hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a
tool tip in which we're actually gonna do something a little bit crafty crafty
um you know how much i love hats wow you can't even see my face
it's not a secret how much i love hats uh
people wonder where i get my hats well i go to hat stores but that hasn't been very
fruitful lately no stores well i haven't been to i haven't been to a store in a long time
but one of the other places i get hats is ebay and i've been eyeing the resist all open road hat for
a long time uh and i managed to get this one for a good deal it was advertised to seven and a quarter
i mean i guess it's could fit me at seven and a quarter and i mean as i look at myself in this
mirror it's not perfect um i wanna stretch it out and i'm gonna show you two tools that i use to do
this here we go now you may find a hat you like in a hat store and it might be a little too small for
you because it's the only one they have and the proprietor proprietor of the hat store may tell
you oh we can stretch it out and they'll put a thing that's like two wooden moons and they'll
stretch it a little bit and then it'll fit you a little bit better but it's not a permanent
solution when you stretch this that way it's going to stretch a little bit but
not a ton you've got you're working against a lot you're working against
the leather the stitching the construction the seam the sewing etc you need a little help oh also
you can buy you can go on amazon right now and look at hat stretchers and they're like i don't
know 12 or 14 bucks for these like cheap ones with a turnbuckle in the middle don't buy those
don't ever buy those there's no reason to because you can buy a magnificent turn of the century like
turn of the 19th to the 20th century hat stretcher and it looks like this yes
okay so right you got to buy it within the range of your head this is to stretch hats that are
within the range of my head i think i paid 30 bucks for it look at this beautiful piece of
oh amazing so what you do is you put the stretcher in the hat that's it and then you slowly
hear that yeah i hear stretching going on but no better so how do i help the stretching oh
i do it with steam i have talked about steaming hats before but most of the practice that i've
been doing in this department i've been doing off camera so this is the first time i'm bringing my
steamer into the mix and this is a standard fabric steamer and uh if you are into cosplay
you should have one of these in your collection they're expensive they're they're they can be
expensive they can be in the hundreds of dollars i picked up this one on craigslist
for like 50 bucks 20 years ago yeah i think 20 years ago um and it was because i was like so
sick of eyeballing it in the catalog for film equipment and not being able to afford
it because it was like 500 bucks or something i mean it's overpriced or
it was overpriced for what i needed it for because i didn't need it regularly i pretty much only use
this thing when i'm working on costumes uh i have an emergency steamed out of tux but that was just
once so um this is a jiffy steamer and every costume shop in the world uses one of these on
a daily basis they're awesome um i'm about to use it to help this hat stretch a little bit amazingly
the original the original tag is in here p145 gila the color is o23 mink brim is three and a quarter
seven and a quarter is the size yeah that's that's group
i'm keeping that it's lived with a hat this whole time so uh i'm going to put the
stretcher in here and i'm going to just bring it under just resistance tension not a ton and then
i am going to bring some steam in here now the thing about the open road hat is it's very much
like the kind of hat that you see i feel like it's i i don't know this for sure but this is very much
like a dil bob dylan in the late 60s kind of hat this is rambling man hat it's a rambling man hat
um these show up on ebay all the time but of varying qualities and lineages
and i i have so many hats in this brown i was hoping for a kind of a a more beat-up off-white
one but we'll see i may still get it so now i've steamed it a little bit i've warmed it up
i'm going to just pat it out there and i'm going to steam a little bit more just i hope it takes
so i said recently that uh that the felt of a hat is a tiny little fur uh with a binder and
i have been disabused of that notion that like really good felt is there is no binder it's just
the uh the physics of the felt holding together in the same way that like the
small tendrils of rope or tiny little strings that hold together uh hold on let's just see
yeah okay still again i'm creeping up on this so i'm just gonna you you don't wanna
it would suck to get it too big well i mean you can there are things that i have learned i
can do when that happens i'm going to steam it up again and just get it a little warm
now hat makers they have this whole like steam generator that makes steam for hats and this isn't
like the best output for hats but it's fine for me and the kind of things that i do and uh i recently
well i'm working on a costume in which the hat i bought was magnificent but needed a bunch of
customizing and that's when i did a lot of work with the
steamer and i made me feel uh maybe i should be a little bolder about
showing everyone how i stretch a hat okay so give them a little bit more
there's a hat store in manhattan on fifth avenue called jj hatters and the wonderful crew there
is uh one of my regular visits when i go to new york and i have spent may have spent
hours in their store like pulling hat lights off the wall and having the you know playing
around with them and like okay that's a little bit better a little bit better
i feel like yeah i know the crown is absurdly high again i'm not sure this hat works for me
i am not positive that it works for me and it may be that what i want to do is a more crushed
and crumpled open road kind of kind of crown this one is almost a little bit overly neat
that's the issue i have with a lot of manufactured hats is when the creases are all perfectly regular
it pulls me out of the story oh right i want to get one more little stretchy poo in here
so when you have a hat where it's got like creases there
whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa where you see creases right like this steam is a
reasonable way i believe if i'm understanding that correctly to get that out all right and
sorry my steamer fell apart and i got to put it back together
without touching it because it's burning me
it's difficult being this impatient
this hat's definitely been beaten up and i like that about it
but like i said i think some of its creases are still a little too regular
that's it that's the fit that i was looking for
so that is more the kind of
yeah that's more the kind of open road thing i'm thinking of i gotta go get my big mirror
this ground is so high it's crazy
it's way better i haven't done much to it i know i look if you're a millionaire
and you're watching this and please know that i'm i don't pretend to any
knowledge here that i don't have this all trial and error and from hanging out in hatch-ups
uh yeah i'm quite sure i'm getting lots of things wrong but it's not a bad
i mean the thing about a new hat is you gotta wear it for a while and you gotta see if it's gonna if
it's gonna take you gotta it takes a while for the hat to become part of you uh funnily
enough it looks better on camera than it does in the mirror but i'm not sure what that's about
let's see i'm gonna just try and get that
front pinch just a little bit better a little bit tighter
so yeah it turns out that what the steam is doing is just allowing the little
tiny microscopic pieces of felt to move around each other
i just i have no idea if i could pull up a crown like this but
now i've got a hat that i can try out now you can see how i like it
yeah hard to say uh
i've done everything i can to this hat i hope uh yeah
i i was thinking i'd end up with a much better looking hat in the end like i'd be
like damn that looks awesome but i forget that that's almost never what happens with a new hat
almost never i gotta say it looks pretty darn good in the camera here
right this is a mirror shot and so is this a mirrored shot
even one of those little handheld steamers that they're now putting in hotels and by
the way hotels thank you for putting in steamers as opposed to irons because frankly for me i find
them much more useful but those little handheld steamers that you can get i don't know i'm
actually not sure how much they cost but a little handheld steamer would be fine for like you know
periodic work on a hat i i really think so and yeah do not waste your time with any of those
new wooden turnbuckle driven hat stretchers go get a beautiful this is like this is like i stole it
out of a louise nevelson sculpture this this is the chisel i just love this thing look at that
cast iron handle oh it's gorgeous all right time to get rambling i'm a rambling man
thank you guys for joining me i will see you next time thank you guys for watching that video if
you'd like to further support us at tested you can do so by buying some merch from us in our store
a link is below but i wanted to tell you that for the first time we are releasing a
discounted bundle of tested merch specifically our original five demerit badges these are ways
in which every maker screws up so we've got the measure once cursed twice releasing the mysterious
blue smoke from electronics and stopping them from working breaking a drill bit uh
3d printer going all flagged spaghetti monster on you and my personal most common one cutting
your finger yeah get yourself over to tested dash store.com and line yourself up with some
demerit badges i'm going to sew these to my apron oh that actually would make a good one day build