let's take another question
johnny cole asks can you tell us a little bit about your floor it sounds like you're walking
across a wooden floor but you have some really heavy equipment in your shop now the lathe and
mill and the pool table this building i am in was a firehouse when the building was first built in
the early part of the 20th century and as a firehouse it has these garages and the floor
slants all the way to about right there so i'm standing above what i think is about 18 inches of
empty space when i moved into this space we built this floor by we i mean some wonderful carpenters
i hired built a perfectly flat floor out of inch and a quarter tongue and groove flooring plywood
on supports that can take the weight of a two and a half thousand pound mill and a three thousand
pound lathe i actually we did the math before we built the floor to make sure that those could uh
be supported i will tell you the floor complained when we brought them in but they made it in just
fine um yeah i i'd rather have a concrete floor than a wooden floor i'll be honest with you
but one of the advantages of a wooden floor is i had a power line coming out to uh this workbench
and it was always a pain in the ass to roll things over that power line i had one of those little
electrical cord covers that you can roll over and nothing ever quite rolls over and
i had double stick tape on the back of it but in this shop that's just not gonna last
so finally a couple of weeks ago and i didn't even cover this
because well i'll tell you why in a second i actually drilled a hole in the floor and i
ran an extension cord from a floor plug over there i know that's i did it right but the
reason i didn't cover it as one day build is no one needs to watch me do electrician work
because i'm not an electrician however i include an extension cord that basically runs under the
floor so now i can roll stuff around here that is one of the advantages to a wooden floor
compared to the mill and the lathe the pool table doesn't weigh anything
um kenneth willentang kenneth quillen tang jr thank you very much wants to know aloha from
hawaii aloha uh what has been your favorite cosplay costume you have worn to comic con
there is there is i was gonna say there is no favorite it's always the one i just wore uh i wore
my captain america stealth suit to c2e2 in chicago in february and that one still holds a very
special place in my heart we just put up the video of me doing a mod on its shield a few days ago
um i'm still super particular to chewie to chewbacca i've worn chewy uh on the floor i
think at least five times four times maybe five times um and it's always really great to put on
chewy because it's not too hot a costume i also love putting on my spacesuit i'll take any excuse
to put on my spacesuit um for the experience it's hard to beat no face it's hard to beat that first
no no face experience i had um which is a long involved story if you don't know it um i did a
ted talk called my love letter to cosplay which tells the story of my first no face costume uh i'm
never gonna tell the story better than i did on the ted stage go take a look at that um but yeah
and then there's like whatever costume i'm kind of thinking about at the moment minute for me again
it's not just about the object whether it's a costume or a prop it's about the experience and
the experience is an ongoing thing and it's ever-changing and
you know sometimes my experience of a costume will change when someone comes up to me six
months later and said that inspired me to do this and i did this and i learned this thing
like didn't expect that um i wonder which island you are on in hawaii and i wonder how hawaii
is doing i i have many friends who live over there and i i hope you guys are all doing great
let's see christian christopher emrich asks as a teacher i have showed your videos many times
when discussing how scientists and engineers and makers think about and approach a problem
what is something you would tell up and coming steam students
you have to build it more than once you have to build it more you have to prepare you have
to expect that you are going to build it more than once if you are going to build something
you're going to build it more than once it's literally just there's no you cannot try and
expect to build it the first time correctly um that is a big one like prepping yourself
expecting the mistakes expect the mistakes because you're going to make them if you try and avoid
them you will fail and you will further feel like a failure because you attempted to avoid them and
fail to avoid them let me tell you you are never going to avoid them there's a great line
in body heat that's the movie mickey rourke has an appearance in body heat his body heat his
first movie i mean i want to say rumble fish but i feel like body heat is maybe his first movie i
it's hard for me to remember when all those movies came out back then but anyway in body heat
william hurt is talking to mickey rourke and mickey rourke says to him
william hurt is planning a crime and mickey rourke says
in any crime you're going to commit there's at least 25 there's at least 50 ways you can screw
things up and if you can think of 25 of those ways you're a genius and you ain't no genius that
is a great axiom for a maker or an up-and-coming up-and-coming stem steam student um i appreciate
that you're teaching them to approach and think about a problem i mean
that is i spent so much time doing this i've got a huge build coming up next in the next two weeks a
really really big involved build and i have to get it right uh i i've set up something in the future
with this build and i can't not show up right so the next two weeks are going to take a lot
of my engineering expertise and they're going to require a lot of iteration and i got to be ready
to keep on iterating and up until now what i've been doing is i've just been thinking about this
project i've been thinking and thinking thinking making sketches making lists um but i'm clear
at this point in my in my life as a maker that that thinking is just the most important part i'm
solving so many different problems and it's not like i'm coming up with the exact right solution
but i'm eliminating ways that we're problematic i'm thinking oh what if i did it this way so i'll
spend a few days oh maybe i could do it that way and then i'll rest ah i'm over complicating it i'm
thinking too far i can be simpler and then i look at other people's ideas about how they solve that
problem and i'm like oh i could be even simpler than that oh look at that that's really right
obsessively pondering a project before you embark and part of that obsession is the list making is
the sketching and don't have to be good at either of those things to reap their benefits seriously
you don't have to be very good at sketching at all to use it to help understand things
i and and for me it's being able to understand the minute in a physical way like i take the project
and i put it in my head that's what you've got to realize you've got to do if you're making a
a a thing and it involves five pieces every one of those pieces has a shape a topography
and you have to have all that in your head so for me the thinking process is
how i sort of layer those things into my head to get ready to solve a problem
um yeah good luck with your steam students teaching them to be problem solvers
is that's awesome that makes me very happy um the last question look at that it's already
been over 75 minutes amazing um james l asks hi from wellington wellington new zealand
hello hello wellington hello my friends in wellington i miss you guys so much
i was there earlier this year which i feel very lucky for and hopefully i will
be there before too long hope springs eternal we will see what happens but hello wellington
um your question what is your favorite tip skill or tool that you've seen at what a workshop and
taken back and apply to your own workshop what a great question um i have to say that
what i've picked up from what recently that has really altered my life are proxon tools
um i believe i can actually i i love them so much i barely have to leave the frame
the the dremel and the finger sander so i know i keep saying dremel it's like a or
it's like a generic term so this is the proxon uh micromott 60 that slash e um this is a rotary tool
that goes very low it doesn't go as fast as a dremel i don't need it to i have almost
never ever used a dremel at the high end of its speed range i like how light this is
i really dig its low impact cord and i yeah this has been a fabulous addition and i learned about
it on my most recent trip to weto when richard and i were making something together and this
this is called a finger sander i have four i have four different versions of finger sanders
i watched adam do a super unsafe thing on the computer today um this is a great finger sander
one it's got an adjustable angle on the on the finger here um i have actually chucked
this into my vise and used as a little baby belt sander it's got an adjustable speed and a switch
so you can also run it very slow and that is a very gentle amount
one of the difficulties with tools sometimes is that they're actually too good at what they do
and they take off too much material and tools like this that have a very uh very adjustable low range
of speed are super useful for me because i like to creep up on stuff as i am fond of saying if
you're not sure how something is going to go or if you are not an expert in a technique goes slowly
that uh going slowly can substitute for skill where skill doesn't exist like you could build
an amazing guitar it just might take you a year where it takes a luthier four or five days and
that's that's a real split like i've known people who spent seven or eight months on a ukulele uh
and it was magnificent they're not gonna make any money making ukuleles like that but that's not
the point of that art of that exercise so i really like these tools proxon is definitely one of those
weather things but every time i leave weta i leave with a list of things like uh chris their painter
i discovered an airbrush last time i was there because we were also doing some painting together
oh we've got a really really fun painting video to put up later this year um and when you visit
a shop like weta and you see that they're using a spray gun and an airbrush i always note what
brands they're using because in film production work you don't want to use something that is super
um touchy like you can spend a lot of money on airbrushes that do incredibly fine work
but require all this adjustment and finesse and cleaning and film you don't have that kind of time
in film uh in production you need stuff that is bulletproof easy to clean easy to use you can
throw a whole bunch of crap at it and it'll all spray out the front and i came away with a great
airbrushing iwata and a terrific spray gun which i can't remember the brand name of but the tool tip
will be coming about those two i still haven't even used the airbrush um but the spray gun
i was using it at weta and we were throwing acrylic in it of every different thickness and
just like pouring pouring springs spraying pouring it i mean the thing got filthy and it never wasn't
spraying and that was like that's an institutional knowledge that a shop like weta brings to bear on
a tool like no we're going to use this one because it's bulletproof and it never breaks
down that's the one i want to bring into my shop guys thank you so much this has been great norm
chan everybody yes uh final bit of housekeeping and uh thank you everyone who joined during the
live stream yes thank you for helping us break a thousand we we really really appreciate it it's
going to allow us to that the bigger projects that i talk about your membership dollars will actually
totally help us be able to execute things like that and it will allow our crew and us to do
keep on making the same level of content we've been making through the whole lockdown and that
content can be available for everyone so something that we don't want to get misunderstood is you
know things like that samaritan build series it's going to be a one day build series that's
going to be on youtube channel so everyone can watch but it's support from new channel members
that allows us to keep this level of output and do live streams like this where you'll be doing
q a and also build you have a bunch of kind of live builds you want to do and i was going to
do a live build today except i lost the lego set that i was going to build for you all yeah and
uh last bit of housekeeping we also have a discord server so if you're on discord it's invite is just
discord dot gg tested and for tested supporters and tested patrons there's a members exclusive
channel on that server that we're going to be and that's where we're going to take questions
for things like uh live streams and interact there so all the information is on youtube
under the community post and we'll see you there thank you guys so much have a wonderful day say
stay safe wear your mask wear your mask it's how you care about other people
love you guys keep making stay up stay obsessed and i'll see you next time
cheers