Two Grant Imahara Stories

John Osborne 1561 says can you tell us a grant and mahara story I love hearing about him I'll tell you to Grant him a horror stories um I will tell you that in a place like ilm grants nerdiness intelligence and kindness stood out and I don't mean each of those qualities I mean the the combination and excess of all three of those that Grant had really stood out like he was unique at the model shop that's for sure um and um there was this uh so movie stars came through the model shop all the time because it was the sexy part of the ilm tour because what are you going to do you're going to take a movie star to a bunch of offices with people sitting at desks and working on workstations that's not sexy uh so the model shop was always the end of every tour and we got to see Clint Eastwood come through and Sean and Robin Wright Penn came through with their kids and Anthony Daniels and Ray Park I mean all these people came through um and uh in sync yeah in sync came through that's Justin Timberlake's old band right I'm probably right NSYNC comes through and they don't have Justin Timberlake with them but they have been recording an album up at Skywalker sound um so apparently they also did like briefs no I didn't talk to you there also did a brief cameo in episode one or two I can't remember which one I think it was episode two um and they came down to the model shop for a tour and Grant and mahara's desk uh at the model when they were touring the model shop it was on the uh south side of Kerner Boulevard the model shop used to be on the north side of Kernan Boulevard this time it was on the south side and they come through the BR and Grant's Grant's desk was right on the other side of the break room and so NSYNC gets this tour through the model shop and they come to the break room and they're about to leave but it's only like a half a dozen desks between the break room and the exit and they walk out and they look and they see Grant's desk had in front of it low dead low um his robot that he fought at BattleBots with uh and I I one of in sync could it have been Joey Fatone one of NSYNC looked and said dead blow and then panned up and there was Grant like soldering and he went Grant him a horror and that's when Grant discovered that NSYNC were fans of his as a robot builder I heard this in the break room just amazing absolutely amazing and like completely deserved it was hilarious to have like one of the most famous like this is a group of some of the most famous people in the world at that moment in time and they come through where they're like fabulous um the other the other thing I wanted to tell you about Grant uh is he was a phenomenal impressionist granted incredible impressions of people um his co-workers he did an impression of me I never got to see it I have been told that his impression of me involves a lot of drumming on the table um the thing about his Impressions were is that you'd be like you know you'd be hanging out on Monday in the break room and you'd be talking about how Friday after beers like everyone had a few too many and we had a really fun time and like hung out until like 10 p.m in the model shop that would happen and then weird would happen somebody would do something fun or weird we would be talking about it but with Grant if he was telling you one of those stories he'd be he'd be doing impressions of each of the people and there's a thing about people that can do that sort of casually that I find really fascinating because there it takes deep watching um but also Grant's Impressions were absolutely never at the expense of the person he was impersonating they were never an impression that I think the person would have minded and that like that's real that's built right in that was built right into grant at the at the root level uh that kind of kindness and I wish I'd gotten to see his impression of me David strome David Strong four five two four David strohm says I recently watched the Tesla earthquake machine episode can you talk more about how Grant imahara's device affected a large Bridge Jamie looked genuinely unsettled how large a device would be needed to be a real concern um this is a great question and I'm going to give a little bit of overview because uh this is one of my favorite episodes and in my history with the show so it's going to be a mythbuster story in my history with this show the things that I remember are like the moments in which I understood more about what my job was or I saw places that I could contribute so the myth is that we were starting is that a group of soldiers Marching In lockstep on a bridge can cause that bridge to uh start to oscillate at a what's called a fatal harmonic that can destroy the structural Integrity of the bridge and we called the episode breaks that bridge and it's a long and storied urban legend uh famously actually when the Brits opened up the Millennium bridge in London they had issues with that bridge moving and it was a fascinating thing because when people were on the bridge and it moved and they felt it moving their mode of correcting for it was actually causing a feedback loop that made it move more so it was like we got to watch breaks that bridge uh happen so story wise if you want to tell a story about something causing a fatal harmonic to a bridge-like structure you have to come up with a point of view you have to choose a bridge what bridge are you going to choose it's going to be an arch bridge this is going to be a stone bridge it's going to be a suspension bridge what what kind of bridge we chose suspension as we figured it's it's spectacular it is a uh it's a tensegrity model so it's under its own tension and its strength is created by its own tension so we might be able to see it move like the Tacoma Narrows so we chose the suspension bridge but then if you want to narratively talk about what can cause a destructive amount of force on a bridge you need to build a bridge in which a drug a destructive amount of force can be applied to it I know that sounds totally obvious but if I build a suspension bridge in scale and then I apply a force to it and it doesn't break what have I proven to you I have only proven that I've built a bridge that can sustain that if I want to investigate a certain kind of effect on it I have to build it in a way that it can be destroyed and this was the first and biggest issue we had with break step Bridge as a story which is bridges are way over designed for all the best reasons in the world and it is really hard to design one that can be messed up by a fatal harmonic um and so I mean this I remember having one of my first big arguments with my producer about this because uh we didn't understand where each was coming from but I was really understanding no no if we're going to show that it can survive we have to we have to know at what point it fails we have to if we're going to graph it to success from destruction we have to have destruction as a point on the graph um but why was I telling the story right so we were talking about ways to create a fatal harmonic and a harmonic is simply that we're talking about is simply being pushed on a swing this is what to think about when I'm describing a harmonic when you are being pushed on a swing here you are you are swinging and you're coming and I give you a push and you swing a little farther and you come and I add a little more impetus and each time what I'm doing is I'm taking the amount of energy and I'm adding a little bit to the system and this is what we're talking about we're talking about soldiers Marching In Step they're adding adding an impetus to the system and if you add that impetus at the Apex of at the end of each pendulum movement of that system you can build up a lot of force with a little consider how high you can push your friends while you've been drinking in the park late at night uh and you can get like almost horizontal uh and that is that is what we're talking about and there are ways so how do you how do you apply a force uh this was a gigantic fight that Jamie and I have uh Jew Joe Cooper just gifted a membership Richard A just gifted a membership thank you we had this huge fight because Jamie had found a bunch of pneumatic cylinders that were like a quarter of a pie and they uh they actually made a lever they actually had they they moved a lever 90 degrees and Jamie had found a bunch of these Surplus and he really liked the idea of putting boots on these and having these be our quote unquote soldiers and I had a huge issue with this because if we were going to impose a rhythmic harmonic on this bridge our timing was absolutely millisecond critical that's what I viewed from an engineering standpoint I thought our timing is millisecond critical we want to be able to adjust the impetus of the addition of force to an incredibly fine degree and pneumatics are not the way to do that no sir pneumatics are spongy and they have variable start times and you can lose a little bit of pressure and timing can change very quickly it's very hard to maintain a constant pressure with pneumatic systems especially if you've got like a whole bunch of these boot Soldiers with this huge fight I made my case you try we had this huge fight Jamie and I did I made my case and then I gave it up he said this was really important to him and so we went with the pneumatics and they didn't quite work and that's when we had found out about this magnetic actuator which used a a a rod filled with stacked reversed magnets and a coil that allowed it to move the shaft of this uh to any degree at any kind of speed it was like a brand new pneumatic a brand new actuator so again this was just a cylinder with stacked magnets inside and a housing that that cylinder went in and the housing had coil in it you could activate this coil or coils in here and make the cylinder move anywhere you wanted and at any speed really cool device except that it was so new you couldn't buy it with a program that could run it and so we called it brand we're like Grant could you come over and help us program this thing and maybe program it for us he said absolutely and so uh actually I think it's grant that knew about this device now that I'm thinking about it I believe he knew that this device existed we ordered it discovered it needed programming and brought him over to do it and that's when we were able to really see and graph that we were adding an impetus at the right time um and yeah when you do you build up a lot of energy it's can be quite spooky that was that was a really difficult story to tell um making a bridge that could be broken was Jamie and I neither of us understood or neither of us understood how complex the parameters of that story was when we when we first dove into it um and it was a real education that whole way through um final day new mall on this story which is years later Jamie and I have had some other fight about some story and we're driving the next day and we're talking about this argument that we'd had and Jamie was like Jamie um Jamie was Jamie is slightly on the Spectrum and he likes to come up with plans to not have conflict again when conflict has happened he likes to talk about it and likes to talk about ways that conflict might not happen and so we're sitting there talking about this argument and Jamie says well now that I'm thinking about it I'm thinking that if we disagree about the Aesthetics of something that the science should win like the science should rule out uh when we have a disagreement and I said Jamie I totally agree with that one and he says I'm trying to think of a of a case you know I mean it was like break step bridge and I'm like do you mean when you wanted the aesthetic you after trashing me for years for being the goofy one who likes to add Flames to stuff and that would make you sick to your stomach quote unquote you're the one that fought for these cute booted pneumatic actuators that didn't actually execute our experiment correctly and then you realized you were wrong in this conversation years later and he was like oh yeah I guess so I didn't even get the satisfaction of an apology thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get Advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the atom Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 723,615

Keywords: tested

Id: 5cwdhuWqY0Q

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2023