hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a i well it's an interesting category of what is about
to happen because a friend of tessid was coming by today and they are here in the building and
we were talking about what we could shoot because uh this random test had never been
in the cave and we were thinking about what kind of shoot we could do to welcome him
into the cave and then we came i can't remember who came up with this concept but we realized
what if he had something he wanted to see in the shop we could do a reverse show and tell where
instead of me looking at something new i'm showing something i already have to someone for whom it is
new and so ladies and gentlemen i would like you to welcome friend of tested andrew barth hello
andrew good to see you man great to see you too uh andrew uh did all of the uh incredible heavy
lifting on the apollo command module hatch that we assembled at the smithsonian air and space museum
in the summer of 2019 and you currently can we say where you work i'd rather not there you go
andrew works in aerospace yep there we go uh and you said you wanted to see
the 2001 let's talk about it let's talk about why you wanted to see this uh so 2000 was one of the
coolest movies ever yeah uh i remember seeing it with my dad i don't know what year but i was
i was pretty young and i remember thinking what what was what just happened you know
and like to be clear i think about that every single time yeah but like i get more and more
of it but either way it's so interesting so beautiful yeah um and as you know i like space
suits and i like space in general so i i do a lot of conversing about spaces and spacesuit mechanics
and engineering and absolutely yeah and so this is one of those one of the things in the movie
that caught my the most um maybe weirdly maybe not i don't know but yeah i just want to see
this in person um maybe talk a little bit about your process how this particular suit came to
be maybe a little bit about chris hadfield if you want absolutely um one of the things i love about
2001 is how much research stanley famously put into it by bringing in nasa engineers
and future prognosticators to help him assemble an idea of what the future of space travel could be
and i'd like there's a real a mercury suit feel to this right yeah yeah please oh yeah
everything's meant to be handled and you know he didn't worry too much about the wrist rings they
just aluminum fascia over the edge of the sleeves this is very mercury the even the
colors yeah absolutely indeed and i remember i actually say i remember a textbook from the 70s
saying oh future spaces would have these kind of ribs all over them there's an old textbook yeah um
when i embarked on commissioning this because i commissioned a guy named mike scott to do most
of the building i contributed the backpack and then all of the connecting parts these actually
oh wait there we go these buckles are actually martin baker ejection seat buckles okay you're
wearing yeah yeah these i was i was just looking at these as you turn around those look uh genuine
yeah um although i funnily enough i couldn't find this part okay i just found an ebay auction with
like five of these and i bought them was as a lot so that i could replace these i hand made
this out of aluminum on both sides yeah um it was a pain in the ass to get it right um but yeah
i like you can see so they were building this in england in the late 60s it's like of course
they're grabbing a late 60s martin baker yeah this is like what was in the surplus shop right
yeah um let's see what else was i uh oh um i will save my favorite fact about the suit for last uh
there's something that i really loved when i got some reference material about the the letter set
here so they were using uh rubbed down press-on type okay do you know about what's not familiar
now okay uh when i was a kid slip decals were for models but like when you wanted really high-end
like colored text on something even if it was like an annual report you ordered what was called dry
transfer lettering okay and it was a kind of a soft lettering on a on a on a like a vellum back
and you held it up to a thing and with the pencil you rubbed over the lettering and it transferred
it from the backing to whatever you were putting it on i see okay and then you sealed it and they
would sell them in sheets of letter set with like you know five of every letter so you could
you know and this is what this is how graphic designers worked before there was
easy color printing absolutely yeah i mean i remember assembling annual reports with this
where it was thousands and thousands of dollars worth of dry transfers to get all the colored
text on well on the back and i i have not gone to making the decals there's really nobody who
makes dry transfer anymore so i want to have some slip decals made and i found
some reference and there's this big paragraph of information that should be at the bottom of this
it's actually the legalese from the bottom of a sheet of lecture set really yeah no one in the
movie would ever see it up close but i have a picture close enough that you can read it and
it's just like they're like ah screw it and they just like rubbed from that yeah was it just like
i don't know what's upon here there's just a big block of text why not exactly nothing yes totally
and there's a bunch of detailing missing from here right now because i've never gotten around to
i really need to print my reference material up one to one because there's
all it's basically like almost a subway map of colored lines and little dials and
dots and stuff to fill in here this has never been right also on the original suit uh there
was actually a piano hinge here and this opened up so that they had access to the fans this tube was
an actual fan keeping the visor from fogging up was there like a manifold in there to blow it up
across the visor or just i don't think so okay i don't think there was and you know i have no
idea how loud it was on set i don't have any idea how well it worked i can't find any account of
someone who wore this and was uncomfortable in it yeah um it is hilarious how heavy this helmet is
there we go and this is mounted the correct way to the original which is two pins
two dowel pins and magnets wow and this neck piece was made this way which obviously
there's a great efficiency to doing it in two joint halves than one big cut aluminum piece yeah
you know i'm not wasting a ton of aluminum yeah so i had these water cut by a local shop oh man
and that's fine yeah i was of course my brain my brain goes to neck rings first on spacesuits and
all the hardware so i'm very appreciative of that wait till you hear go ahead and just go
ahead and hold it that's that's significant and is it fiberglass or something it's fiberglass
that as far as i can tell the neck rings are solid aluminum in the real thing i've never held a real
helmet but they look like that i can't imagine that they're much lighter than that they're
thick too i mean yeah it's it's the other one of the more difficult engineering parts is the fact
that this glass bows out just a little bit and the guy who built this had to build a manifold to hold
the visor in an airtight way and heat it while putting in a little pressure to get it to bow out
yeah if it were just a single curve it'd be fine but compound is harder yeah wow
so there's there's a feature to this that's completely hidden put it on your head all right
and if you breathe just in and out steadily i'm sure that they recorded dave bowman's breathing
sound in the movie inside that helmet it sounds it sounds exactly right yeah right
it's like such a sense man like i was like why am i missing and then you said the breathing i
was like you're right it's exactly the sound and it's so much like kubrick to do that right yeah
so cool so when you said you wanted to see this helmet i will admit to you
that about six months ago i pulled the liner which was all um like a half inch urethane
okay sorry half inch neoprene self stick neoprene i saw a reference that it was sewn leather in the
interior so i started down the path of making a leather interior for this and my sewing machine
crap the bed i know and i went and bought a new sailrite sewing machine but i never
got around to finishing the thing that had caused me to buy the new machine and so i did
this yesterday i i finished this piece and put it in and it's not perfect um but it's beautiful it's
definitely more legit than the neoprene uh and i like to i love how dead it sounds in there yeah
you know like when you hear oh yeah i guess you oh you you heard from his microphone okay good um
yeah um these this is actually correct like all of the breakdown of these little parts and they're
just like stuck on there yeah is that accurate to the originals as well i'm not sure if they were
velcroed or i think they might have been um it's hard to say these things got got seriously abused
after 2001. they show up in they show up in doctor who episodes they show up in a bunch of british
sci-fi movies in the background of stuff repainted there's one suit that you can actually if you
pull the pull it and stretch it you can see that it was painted it was silver at first
and then it was red and then it was yellow so they were recycling suits throughout the film
in order to like get the colors that they want yeah it one thing about displaying
spacesuits that i was really surprised by is that they're all stupid heavy yeah yeah even the
the the film ones are still there's a lot of stuff there yeah um and they really they harm the
mannequins i think this guy was about six inches taller than when he started but he's uh yeah
this is a piece that isn't actually this is a funny one because it's not visible on all the
suits and it is visible in a lot of the early prototype suits but it's not on camera a bunch
but i love it i just i love the ibm and i love these these these simple buttons which
are basically just held down with them double stick okay yeah i saw a give a little bit but not
yeah and that's that feels like nice and accurate you know oh yeah yeah right like a membrane type
push button type exactly exactly i do find myself looking at the set with like all the
people wearing these wondering were they all just sweating balls in there yeah yeah
i have no idea yeah i mean like even with the airflow i imagine it's just awful i'm sure
i'm sure i mean chris hadfield and i were both sweating bullets immediately and you had cooling
suits on we had cool particularly at least my favorite part of wearing the cooling suit first
when i put it on i turned it on and i watched my body heat melt five pounds of ice in like
10 minutes yeah and i said that to chris and chris was like well we never run them full time we never
run the cool suit full time you run it until it brings you down and then you you stop you cycle it
okay um so we did that and our cool suits lasted for about the full hour of our of our comic-con
walk um it a couple of things that were really lovely that was we gave i gave chris hadfield
a first he had never worn a fake spacesuit when he when he went and you know i have you put on a
spacesuit uh i actually got to put on a film one i will tell you about later excellent yeah so you
know that the indignity of that yeah the ass goes out and you have to get this whole thing going and
it never really quite sits until you're yeah yeah and so i went through that with chris and it turns
out there is no dignified way to do it it looks just like you'd expect but then as we were getting
out and chris got out he left the arms halfway undone and the legs halfway undone and that's
how they leave the suits so that they can properly have the most surface area to dry out yeah i was
like oh it's a real massive way to leave the suits oh that's so cool to get rid of there's a little
detail that he probably did subconsciously just no he said specifically he's like no
i'm going to show you how i do that christian i was really done yeah exactly he's buttoned down
for this one did you have any lighting installed to not obviously for the walk but for later for
showing your face no uh and that's because there weren't any lights in the helmets okay that was
another thing i was gonna ask yeah it's a very rare one i mean because every film puts lighting
in the helmet yeah and it's ridiculous idea from an actual usability standpoint yeah blinded by
something looking at space that's maybe not the best but yeah it reminds me of watching them
and louise when they're in the car at night and there's like clearly this giant bar of light under
the dashboard lighting their faces that's the same exact thing they can't see out of that car at all
yeah so no there were that's actually one of the weirdly like quietest high-fidelity things
kubrick did about this suit is that there are no lights on any of the nasa suits
ever yeah like i don't even think there's a blinky i think there is a display on the emu's
that you can like a seven segment or something uh-huh yeah exactly but that's it there's like not
a blinky light on the whole thing the only other uh example i can think of is the finger light
from the like the mercury gemini that cut out the circulation to john glenn's hand i didn't know
that yeah because when they did the first this is funny when i did it first i sewed on a little loop
just like the real thing and then i took that same lensed bulb and shoved it in there and it was like
hurting my finger and then i found an account of john glenn is like his notes after the first time
he took it up was like it cut the circulation off to my finger that's not great yeah but
there's also like this this aspect of like even in the imitation of these we end up crossing over
into zones of engineering and experience that were gone through by the real engineers and the
real astronauts yeah yeah absolutely i find that that uh it's like a form of archaeology
and it's actually not even that different from what chris does over at clickspring
right trying to figure out how you could have built an antikythera mechanism using all original
tools yeah and he's unearthing psychology of the maker by doing this in a way i feel like it's like
has real veracity and real rigor to it absolutely yeah i get the same thing when i do this yeah as
we were talking about earlier with apollo and whatnot um digging through the uh the
engineers brains kind of through their work yeah i can imagine absolutely the the same thing here
well you had the same experience i did which is realizing once you start to quantify nasa hardware
that all of the engineers are using whole numbers as much as possible so it's not like seven point
three five nine it would be seven point one eight seven five you know yeah something something stats
static yeah yeah and i really appreciate that because it makes replicating them easier too yeah
uh i just another way it feels like a craftsman as a craft craftsperson is reaching out to you across
time absolutely yeah you know yeah um what is the next space piece of hardware you're obsessed with
that you're working on um so actually it's an aces helmet oh yes that would be the next one um i am
kind of in the process of doing some some disconnects here and there for for apollo um but
we'll see how that goes i've kind of stalled on that just because of time yeah
um you have a job you have a real job i do it turns out yeah um but yeah so
i'll probably be making some of those uh gas disconnects uh pretty soon here or not yeah i
said that back in january and yeah i know some of these things take years and years and years yeah
um i'm just i'm just glad i get to see things like this uh and learn from it so that maybe uh in my
own projects it will help and it certainly has in the past anything you want in terms of information
you let me know i love exulting about spacesuits thank you it is an endlessly fun subject thanks so
much for coming by thank you and thank you for our first uh reverse show-and-tell not the last we'll
be doing this again um people come here we can break out some things that they want to see andrew
thank you so much thank you all right thanks everybody i'm adam savage i'll see you next time