thanks for joining me today uh i really appreciate it i just i love these live streams
and i love the themes you guys come up with for questions so uh just to reiterate from the top
of the hour i'm answering questions about my show savage builds on the discovery channel
which is viewable on discovery's streaming service right now there are 10 episodes of
goodness we did everything from making a working zf1 gun from the fifth element with some help
from the inimitable and unbelievable gary oldman and we also made a suit of working ironman armor
what do i mean by working i mean it was made out of titanium it was bulletproof and it flies yeah
savage builds was a lot of fun um so uh the the the the first question we have is from john hess
who says in the wheel of death episode if you could revisit it and had unlimited time
and money what would you do differently oh i do lots of things differently so
to uh to give you guys an understanding of what john's asking about the wheel of death
is a incredible world war ii weapon called the panjandrum and one of the big issues for the
allies in breaching german beaches in france yeah that's correct for world war ii breeding
breaching the german defenses on the coast of france one of the biggest issues was that the
germans sent out all these things these these giant uh things of rebar called czech hedgehogs
they had hundreds thousands of miles of barbed wire and mines and stuff um and then they had
this huge seven foot thick super tall sea wall at the end of the beach and the allies thought about
making a device that could roll over all of those blockages and get to the sea wall to blow it up
and what they designed was a i think it was like a 12 foot tall wheel here actually
it didn't look too different than this wire spool here uh two wheels 12 feet tall with a payload in
the middle several thousand pounds of explosives and to power it rockets attached to the wheels
right uh uh carrie grant and tori uh approached this uh story for white rabbit project if i
remember correctly um savage builds it was always on our list and we actually built one
um we built one with help from my friend adam stelzner from jet propulsion laboratories he's an
unbelievable engineer and project lead uh adam was when you saw the uh uh uh the amazing lander
of uh some of the mars rovers adams and his adam and his team are the geniuses that let us land
things on mars and actually be able to use them um so adam helped design this incredible device
and we built one to spec and it didn't work that well so we built our own and again we used rockets
with the right propulsion the right amount of time uh and it's a spectacularly weird invention but
it's also from an engineering standpoint a really beautiful idea because if if what you have is a
whole bunch of blockages between you and your goal just make wheels that can ignore blockages that
that large that that's a great that's genius it's so crazy it's genius it's i dare i say it is a
jamie heinemann type solution so i'll just make some bigger wheels yeah um so our second execution
adam stelzner's amazing idea was to was to put a pair of fly wheels on either side of the
of the panjandrum and spin them up and then use the breaking of those flywheels
to transfer that energy to the rotational movement of the panjandrum in theory it was a great idea
in execution we underestimated how much braking power we would need
we needed a lot more than this standard pair of uh caliper brakes from a truck we thought that
would be plenty turns out it's not plenty not for the kind of energy transfer we were interested in
so it didn't work that's fine that's what happens when you experiment um i i do want to tell you
one story from production which is that we lost the panjandrum at one point
um so we built we built two of these things 12 foot tall two wheels like six feet apart they're
gigantic and we mounted them to a flatbed to drive them down to this farm in half moon bay where we
were filming and on the way i'm just going to say it this way on the way one of the panjandrum
panjandra one of one of the panchandrans
fell off of our flatbed and spent a little bit of time rolling down a california road yeah
luckily it was like 4 45 in the morning there was nobody else on the road amazingly the pandemic
rolled like i think a few hundred yards before hitting a tree and not being damaged we were
able to actually use it only a few hours later i just remember my producer quasi apparent calling
let's go i'm running after the panhandle running down the highway down the road yeah
luckily no equipment no people no vehicles were harmed or injured
oh my goodness that was kind of scary um if i had my druthers i would totally build another
pan tantrum i would totally if savage builds got picked up for another season i would be pitching
redoing panjandrum as one of the episodes uh i think the idea of using spun up flywheels and
braking force is a really really clever idea it's just it from a physics and engineering and
energy standpoint it was surprising how much braking force we required to start
transferring that braking energy into forward momentum forward movement energy
so yeah if i had time and budget i would do it again hopefully it would work this time
uh all right let's see
uh so c2 lawson wants to know um did i have any ideas for savage builds that i was unable to build
well yeah we had for a show like that
you start with a list of like hopefully 30 or 40 things that you want to do and then you know
you start to look at the you start to look at the you look at that list through a whole bunch
of different lenses so you look through what is the stuff that i'm dying to do
what is the stuff that only this production could do those are two different questions
because if there's something that only our and to be clear like the production team for this
uh relied heavily on a lot of the expertise from uh the original mythbusters production team um
yvette solis and jack's marker were the two supervising directors and producers under
john tessier on that shoot and they are both uh long-time veterans of mythbusters and so
sometimes there's a lot of crossover between some of the experiments i've done and things like other
youtubers and other science channel science show people have also done so sometimes the metric that
i like to look at is is this something that only our team could could pull off because that would
be worth doing uh we have a lot of weird expertise this mythbusters group uh and to bring it to bear
on something strange is really awesome and really fun so that's another lens another lens is what
is the network glove what does the network hate the network you know for the most part
i've always found a pretty willing partner in discovery if something's really spectacular and
i think it's spectacular they have always wanted to do it but sometimes you butt heads sometimes
the network can't see how something's going to be exciting and you know it can be exciting um i mean
i'll give one specific example and again i i don't mean to this isn't a trashing network executives
uh talk because everybody has their job within a production they all answer to different people
they all have different metrics by which they need to do their job and i respect that um but when
we did the nitroglycerin episode for instance and the nitroglycerin episode was uh was about ways to
safely transport nitroglycerin famously volatile if you had a jar of nitroglycerin in your hand
and you dropped it the story goes the whole building would be vaporized and there was a huge
nitroglycerin explosion here in san francisco back in the gold rush era um and we found an
expert in nitroglycerin we made you have to make it because no one nobody manufactures it anymore
you have to make it and it's very expensive like crazy expensive like you know banaca expensive um
and what we found in making the episode was that was that nitroglycerin is so
dangerous we never got to the plot of our episode nitroglycerin is so unpredictable
you can't count on it actually exploding under any specific circumstances
yeah i mean we would do things that should be guaranteed to get an explosion and we wouldn't
and we'd do things that would kind of maybe get explosion get huge explosions it was terrifying
and in the end the entire hour of television that we ended up making turned out to be just about how
difficult it is to work with nitroglycerin not at all the original plot and in the original
plot what i had what i had come up with which i really loved was that um i would bring in an
engineering expert like my friend michael lynch or danny hillis or somebody and we would using only
equipment and materials available to a gold rush era traveler like tools from the 1850s 60s 70s
um we'd use only tools and technologies available to that time to make some super gimbal carrier
for nitroglycerin i love this idea i love the idea of using modern modern engineering concepts like
you know using 1860s farm equipment to make a steadicam right that's that's an inherently great
juxtaposition um but we never got there because nitroglycerin is so awful and so difficult to use
that we ended up making an hour in television just about that but the thing is i don't think
i would have ever been able to pitch that episode the one we ended up airing
because a a network exec would be like really it's just going gonna be like spinning your wheels the
same way every single time which is a completely reasonable question if someone came to you and
said i'd like to do an hour of television that seems to be the same thing over and over just
raising the stakes every time but achieving the same result that is a difficult pitch
but there's also a difference between what happens in an episode and who it's happening
to and that's that kind of you know you can't quite say to a network executive oh it's going
to be fun because i'm doing it like that's not necessarily the answer yet it is kind of an answer
um but the the the c2 lawson you're asking about ideas for savage bills that we were
unable to build the thing is is that a lot of the bigger items on that list i'm still holding
in reserve for another show or another execution there are tons of like big or expansive builds
that i continue to think about and dream about and will eventually one day do for instance
having recently um brought my samaritan to almost completion this is all aluminum
i'm now i'm now feeling the desire to make one out of steel to make one entirely out of steel make a
firing a firing samaritan out of steel i would love to do that that was on my list
for savage builds season two uh if we ever if we ever get there or got there um because apparently
uh from what i understand from gunsmiths this is a t oh no it's the wrong bullet i want to pull out
the silver one where is it no there we go um that this is apparently a terrible relationship between
bullet and the amount of powder project projecting that bullet out of your out of your uh uh gun um
that this is a very anemic amount of power to power this bullet
that is a testable proposition and i would love to do that someday i might that's the only one i'm
currently willing to share with y'all thank you c2 lawson thank you for watching that entire video
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