adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip
revealing the mysteries of the world one material or
tip at a time um in front of me here i have a bull whip this is uh the second
bull whip i ever made um and this ends up being a little bit
of a show-and-tell but it's more of a tool tip
um i had always wanted the whip from raiders of the lost ark like
every 10 year old who saw that movie uh i wanted one
and in the early 90s as i got hired on special effects and i started building
my skill base i started to realize i don't know some
point it came clear to me that i was never going to be
able to afford a real uh leather bull whip like the one
indy has in the film where the plates of the leather lie super flat and
beautiful and uh i decided to embark on making my
own uh and i found a book at tandy leather
hold on
i found this book at tandy leather called whip making by
uh this wonderful writer dennis rush so this is i don't know if tandy still
sells this book if we find it we will link to it um this is a
terrific little basically handwritten hand-drawn
guide in making bull whips and i followed it very closely
and made my first bullet out of some heavy-duty uh
uh brown latigo not vegetan uh some cowhide effectively and
it was moderately successful but then i wanted to make a real raiders whip
which i knew were made out of kangaroo hide and the only place you could buy
kangaroo hide at the time was from david morgan the actual guy
that built the whips for raiders and he has uh david morgan's son ron now
runs the company but they're up in seattle
and they were for the longest time the only importers that you could purchase
kangaroo hides from so i called them up and i said i'd like
to purchase a kangaroo head but i'd love to talk to david morgan if i could and
this is like 95 96 and david morgan gave me 90 minutes on
the phone now i might have done all this in a show until years ago but
um david morgan walked me through the parts of this book that
had worked for me and that hadn't worked for me there were some things in here
like within the structure of a bull whip there's an
internal core of four braids that comes out to
um perhaps about uh probably about here and then you wrap that in a belly a
basically a long triangle of leather and then there's a second
belly of like six plates six laces and that goes out to probably farther
uh and then you wrap it in another belly and then there's a third and final set
of braids which is these which is a 12 plate so these were 12
braids that started out this thick and ended up this thick
and when i was tying together all of those
various multivarious layers um this book will tell you that oh you
put on the triangular belly over the braiding and then you can braid over
that and secure it in place as you're braiding
that was not working for me it was not working at all for me
and i thought i need to secure this this this layer of leather
before i braid over top of it and that's when i started using
a classic leather workers material waxed twine and wax twine is great
in your string drawer every maker should have a bit of this because it's super
useful comes in multiple colors um because the twine is waxed it tends
to hold its knots very well it tends to be almost
impossible to untie but that is terrific for like
low profile tying off of stuff with nice tight surgeons not like multiple
overhand wraps waxed twine is one of my favorite
leather working go-to tools and i use it for
all sorts of different things cut to 20 years later i am making the raiders
of the lost ark episode of mythbusters and i'm being trained how what is that
why is that why is there a spoke why is
there a spoke wrench in my leather working all right well now
there no longer is okay cut to 20 years later
uh i'm working on the mythbusters raiders episode and i'm being trained
how to crack bullwhips from legendary whipmaster
anthony delanges uh anthony trained harrison ford how to
crack whips he is the man uh when it comes to looking for someone
to do that and anthony and i started talking about the making of whips i
brought this one to show him uh we had lots to talk about obviously
uh and he said do you know about artificial cat gut
and i was like because no i did not know about artificial cat
gut i mean i grew up with cat gut uh tennis rackets
which used to be strong and maybe some of them still are
strong with cat gut which means it's literally like
intestinal lining of cats i don't know anything about how they get
it i don't want to know um and it never occurred to me that cat
gut was a material i needed but then anthony told me that you could
buy artificial cat gut and i went on to amazon and lo
for like seven or eight bucks i discovered
i actually can't remember how much this is but we'll link to it in the comments
below it's not that expensive what i discovered was there was
something bigger than phil there was a even better twine
than waxed twine and it's artificial cat cut
okay this is i don't know this stuff is super thin i mean
it is as thin as a sheet of paper four or five thousands thick
um it is a uh uh uh some kind of polymer i have no idea what it's made out of
this has to be 20 000 feet of it i'm obviously not but
like it's so thin i can't even imagine how
much cat got this is my lifetime supply of artificial cat gut but let me tell
you four specifically super
low profile wrapping of stuff you want to wrap the end of something
hold it really tight you don't want the wrapping itself to cause
bulk under the thing this is your answer um it basically i still have a ton of
waxed twine in multiple colors but the artificial cat gut ends up being
much more of a go-to uh tie-off solution than that um
and i'm here to say this simple little roll again
one one-time expense will last you for the rest of your natural life
i mean unless you're making whips all day long in which case more power to you
write to me i'd like to buy one of your whips
maybe who knows um yeah this is a simple and quick one but
artificial catgut it's worth your time thank you guys for
joining me for this tool tip i will see you next time