uh so c2 lawson wants to know um did i have any  ideas for savage builds that i was unable to build   well yeah we had for a show like that   you start with a list of like hopefully 30 or  40 things that you want to do and then you know you start to look at the you start to look at  the you look at that list through a whole bunch   of different lenses so you look through  what is the stuff that i'm dying to do   what is the stuff that only this production  could do those are two different questions   because if there's something that only our and  to be clear like the production team for this   uh relied heavily on a lot of the expertise from  uh the original mythbusters production team um   yvette solis and jack's marker were the two  supervising directors and producers under   john tessier on that shoot and they are both  uh long-time veterans of mythbusters and so sometimes there's a lot of crossover between some  of the experiments i've done and things like other   youtubers and other science channel science show  people have also done so sometimes the metric that   i like to look at is is this something that only  our team could could pull off because that would   be worth doing uh we have a lot of weird expertise  this mythbusters group uh and to bring it to bear   on something strange is really awesome and really  fun so that's another lens another lens is what   is the network glove what does the network  hate the network you know for the most part   i've always found a pretty willing partner in  discovery if something's really spectacular and   i think it's spectacular they have always wanted  to do it but sometimes you butt heads sometimes   the network can't see how something's going to be  exciting and you know it can be exciting um i mean   i'll give one specific example and again i i don't  mean to this isn't a trashing network executives   uh talk because everybody has their job within  a production they all answer to different people   they all have different metrics by which they need  to do their job and i respect that um but when   we did the nitroglycerin episode for instance and  the nitroglycerin episode was uh was about ways to   safely transport nitroglycerin famously volatile  if you had a jar of nitroglycerin in your hand   and you dropped it the story goes the whole  building would be vaporized and there was a huge   nitroglycerin explosion here in san francisco  back in the gold rush era um and we found an   expert in nitroglycerin we made you have to make  it because no one nobody manufactures it anymore   you have to make it and it's very expensive like  crazy expensive like you know banaca expensive um and what we found in making the episode  was that was that nitroglycerin is so   dangerous we never got to the plot of our  episode nitroglycerin is so unpredictable   you can't count on it actually exploding  under any specific circumstances   yeah i mean we would do things that should be  guaranteed to get an explosion and we wouldn't   and we'd do things that would kind of maybe get  explosion get huge explosions it was terrifying   and in the end the entire hour of television that  we ended up making turned out to be just about how   difficult it is to work with nitroglycerin not  at all the original plot and in the original   plot what i had what i had come up with which  i really loved was that um i would bring in an   engineering expert like my friend michael lynch or  danny hillis or somebody and we would using only   equipment and materials available to a gold rush  era traveler like tools from the 1850s 60s 70s   um we'd use only tools and technologies available  to that time to make some super gimbal carrier   for nitroglycerin i love this idea i love the idea  of using modern modern engineering concepts like   you know using 1860s farm equipment to make a  steadicam right that's that's an inherently great   juxtaposition um but we never got there because  nitroglycerin is so awful and so difficult to use   that we ended up making an hour in television  just about that but the thing is i don't think   i would have ever been able to pitch  that episode the one we ended up airing   because a a network exec would be like really it's  just going gonna be like spinning your wheels the   same way every single time which is a completely  reasonable question if someone came to you and   said i'd like to do an hour of television that  seems to be the same thing over and over just   raising the stakes every time but achieving  the same result that is a difficult pitch   but there's also a difference between what  happens in an episode and who it's happening   to and that's that kind of you know you can't  quite say to a network executive oh it's going   to be fun because i'm doing it like that's not  necessarily the answer yet it is kind of an answer um but the the the c2 lawson you're asking  about ideas for savage bills that we were   unable to build the thing is is that a lot of  the bigger items on that list i'm still holding   in reserve for another show or another execution  there are tons of like big or expansive builds   that i continue to think about and dream about  and will eventually one day do for instance   having recently um brought my samaritan  to almost completion this is all aluminum   i'm now i'm now feeling the desire to make one out  of steel to make one entirely out of steel make a   firing a firing samaritan out of steel i  would love to do that that was on my list   for savage builds season two uh if we ever if we  ever get there or got there um because apparently   uh from what i understand from gunsmiths this is  a t oh no it's the wrong bullet i want to pull out   the silver one where is it no there we go um that  this is apparently a terrible relationship between   bullet and the amount of powder project projecting  that bullet out of your out of your uh uh gun um   that this is a very anemic amount  of power to power this bullet   that is a testable proposition and i would love  to do that someday i might that's the only one i'm   currently willing to share with y'all thank you  c2 lawson thank you for watching that entire video   if you'd like to support us further you can head  over to the tested store links are in the comments   below and you can buy things like our demerit  badges you've heard of merit badges these are   the opposite this one here is for measuring once  and cutting twice we went back and forth whether   to measure once and curse twice because that  also happens we went with the cut twice and   this is one of my all-time favorites this is  when you accidentally release the mysterious   blue smoke that makes all electronics work and  then they no longer work you can't release that   smoke head over to our store get yourself some  demerit batches and we will see you next time

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 295,823

Keywords: adam savage, panjandrum adam savage, panjandrum ww2, adam savage savage builds, savage builds, adam savage questions, adam savage answers questions, adam savage answers your questions, behind the scenes savage builds, adam savage Q&A, adam savage live streams, adam savage tested, discovery channel, discovery channel savage builds, adam savage mythbusters, ask adam savage mythbusters, ask adam savage tested, wheel of death fail

Id: ei2jLKORXn4

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021