Adam Savage here with another one day build. I am in my cave and today's one
day build is a display one day build my cave is separated into two broad
sections this is the shop section I'm sitting in now and just to decide of me
the west of me is my display section with all of my lit billy bookcase
cabinets from Ikea filled with glass shelves and lit and because I like the
museum type aspect of it I have started in the last couple of years to take more
seriously the display of some of the more precious objects that I have and I
love the way museums display things and carefully soldered brass clips that make
sure they don't impart any marks to the piece I love it when I see the little
metal supports for bird skeletons and stuff like that and one of the first
exercises I I played with was with this subject right here now this is an object
of incredible history history this is one of Bob Dylan's harmonicas through
various channels a friend of Bob's gave this to me a few years ago and I had it
sitting on a shelf here and then I was visiting a musician a famous musician
who's a good friend of mine and he had a Bob Dylan harmonica and he had it in
this big picture box with this sign it said Bob Dylan's armonica and I thought
if he pays that much respect to Bob Dylan's harmonica what kind of asshole
am i that I have it just sitting on a shelf so I built this display for it and
this is comprised of a very careful little brass holder with a little
pressure reliever on the side of the harmonica and it sits in this bell jar
bass and there you have it that is my Bob Dylan harmonica display now this is
just as by way of showing you an example today I am building a new display for a
new object I have just got recently I was lucky enough to participate in a
performance at New York City's Radio City Music Hall
a legendary Palace Theater I mean it is an unbelievable venue
never been inside it's gorgeous from top to bottom it's over a hundred years old
and the crew there the local union crew that oversees it is deeply proud of
their beautiful venerable building and several of them took pains to show me
around at some of the stuff they found most fascinating so I got this
incredible ground-level tour of this amazing piece of engineering and it is a
piece of engineering there are three lifts on the stage at Radio City that go
up and down like 40-plus feet on these hydraulic and air pressured Rams that
are over a hundred years old in fact the hydraulic elevators of
aircraft carriers that move planes around the first ones were based off of
Radio City's lift so during World War two Radio City Music Hall was a
protected site it was a military secret yeah so as I was getting the tour
downstairs of the hydraulics of the mechanics the ancient boilers and the
amazing marriage between the old and the modern in order to operate this
equipment safely the guy showing me around was saying that different seasons
different things can fall through the cracks of the stage of course because
these lifts they move up and down but there's gaps between them you have to
have a little tolerance and stuff falls through those gaps and depending on the
season you find different things and it turns out that over Christmas one of the
things you find is Rockette jewelry yes the famous New York Rockettes Christmas
show happens every Christmas season at Radio City Music Hall it is a New York
tradition one that I have never partaken in and I now will having seen some of
the scope and the scale and the amazing performance they do but here is two
pairs of Rockette earrings and they were given to me on my tour and I am
gratefully adding them to my collection and I thought I want to make a nice
display for these Rockette earrings and so that is what my one-day build will be
today they display a proper museum type display for Rockette earrings now I
recognize that these are inexpensive pieces of costume jewelry but it's the
history that they describe that makes them interesting because they're worn by
the famous Rockettes I've got two pairs here
and I think I'm just going to make a display for this pair this pair I will
keep nearby but I'm not gonna make a second display I guess I can they're
clip-on so I can just wear them for the duration of this build as for how I'm
going to display them I have an option which I like which is to display them
inside this shadow box here but then I was thinking like what is the best way
to display them in a shadow box and I thought about an object then I was
wondering if it existed and I went onto Amazon and sure enough it does silicone
ears so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a frame for the rock head earrings
in the silicone ears oh look at that yeah we'll probably do it like this oh
wait oops it's getting it wrong there we go that's it look at that so I'm gonna
display my rocket earrings in this on the silicon ears suspended in the shadow
box it's actually going to be a pretty straightforward and quick assembly but I
think the end results gonna look pretty darn cool it's dusty and I've had this
thing for years I like building displays into these window boxes these shadow
boxes they're fairly inexpensive so that one slips in
yeah let's see by 3 inches 1/2 inch they're like three and a half okay so if
three and a half is the middle then three and four in the last few months
I've done a couple of different styrene scratch-building videos and I can't
remember if I've actually covered cutting a hole through the middle of
styrene but I am going to cover that right now because it's an important
skill to know if you're going to be scratch building with styrene you don't
have to use saws to cut holes in the middle of styrene you can actually just
use well the technique I'm about to show you but first let me get this set let me
free these two pieces of styrene from their home so I can start to work on
them individually score score this is what I love about
styrene one score pop it out oh it's the best
doink now I have two identical pieces that should fit inside of this they do
and I'm going to cut out the holes for the ears I'm going to cut out some ear
holes
obviously one could laser cut this if one was so inclined and I certainly
could I really this stage in my life I just prefer doing it by hand all right
so now I have a piece of styrene which has the scores for popping out these
windows but if I start to bend this on this I could easily torque it or break
it so in popping out internal windows and
you could do this with I've done this with every shape imaginable from circles
to hexagons to squares here is my method I go from one corner to the other and I
simply score an X across the diagonals of my rectangle and I want this score to
be fairly deep with styrene you can get a good snap with even a shallow score
but I want this thing to favor breaking on these lines first so I'm gonna give
it a double score and cut quite deep actually okay so now I've got a window
with these two Center holes and I'm gonna just start just gonna start
manipulating it across those until I hear a telltale snap oh there we go
I felt it rather than I heard it there we go
okay so you can see now it's starting to separate so again I'm just sort of
riding it along those seams without trying to get them to extend any farther
because styrene breaks can propagate and you don't want them to do that this is
something you'll get better at with experience now I've actually separated
across both of the axes of both of my X's so now popping out these windows
should be as simple as there we go popping out a triangle I may have to do
a little clean-up on this at the other end but still it's a lot easier than
using a scroll saw tell you that there goes one that goes the other
there's the third there we go so I got a little bit a little bit of cleanup right
there or and there yeah not bad this is really neat when you start cutting out
large circles out of big things when I was doing the we bows for flubber this
is how we cut out all the internal holes on the thing and we're all done by hand
with an exacto blade it's really you can do some fairly sensitive little cutouts
it's quite a versatile technique we go and oh now that's gonna be the hero side
I can't even describe to you how soft these ears are they really like they
they feel exactly like real ears except without the cartilage so absurd so
absurd okay come on there we go it fits inside this window box that's looking
pretty good needs to be just an inch and 50 so that means I need this whole
distance to be an inch and fifty thousand since the glass yeah I'm gonna
have to put the glass in the bottom to it so it's a little bit under pressure
make a mark here all right that's nice all the way around so
all I got to do is take this frame down to that line and this whole thing should
assemble quite nicely
my frame is cut let's assemble this guy there we go
her fagged oh I love it I'm so happy about this it's great
just a little bit better yeah air on this
yep a little bit of positive pressure there we go ladies and gentlemen my
museum type display for Rockhead earrings I'm really pleased with that
that came out loves me some shadow boxes
you