Tour of Adam Savage's Shop (2024)

hey everybody Adam Savage in my cave with some new shop infrastructure to some new with a new shop infrastructure tour you have no idea how significant the change that has just happened in this shop really is and I am dying to walk you through it but some prehistory first for the last 13 years I have been working in this shop mostly at a bench sitting right here this has been my primary work interface for the most part everything I've done has happen on this bench except for cabinet building which is ridiculous I tend to build my cabinets on the table saw which is stupid because this is a perf cabinet matri V is what it was built for um but suffice to say I have enjoyed the luxury of a shop in which I am the only one who uses it which means that things don't get lost unless I lose them I don't have to worry about a hammer that someone else didn't return and that's been great and the fact that I build one thing at a time has meant to the largest degree that working at this bench has not been an inhibition And yet when people visit the cave they are often surprised by how small this working area is because the amount of area I work in here is only about 450 Square fet it's about 15 by 30 um and like I've said for most of my years here that's not been a problem but in the last year and a half two years I have felt the in approaching smallness of this space and I've been feeling like I needed to expand I thought for a while about moving the cave and then I thought better of that I live two blocks from here give or take and that is a luxury that I am jealously holding on to a three minute commute is a thing of magnificent Beauty um but more than that I also realized that there was space for me to expand in this shop uh I I when I first moved here in 2010 it was my wife's idea specifically to make part of the shop a display space and I I loved the approach to that I love that idea she knows how much I love telling stories about the things and having them out an extent is fantastic I came up with the idea of using Billy bookcases of lighting them of putting white backs on them so they became like museum display and I set up 14 of them here in the middle of this shop filled them with 10,000 artifacts um and like I said over the last year I've been thinking maybe I don't need that display space maybe I want to move that display space somewhere else maybe maybe I should have a museum somewhere that's that's a long-term thought but the idea was that's where I could expand and I was slowly wrapping my head around expanding into the display area when earlier this year I got word from Shan how house that the old industrial Light and Magic model shop building on ker Boulevard in San Rafael California was finally going away and was going to be converted into Medical Offices these are buildings that George bought way back in the 70s when he first moved up to Marin and ilm used to occupy all the buildings on both sides of ker Boulevard in the specific area of San Rafel and they were down to the last one I don't even think ilm own this building anymore but it was still being inhabited by some OG modelers uh and it was still being used as a model shop for commercial jobs and film jobs and it's gone as part of the winding down of that this OG building there were parties we tested went up and shot for several days interviews with Ben Bert and Jee Bolly and some other Lauren Peterson some wonderful Old-Timers who gave perspective into what that building meant and what it was like to work there and all that equipment got boxed up and auctioned off every friend I have in the Bay Area procured some bit of ilm history in his auctions uh and I was sitting in uptown models with Sean house and I was looking at this 22t long wall of model making racks and the construction of the models happens in styrene and it happens in tubing and it happens in acrylic and it happens in brass and it happens in aluminum those are the primary building materials of a movie model shop and I'm standing there in uptown models and I'm looking at this wall of all of these materials and I'm thinking are these going to get broken up and carved away and you can't sell any of these things they're two who who's going to buy a 500 lb rack with $100 worth of brass in it and I just said to Sean I'll keep it together like I'm offering to take these racks and to keep them extant keep them stocked and keep them available available I'm not even sure what available means I mean all of my old ilm colleagues can come here and go shopping any time they want that's mostly what I mean by available I don't think that's something that happens a lot or will happen a lot but there also too important of an artifact to let go so I said that to Shawn and then a month later Shawn calls me up and says I need you to pick these racks up within a few days before Thanksgiving the week before Thanksgiving cuz he had accepted my offer instantly I just didn't quite realize it so I rented a truck and went up there and Joey who's shooting right now met me up there and we humped a couple of tons of crap into a 16t cube van drove it down here it was non-trivial um these things are heavy they're exhausting uh and then all of this racket came into my already full display space and working shop and crippled this place for about three weeks um you could barely move I I actually got mildly depressed like that that that is that Lial space like moving is really hard for me moving moving house moving apartment um I do not like the Lial space I like to have landed somewhere and whenever I have to spend a few weeks in a Lial space it's difficult for me emotionally and so I was I was having that moment but here's the thing when I said I could take the racks I knew that I could f them in here I just didn't know exactly how but I knew that they would work but I hadn't planned to expand into that area for months I I was kicking that mental can down the road until Sean accepted my offer and then well it's time to just deal with it so my shop assistant Orlando and my assistant Veronica and a couple other people and I spent a week packing up the entire display area so let me just describe to you for a second what the display area was it was 14 Billy bookcases with six shelves each housing lightsabers Legos astronauts space stuff everything imaginable now this is a map I have in my head how do you pack all this stuff up to be accessed later I kept the mental map we took a photo of every single shelf and each shelf went into a single legal sized file box carefully packed with paper and packing materials and then the picture of that shelf went on on that box and it was numbered in the shelves a through M with shelves 1 through six in each one and they are now sitting in a temporary storage space in the orientation they were here in the cave so everything I could ever need out of any of those display cases I can go to that St storage space and get that thing immediately it's stunning once we moved all that stuff out we started building the shop but it wasn't something that you could do like that you had to kind of be taking down Billy bookcases and chronicling them which we did for two whole days at the same time as you're also building the shop and I I think I've given enough of a preamble so that Joey can actually swing a camera left and you can see just how much more space I have in this part of the shop and well there's a lot of things going on here there used to be a nut and bolt cabinet here this drill press used to live over there but drill presses he he belonged nearer to the mill than he was uh and also it's on Wheels so it was easy to move over here the other thing that's missing here is this workbench which is I say workbench in air quotes because it was mostly a horizontal surface covered with crap it was a storage shelf but it had to live here because there was no other realistic place for it to live and it sort of covered this this rack was over there that's not important but in the reorganization of the display space I obtained tons more room over here let's go see what it looks like over here cuz this is these are active Goosebumps that I have from taking in this space with you here right now I can't tell you how happy this space makes me let me give you a little tour of the racks and of How It's laid out uh so the real rior starts about here these were all already here these were on a shelf over there um all of these drawers are airplane food containers from uh decommissioned airplane food carts these I liberated from a parking lot near the airport back in the early '90s but we don't have to talk about that phase of my life they got moved over here so now Expendables tape dyes fabric foam brushes rubber bands all of these Expendables are now easily retrievable and here come the first of the ilm racks these two big Blues weigh about 4 or 500 lb a piece they're made of particle board and covered entirely in melamine they're like magificent works of art for rack and they have been storing ilm stuff for decades uh we've got your ey beams and your plastic up here we got your brass down here we got more stuff and lots of the allocations of these shelves may change over the coming years um Dave fogler gave me the great idea of taking everything out of the top of this shelf but just having model kits is a kind of homage to the ilm loft of model kits and I'm totally doing that these two big Blues were both the last thing to come over from Uptown and the heaviest um they really weigh four or 500 lbs a piece and we took a lot of stuff out of them we didn't take everything out of them so they had to be wrapped in plastic wrap it was a whole thing they were sitting here they were like I said they were the last thing so they sat here and here and there was no room to move I had the little tiny pathway through those wrecks over here and these wrecks over here and you can kind of get over here and then the philosophical drop that I got from doing a live stream where I realized this room is the hardware store this room is the hardware store the second I had that thought I realized these live on either side of the bathroom door I don't know why that was so clear but like it's why I love a framing rubric I think it's hilarious that my bathroom door is now at the end of recorder you can hear the sound difference um I do plan by the way to put a really nicely laid out tap chart right here for common tap sizes and decimal equivalents um I'm going to put some other art here Joe Johnston director of all your favorite movies and designer of Boba Fett and a million other things started as the Ultimate model Making Triple Threat they can draw anything direct movies and also make all the models Joe Johnston signed the back of one of these we can't remember which one but his signatur is on the back I was looking these racks aren't 1970s old but I was looking at these racks over the shoulders of Lauren Peterson and Steve golly and Joe Johnson when I was 11 and 12 years old there are pieces in these racks that were in those magazine articles that young me read and thought I want to do that as a job that's part of the story that these carry and why I wanted to keep them with their Brethren and so let's continue on I'm not sure if milliped is going to stay in here we're still deciding these are my old brass racks and lengthy material stuff we got to actually sort a whole bunch of the weirder stuff I had in here into the big blues and oh yeah here I can move this there were two of these and I only brought one over This 8ot Tall monstrosity is actually super useful um and a lot of the allocation of this may eventually change but it's fantastic for having this kind of specific lengths of material here we have all the clear stuff I want to say clear here we have all the clear stuff um again you can't have too many sizes and layouts of clear oh I totally forgot when we're talking about tubing I'm so sorry if you turn and we about these things this this this stuff this gray plastic not this orange plastic this gray plastic this is uh plastruct uh uh uh model making styrene this is styrene which means it glues easily to model kit parts and to Evergreen styrene this kind of stuff you've seen this in every hardware store in the world um it glues beautifully with this and this is how we did all the circles and columns at ilm was the varying lengths and widths and diameters of this stuff I have the oh no it went here uh I have the clear heavy clear tubing up top but just this oh my God I can't even tell you how like much this makes my hands itch to make spaceships when they were working on a picture they would order a bazillion of something and then have to sort it later I know these kind of belong over there and all of this is a a work in progress all right we'll put that right there um these these you have no idea these are again plast druged architectural modeling materials here's the what they look like when you buy them at a store that sells this kind of stuff um but wait which one is this this is a 400 there goes um this this particular this part yes there it is this is what you might recognize that particular shallow Dome is represented across the entire film industry there are buildings in tattooing that has these as roofs the tops of the two tanks on the back of the alien environmental suit designed by designed by Mobius and built by John M's team for the movie Alien uses a pair of these These are so ubiquitous in film and here's every size ever plus little discs little Rings little elbows I didn't know this but when you are designing the architecture of an oil refinery you are designing how the pipes actually route and when you do that you need systems like these colors that plast sells so people know what's carrying oxygen what's carrying Benzene what's carrying toine Etc in fact that leads to this craziness which is all of these colors of pipe for architectural modeling there's a lot of polyurea off gassing out of here and I tell you I could smell it Orlando was like I think something pooped in there and I'm like nope that's just the plastic volatile volatile organic compounds I believe oh look at this little little staircase um this was where we would go shopping to build stuff and now it is the hardware store for my cave uh lastly there's these uh 2 4 6 8 10 12 uh almost yeah PL of these cabinets again filled with all sorts of tiny little architectual goodness um I have yet to crawl through all these it has literally been less than 5 days since we finished this build um eventually of course one of each of the pieces that sits in here will get glued to the front of this so that you can see what goes in every container wait is that is that the right one the question is did you put it back in the right yes I did there we go there's still a lot to do uh before we get to my part of the hardware store I wanted to say this is no joke that this club chair is here this is one of the places I go to relax when I hit some problem I can't solve or I just feel like I need to uh veg for a little bit or frankly when I have a text to send I'll just I'll sit down here in my chair this is like a early 20th century it's got these um flat spots here that are literally specifically for your drink I was in a thrift store with my wife that is not more than about 800 feet from where we're sitting right now and I said to her look at this club chair it's like my platonic ideal of a club chair I just wanted you to see it's a great example and she said you know that Commerce means you could exchange money for that and take it home and I was like I literally hadn't occurred to me I at home like an hour later and it's been one of my favorite chairs ever since okay on to my Hardware store all of the sordo cabinets came over and are now in one location where they were formerly in four separate locations and they are probably the very first thing I'm tackling in terms of a big infrastructure change that'll be a future video um all the paints came in from Three locations into one 11 of these containers uh each one holding dozens and dozens of bottles of paint um I am the kind of painter who doesn't know what I want I have to see what's available to me to know how to proceed so each of these paint racks has been designed so I can see all of the colors at once depending on the medium I'm working in uh and I I again that is a really important feature for my working process and I love these containers but as you can see I built them at several different spots so they are of all different sizes and utility and hopefully uh I'm going to make a rack that holds them all really nicely um oh yes this is something you've never seen on a workbench in this shop uh this is a lovely 12-in metal brake which is for bending metal at right and other angles and this is a little metal shear for uh shearing metal uh shearing plate metal aluminum steel brass uh what have you these are really critical tools and I actually use them all the time but they have been living on the floor for the entire 13 years they've been here um this isn't their final res space as you can see I've just placed it here but this will be solidly mounted to the wall so that I can come over here and do sheet metal work when I need to rather than having to get these out oh I forgot one feature that I meant to show you of these model racks so these racks were built by Nelson Hall Nelson Hall is not the tallest guy at ilm and in order for Nelson to see what was in these upper racks and to see oh I need some of these hemispheres are there any in there well Nelson put mirrors up here so that he and the other shorter model makers could actually see if there was stuff in the uh in the drawers by looking up in the mirrors this stuff all needs a bit of work uh these are still serving me quite well um these uh these cases have been serving me quite well full of some of my uh some of my heavier and weirder shaped things oh yeah that's also going to move there's so many categories um right I was at the paints I was at the metal braks the the the the shop lab oven uh is great here and I want it out on the floor it's something that I use way more frequently than I thought I would um again this might not be its final container or it might not be its final platform but this this this case specifically with its foldup sides was for sale at a garage sale in 1992 and I was there with my friend Mark and the guy said I said said oh are you selling this cabinet cuz I really like this cabinet and he said I don't know are you an artist and I said yeah and he said because I love this case and I love this table and I want it to go to an artist um and I have had it ever since and I have loved it ever since it's full of some paperwork right now um and again like I said it might not end up being the final resting place for the lab oven but it's nice to see this piece out and about again it's been sitting way back part of a display um very nicely my safety cabinet has come out from the corner where it should be and we have safety for breath for eyes for hands and for ears um it's a long time coming this has literally been one of the hardest to reach cabinets in the shop which tells you something um and perhaps my favorite part about this room right now is that I was able to bring over my old old shed NY 12x 36 lathe and back it against my uh 15x 40 lathe this actually was m7's lath Carrie Tori and Grant used this for the whole run of Mythbusters it ended up going down to Frankie palo's shop where he and his team built a stand for it um and that was the only thing I wanted for loaning this to them for about 10 years it might have even been longer than 10 years at any rate Frank moved shop he sent this back up north I picked it up uh in January and it's been sitting in storage waiting for a home here and again it's been part of like the amorphous mix of how this space might net out I can't stress enough that I really was kicking the organizational can of this part of the shop way down the road I was thinking of it like six months a year and a half hence but the second Sean called me and was like you can come get these racks now I was like oh I guess that plan is happening right freaking now uh this this is the bench that formerly lived over in the other part of the Cave the one with my flat files that I made in it housing all these wonderful useful tools um flat files are such a vital part of shop I'm actually thinking about building another flat file set um because of how well this is turned out um and also this is truly now a floating workbench I can actually use it for some projects and be able this is a current project I'm going to replicate the old French kilogram uh leg gr um let's see almost last but certainly not least one of my favorite bits of shop infrastructure ever is the uh nut and bolt sorder I made this houses over 240 I think it's 244 wait a second 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 2 4 6 8 10 12 that's 144 wait wait two 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 144 plus another uh 24 uh 48 58 68 168 separate sorters it took me forever just to find the Sorting drawers that were this thin um this has remained one of the most effective organizational strategies I've ever built especially cuz it's on wheels woo the foam brick fell from up there it's literally why it's there um okay I'm going put that in there oh wait no it's button head there we go and lastly the newest uh sorder for all my stainless Hardware that I got at a garage sale recently this uh oh and my gauge pins this is my my gauge pin cabinet and again this also may change a little bit this this might shift slightly I'm not positive um but again a shop is nothing but a process it is not a completed item it is a thing in motion sometimes it's moving faster sometimes it's moving slower very recently it was moving at a Breakneck speed uh and now we have this amount of room and I have to tell you is I like look through all the Vantage points that I now have from this space after years of just a couple over there I'm really moved I'm emotionally moved I feel I feel like I've grown up a little bit I feel like my process has grown up a little bit I feel like actually like my process grew up a while ago and I have grown up enough to match it and serve it that's what I feel like is happening that my process was like Hey dude you're going to need to expand and I'm like yeah yeah yeah we'll get to that and it's like we're really going to need some more room and I'm like yeah no we'll get some big project we'll get to that I promise and I was really planning on not dealing with it for a while I am so grateful that at the moment the opportunity came to offer to keep these together that I was able to offer that and to execute it because these are magnificent objects these racks that came from the original Uptown models they they belong in Museum they belong somewhere where someone is telling their story because the story of the amount of Ingenuity and love and passion that went through those rooms at industrial Light and Magic as those buildings were shutting down there were a couple of parties and a lot of talking amongst a lot of the old-timers and again I'm not an Oldtimer and I'm was only there for six years but it really did change my life from the age of 10 on uh I I've spent my whole life sort of chasing the beautiful Ingenuity that you can see in the movies like Star Wars and Raiders uh and that is born out of those rooms of clever people building beautiful stuff using racks like this and you know I build stuff and I tell stories about stuff and I'm so delighted to have more room to build stuff and more stories to tell about it that's a tour um I'm sure there are a ton of questions go ahead and ask them in the comments if you have specific questions or specific ideas I'd love to read them there'll be other videos there's going to be just 2024 is going to be the year of shop infrastructure builds man there's going to be a bunch of franchise stuff but it's a lot of shop infrastructure thank you guys for joining me I've been I've been so excited to share this with you and like Joey who's feuding right now he got to see it today for the first time and the sound he made is like oh I'm been dying to hear that sound he's like whoa I hope you've gotten a tiny taste of that thank you guys for joining me and I'll see you next [Music] [Music] time [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 764,040

Keywords: Adam Savage (TV Producer), mythbusters, adam savage, tested adam savage, inside adam savages cave, workshop tour, adam savage cave, adam savage workshop, adam savage tested, adam savage shop tour, shop tour, adam savage tour, adam savage man cave, inside adam savage's cave, inside adams cave, adam savage cave san francisco, adam savage workshop organization, adam savage workshop google maps, adam savage workshop layout, adam savage shop organization, adam savage new shop

Id: j8LqMv416mw

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024