Tour of Adam Savage's Home Office

hey it's norm and it's adam and we are in your office we've recorded podcasts here before so people have kind of caught a glimpse of what you have in your office now we've been to m5 we've been to the cave and you have things there but what do you take home well i keep it's a revolving museum here at home i change up what's here in my office the office is not packed with stuff like a cacophonous hole i like cacophonous holes but they don't really have a place here in the house so it's curated so it's curated it's much quieter in here i do store some of the things that i don't want away from me some of my most precious things honestly my blade runner crystal lives here at the house um i don't leave it in the shop because i want it close and it is one of the really irreplaceable honestly i could make it again but you know this is five years of work yeah i wouldn't want it to go away but you know some things here are things you've made and some are things here things you've collected or bought and this this shelf so this is a local cabinet maker made this shelf i added the lights again these are the same lights i'm using to light the cabinets at the cave i have just a little dimmer here so i can adjust the brightness um and to me they make these they make these shelves really sing uh and be real specimen shelves for me so i've got a lot of my favorite things on it um i don't know if we've talked about this the bride's a lot so this is um a friend of mine made this well i hired him to make this it's an exact replica in pretty much every single way there could be of the sword from kill bill and how would you identify those attributes well so uh the the this guy uh andrew blakey what he did was he looked at the fittings and the findings the end caps these all have names in japanese which i don't know right now and he identified that they were probably bought by a prop master like not super custom made for the film and it turns out he was right so he managed to find all the suppliers of the original uh little doodles and baubles and handles and things and then he also bought a cnc machine to make the perfect lioness carving and the hanzo carving as well as the food dog when you see the blade being drawn in the film you actually see a very specific hamon on it that's the edge now this blade is not steel it's actually aluminum and magnesium alloy it's made for the practice of viado which is uh of drawing a samurai lighter yes well actually it weighs pretty similar to a good sword but um this is in fact the same blade made by the same company that made um a thurman's sword for the film so in every way this matches a shooting master wow as close as you can guess and you've done some work on so yeah when he brought it to me uh he had cnc'd this ring here towards the end this is accurate to the film um but i had dinged it up over time and didn't really i was i wasn't happy with how it was weathering so i remade it out of brass a couple mornings ago i just got up real early went to the shop and machined this and it's a little involved more involved than what i'm describing but yeah i made it um i have oh that right so i've discovered you can buy some great memes uh 3d printed from shapeways so i got sad i got success kid and i have the fine gentleman here and this is also printed on shapeways this is printed on shapeways this is a model of one of teo johnson's strawbeasts that walk along the beaches of holland if you if you uh if you hold it up here watch this gorgeous piece of machinery it's so beautiful and then there's this one which i actually bought it's a japanese uh uh magazine in which every magazine comes a kit and there's a new one that's just about to come out i've got it on order so if you blow on that one nope oh okay oh gotta blow it a certain way now oh also in the movie hellboy when elsa gives birth to the beast samael she does it with a reliquary full of salt this is in fact the one from the film how did you get that i bought it on ebay it just popped up like 350 bucks like nobody knew what it was or wasn't paying attention and it's crazy oh my gosh okay i'm going to realize for a second to talk about the story i eventually got a hold of the art director and this is before i had met guillermo i got a hold of the art director for hellboy and he said oh yeah you got one of those cool so do you want to know the story about how i had it built yes i said so he's in prague they're shooting hellboy and guillermo says i need this i need this reliquary thing and he's gamma has a sort of a history in his head about it so the art director takes that and he's trying to figure out what this thing should look like so he goes to the jewish museum in prague it's a very famous museum lots of amazing artifacts and he starts talking to the conservators about what a reliquary from of this kind of history would look like and not only do they give them a really good idea about it but they're like you know we could make that fix we do bronze casting and stuff like that all the time so these conservators at the jewish museum in prague hand built two of these for the film and i managed to get one it's one of my favorite favorite objects i've got a bunch of hellboy stuff in here now moving down we've got things like visible dog which i really like um this is a jar of all my kids teeth i saved them i know that's kind of gross yeah yeah i don't mind being a little gruesome too fairy um another rasputin yeah another rasputin glove this is one of the reliquaries that abe sapien wears around his neck in hellboy um these are the beautiful uh gothic like thorny d d dice that you can buy on shapeways um a registration pip from motion capture suits from industrial light and magic a little more of an esoteric joke there some of my favorite weapons like um obi-wan sabre from episode one mm-hmm it's one of the few things that's good about episode one this is the actual actual prop no no no no no yeah i i i can't afford that that's a hundred thousand dollars this this was just for master replicas but it's beautiful it's got a great weight to it yeah it does it's a gorgeous piece um this is a d milled and deactivated exact replica of indiana jones first pistol from raiders of the lost ark it's smith and wesson um it's de-milling is really complete a pipe has been welded into the chamber so you can't put bullets in it and the barrel's been blocked uh and the firing pins been removed i mean in every way this thing can't fire but um when i bought it it was slightly the barrel was a long barrel so i actually chopped it and machined this gun site to match the original uh so i kind of like that i've got these two harrison ford classics sitting next to him and then a will smith classic i've got a little will smith classic yes the noisy cricket the noisy cricket oh okay kurta computers these are actual computers these are calculators that you operate by turning a crank they're called the pepper grinders that's a series one and that's a series two these are two of my favorite objects in the world they're really complex but you can calculate out to 11 places with this it's fancy abacus yeah and what is this okay this is actually really now i might be wrong about the history of this but this is what i've been told um this was a gift from a grateful client to my grandfather my grandfather was cushman higginson he's one of the pioneers of breast cancer surgery he was a key member of the columbia presbyterian cancer wing for four or five decades you wrote one of the early seminal textbooks on breast cancer called diseases of the breast and he received all sorts of really weird and wonderful artifacts from clients throughout the course of his really long medical career and this is one of them this is a japanese medical doll it is carved in ivory and if you were a woman in 19th century japan and you had to visit the doctor propriety what i've been told again i could be taught this could be a total lie but propriety would dictate that you would never be so untold as to actually describe anything about your body to a doctor sure even that was so this model allows a woman to point to pretty much any part of her body but they carved it without having to describe yeah it doesn't look like any type of medical doll no but and but it's basically a reference it's a reference that allows the patient to point to any part of themselves that hurt or has a problem with left knee only never the right knee isn't that amazing wow yeah it's uh it's something that i got after my grandfather passed away and it's one of my favorite objects moving on over here we've got well okay this is another beautiful object this comes from uh the house i grew up in in sleepy hollow new york was built with a billiard room in its basement this is one of the original balls from the billy room this is elephant ivory they don't make them like that anymore they don't make them like that anymore thank god in fact actually this is a very interesting story this is uh cellulose there's a very fantastic story about this about self-conservation so round about 1900 brunswick bulk calendar company was making bazillions of dollars selling pool tables and billiard balls because pool was undergoing a huge resurgence much like it did with the color of money in the mid 80s and the brunswick company looked and said we're going to run out of elephants they would they were killing thousands tens of thousands a year and they realized this wasn't sustainable of course a fine replacement so they held a contest to con construct a replacement material for ivory billiard balls and the winner was cellulose cell cellulose which ended up becoming the very first industrial plastic it's the reason film was printed on it because it was the first industrial plastic yeah and we have the billiard industries self-conservation efforts to thank for that that's history wonderful this is a replica i made of a russian nuclear launch key uh jack sparrow's key to davy jones locker a lost key from shapeways uh some oh this is a great piece this this is a bit of mythbusters history right here this is um that's a 45 caliber slug embedded in bullet resistant lexguard did you shoot that gun i shot this i shot this bullet um and it's just it's i love that you can see the shock rings the amount of force going on so what this is lex guard is um two sheets of uh polycarbonate sandwiched on top of eighth inch polycarbonate sandwich on top of two sheets of acrylic now the polycarbonate is known for deforming but not shattering and the acrylic definitely shatters and in that way uh this lex guard which is like what you'd see in a bank tellers window captures a projectile most projectiles it's called bullet resistant when we fired a 30.6 at this it went through like two layers of it um again stuff that i would uh this is from uh joe versus the volcano i've been planning to make a mold of that down here we have a couple of beautiful pieces when you uh when you graduate from the green berets one of the ways in which they they let you know is they give you a knife called a yarbro and it's designed by my friend bill harzi this is not a yarbro this is a civilian version of said um they are functionally identical except for uh functionally identical for a knife yeah they'll stab um the only difference is that when you're a green beret when you graduate from the special forces you get a serial number and that's assigned so associated to you um bill recently did a series of knives that he hand ground in his shop and that were uh released and i bought that it's again this was made by spartan harzi it's just a beautiful blade you feel how light it is the handle is actually made of a material that gives you a better grip the wetter it gets like it's actually really specifically made for use in the field under the most adverse conditions and bill is an inveterate blade maker so he's been teaching himself napping which is the way that caveman man used to make arrowheads and this is uh the blade he napped out of a piece of plate glass huh unbelievable is it sharp uh it's fairly sharp go ahead wow and then some oddities uh these are oddies i picked up on etsy um little figures made out of uh fema and sculpey and painted floating in jars um yeah i bought like 10 of these and sent a few of them to guillermo this is um this is pretty cool these are my um these are my headpieces the staff of raw now there's two of them though in the movie careful watchers of the movie will notice that there's one that uh marion is my dog's barking there's one that you can see throughout most of the movie but it's different than the one that marian's holding in the very beginning of the ravenwood bar scene so uh this is a sculpt from the replica prop forum uh i consider now i have the definitive edition of one of each of those uh brass knuckles from constantine uh a replica a replica not genuine this is a this is an impurity from an oak tree called an oak gall um and in fact it is the source of uh early ink and still some of the best ink oak gall uh apparently is one of the key ingredients for making a really good hearty ink before i did mythbusters i did prop building for the movies but i also did some prop research for master replicas and i did the early research heading up to the ranch to help them design a product of the thermal detonator from return of the jedi so you made the prototypes yes and this is the final product that's the final product um i actually when i was making this i called up the guy who had hired me and i said hey tom it's adam savage listen i got all the pictures of the thermal detonator should be able to turn you out of prototype in a couple of weeks and uh two days later i got a call from the fbi and i was right below and they're like is this adam savage yeah is adrian hawkins from the fbi i don't know if hawkins was the name i mean i said whatever his name was this is agent so-and-so from the fbi and i was like you're kidding me right like no sir i'm not kidding you uh mr savage are you building a thermal detonator and i was like okay who is this he's like i assure you this is the fbi he said let me tell you what i think is happening i'm a bomb tech over here at the fbi office in oakland and i've never heard of a thermal detonator but when i google it i found that it is an item from the movie return of the jedi then when i googled your name i found that you had worked on episode one i'm going to make a wild guess that you are replicating a prop called a thermal detonator from return of the jedi is that correct and i said i'm laughing hysterically this one is this correct put together and he said uh he i said how did you know that i was doing this he goes well you called somebody last week and you left a message on the wrong person's machine and whoever you did call called us because they were freaking out hearing someone building a thermal detonator um this is a beautiful replica of keanu reeves lighter from constantine as well constantine it's actually a better movie than it has any right to be i really enjoy that movie and some of the props in it are fantastic so that's that's your shelf yeah it's a it's a moving curated kind of gallery you know it for me it's just like i i turn it on i sit here i take calls and do sketches and do writing of stuff that we're working on and it's it's it's like this small version of my head gives you things gives you inspiration you swap things in and out everything from lego things you've bought things you've built exactly that's wonderful and that's just one wall of your office yeah i'm going to save the other walls for later we will we will there's some other other goodies awesome thank you adam for sharing this with us absolutely cool we'll see you guys next time on tesla.com bye guys

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 3,022,948

Keywords: mythbusters, tested, hellboy, shapeways, home office, testedcom, adam savage, replicas, man cave, cave, Inside Adam Savages Cave, tested adam savage, adam savage man cave, home office tour, adam savage office, adam savage tested, adam savage (tv producer), adam savage desk, inside adam savage's cave, adam savage tour, adam savage cave, inside adams cave, adam savage lightsaber, adam savage home office, adam savage workshop, adam savage house, tested adam savage house

Id: 7I0rX7t1J0Q

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/jjswee]

That was a really cool video, thanks for posting it. I'm a fan of Adam Savage. He is just a really cool passionate dude.

[u/timmmmyboy]

I could listen to Savage ramble for hours about anything. Not only is he passionate about this stuff, but he's such a great storyteller! Great video, thanks!

[u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist]

Anyone know what 'Japanese magazine' that he's referring to where every issue comes with a kit? The specific kit he refers to I paid almost $100 for!

[u/digithead]

That was outstanding! Thanks for sharing the video.

[u/phloating_man]

Via Shapeways article by Duann

[u/johnyma22]

Just for the record Shapeways sucked for me, I ended up using sculpteo then getting my own 3d printer.

[u/transceiverfreq]

I'm blown away that he has one of each series of CURTA. Very impressive.