hello uh adam savage here in my cave and i have a one-day build for you sorry not a one-day
build a show-and-tell a show-and-tell uh that is one of the oldest things in this building
yeah among the oldest things in this building is this handmade from sheet copper
when you look at it close up what you can see is that this is a mechanical hand
what makes this important to me is this is my very first mechanical hand this is the first piece of
animatronics i ever built and i built it in 1990 sorry i'm going to warm up my hands because it's
freezing cold in the game today i'll put on a sweatshirt for the next build for the next video
but this mechanical hand i was living with the roommate who was also mechanically inclined and
that roommate uh he took a a a piece of vinyl tubing it's like normal vinyl tubing i don't know
sorry i actually wanted to i'm actually gonna do a physical demonstration here so uh my roommate
at the time we were both working in theater and he and i both did a lot of mechanical stuff uh and i
we did we were just we were both making a lot of art making a lot of
things and talking about it and he at one point was working on this mechanical hand
and the way he went about it was he took a piece of tubing like this
and he simply he he cut a few notches in the tubing hold on let me just actually get this
right you were gonna this is i didn't realize i was gonna do this for this build but
you'll see why in a second it will all make sense come on
yeah there we go exactly
what could possibly go wrong
oh so much easier
come on there we go
so my roommate at the time he uh
he took this piece of tubing he cut these notches out of it like this
and then he threaded a piece of string through the end
and let's see if i can actually make this work i think i can i can just tie a little knot up here
yeah okay
so
i've cut too much off oh i'm that's it
okay so yes this roommate we were having a party and this roommate
took a took this piece of tubing like this cut these notches in it and come on stay in focus
there we go he took this piece of tubing and with the string in it
and he'll he was making a snake right and
i have to say uh that's awesome i love that it's a great little mechanism and it's a
great teaching mechanism for understanding some of the simple
ideas behind animatronics and physical movement and musculature and stuff like that
but my roommate was we were at this party and he was showing somebody this and they were like
wow you're a mechanical genius and i i just have to admit i got kind of jealous
about him getting all this attention about this thing so uh i channeled that jealousy into a build
and i the next day i took a sheet of copper that i had and i made this hand um
and it was it's funny it wasn't like i didn't know how to do this i i had this i i understood
the concept of the of the hinge i had a couple of toys there's even a mechanical hand toy
that utilizes this uh it's a grabber uh that utilizes this concept and i had one of those so
it's not like it's a difficult concept to grasp nor is one of these more valid than the other
but i like the challenge of making it all out of one single material uh and i just spent this day
sitting there with a pair of tin snips uh as you can see all of this is very crude and i used some
of the same tubing he used for his fingers as the lining on the inside of the fingers to provide a
track uh and you can see how each one yeah and you know aside from the form factor this is kind
of how reasonable animatronics for hands often work um and this has managed to survive traveling
around with me load these 30 some odd years since i built this this was in my desk in mythbusters
this is hung from the ceiling here for 10 years um but most importantly i've talked a lot about
um my first job interview with jamie heinemann i was 24 23 24 years old it's the
early to mid 90s and i had gotten a call from him because i had gotten some attention in the san
francisco theater industry i'd gotten a reputation a good one for mechanical problem solving and
jamie heard about me and called me and said would you come and show me some of the stuff you do and
the normal the normal uh uh procedure was to come in and show your book you know bring in pictures
of stuff you've built and for some reason i was like i don't want to just bring a book i want to
i want to bring things that i made so i brought a case full of stuff and this was one of them um
and so i remember very specifically jamie and i like handing this back and forth and talking about
the mechanics and everything and i think this was instrumental in getting me my very first job with
jamie and thus it carries tremendous sentimental value that was my break into commercial special
effects which became my break into film special effects uh so a lot a lot cascaded down from the
creation of this in really what would i think be the fall of 1990 all the way until now yeah i'm
surprising i'm surprised it has taken me this long to show you this piece um i also like how simply
how low the threshold is right this one material some tin snips some springs and some rivets and
you can start galloping off to animatronics i mean now with 3d printing this is
decades before 3d printing um well thank you guys for witnessing this perhaps one of the oldest
show and tells i have yet done in my creative history uh and i will see you guys next time bye
there's a there's one thing i wanted to add about the mechanical hand before you go entirely and
that is that uh before i did this show and tell i pulled it off the ceiling and it was all bent all
over the place so i spent some time here at that table and i filmed it um of me tuning it back up
and this is just my argument to save everything you don't have to save everything but save
save stuff save some stuff because older you future you is going to
love going back over the things that passed you made for me tuning up this
copper hand this thing i built over 30 years ago i it's a lovely connection to
to me from 30 years ago a connection to that day to the time that took to what i learned from it to
what it led to all of that is really interesting as a meditation practice as a as an observational
practice so this is just you don't save everything i am i know i'm almost a high
i'm almost a hoarder i'm a high-functioning hoarder um but i am intensely gratified that
i still have some of these really old pieces from my past they they they inform my present
okay i'm gonna move on to the next shoot