Adam Savage from tested here in my cave with a show-and-tell there's a lot of
different reasons I store things or keep things in this cave I keep materials for
using I keep objects that are important to me from a sentimental standpoint and
occasionally not often but occasionally I store things just because I think
they're magnificently designed this actually satisfies all three of those
categories interestingly this was the helmet I coveted for more than a year in
1985 this was bells but I remember the time
was as bells first aerodynamic bicycle helmet it was over a hundred bucks it
took me months to save up for it and when I bought it I used to crap out of
that thing this is not the one I had in New York in the 80s but I had an
identical one that I painted and wore on the streets of New York
riding ten to twelve miles a day for years and I loved this helmet it felt
good to wear but also it's gorgeous look at that line that is that's a great
piece of industrial design but the thing that I find most fascinating about it is
that I can tell it was designed in the 80s how I'm actually really curious
about that I think that's a genuinely interesting industrial design question
what about this tells me it's from the 80s I mean there's all sorts of things
that could be manufacturing artifacts of the radius of some of the pieces the
kind of tooling that they would have used then as opposed to now the fact
that this is a thin piece of injection molded plastic there are such a
confluence of small details that I think communicates when this was built there's
a lot of design education in unpacking why it's really clear that this was
built in the 80s now I carried that helmet around with me for years and
ended up using it as a basis for some industrial design that I did in 1992 or
93 I was working as an assistant for Chico McMurtry of a morphic robot works
down in the Bayview building robots and animatronics pneumatics hydraulics and
at the same time I was doing freelance art design art direction production
design and I is doing the sets and costumes for a
dance production at the College of Marin called who's afraid of the dark actually
did that production two years in a row and one of the years we needed 10
reptilian style helmets for dancers and we had zero money we had no money at all
for budget so I had to figure out a way to make 10 lightweight helmets the
dancers could wear had to be lightweight because I got to move a lot and I can't
wear have a lot of torque on their necks and I chose this as the basis for that
chica McMurtry of amorphic robot works I had built a functioning vacuform machine
that was the first vacuum or machine I ever operated and utilize it was 2 by 2
feet and I decided to make the dancers helmets using the bell helmet as the
basis this is an unpainted version of one of those dancers helmets and I'll
explain how I got this from this what chica was really interested in was
vacuform as a way of adding dimension to his robots and in as a way of adding
lots of variegation in the vacuform as he was using he was utilizing a lot of
wet water-based clay on top of the bucket that's probably not very
important he was using water-based clay on top of the bucks he was forming over
so this is my buck and I was adding this spine like a char Geiger's alien or
David Warner's helmet from Time Bandits I was adding these details on top of
each helmet vacu forming over it would flatten some of the clay I would start
heating up the plastic and mold another one and form it and I made all 10
helmets on this on one of these original Bell helmets this one I saved for myself
and I did not paint it because I love how it looks clear to make the inside I
simply filled the void of the helmet with clay and a shape that fit my head
and this is what the dancers wore it weighs almost nothing I think it's like
three and a half ounces perfect for dancers and the first vacuform project I
ever did that's my show-and-tell and I'm sticking to it
Oh