hi everybody adam savage in my cave
with a show-and-tell yeah this is a show-and-tell that probably should
have been a one-day build but i never got around to filming it while it was happening um
it's clear that i love objects and the stories that they tell i love making them and helping
them tell their stories and sometimes i find objects that are so beautiful
i want to build something for them to assist them in telling their story so i'm i'm a
collector of old esoteric technology i love curta computers early digital calculators uh all sorts
of antique tools and there's a piece of sound equipment that was on my radar from way back when
if you cast your mind back to an early francis ford coppola film uh called the conversation
uh directed by coppola uh sound design famously by the incredible director and sound designer walter
murch and in this gene hackman plays a spy named harry call and at one point in the film we see
a miniature reel to reel uh a miniature reel to reel tape deck it's it's tiny absolutely tiny
and uh a few years ago i wrote a column for wired magazine and it was kind of i wrote it for a year
it was what about whatever i kind of wanted to talk about they were awesome
and so i would talk about life lessons and every now and then i would bring up
something that i'd always coveted and at one point i wrote an article on the curta
mechanical computer and promptly watched the value of kurdish computers bump up
perceptibly on ebay because i had talked about them they don't seem to have gone
down either i'm not saying i'm the reason they went up but you know prices are always going up
for reference when i was first like super obsessed with space stuff like 20 years ago
you could buy a pair of russian space gloves for less than a thousand bucks
and now you'd be hard-pressed to find a pair for less than six or seven thousand dollars
the reason i'm telling all of this is because one of the things i wrote about in the wired article
was the uh was this reel-to-reel uh tape deck uh built by nagra nagra are the makers they're
a swiss i think they're a swiss company i could be wrong i didn't do my inaugural research but every
film uh nagra is the de facto film sound deck when i was coming up in the film industry every soundo
had one it was this big deck like this and there were reel to reels and they had crystal sync and
all of this impressive stuff and you could still buy them and there are still people that use them
all the time um but what you might not realize is that nagra also made this miniature reel to reel
uh and they made it for the cia yeah uh and so when i wrote this article for wired i was like you
know i've always considered the niagara real the niagara it's officially called the nagra kudelski
uh uh there was an sn an sns and snst depending on whether they were stereo or not there were many
models but when i wrote this article i realized oh [ __ ] maybe i should buy one now uh and i did
i actually bought one used and i had it fixed by a local sound genius uh and it is one of my favorite
objects and in fact over the following years i purchased more nagara spy equipment uh and this
is the case that i built to house yeah it was all sitting on a shelf for the longest time uh when i
asked sean charlesworth to do some laser etching i had this brushed metal acrylic with a black center
and shawn did the took the niagara logo that i sent him uh and the size and etched it and
that was the sign and that was the first piece i had of the case and then i built this case i
built it out of plywood very same technique as i used to build the blade runner pistol
case this is a paper with a leatherette surface on it covering a plywood box with brass corners
let's take a look inside shall we so here is
the magnificent beast that is the nagra kudelski reel-to-reel
this thing is like a piece of jewelry i can't even tell you how delicious it feels to hold in
your hand um it's not powered up because i don't have batteries in it i don't keep batteries in it
but this is a masterpiece of engineering look at that look at how gorgeous it is
the russians actually made a copy of this that is almost interchangeably um you wound up
you wound there is no rewind on this this is my favorite part
there's no motorized rewind it only goes in one direction so when you want to rewind
uh you you push you uh let's see that's for running this is for rewind
and you push let's see you pull up this handle and you push this button and
that's how you rewind right is that crazy
you would sit there and hand rewind
yeah so you can see why i was obsessed with this so slowly over the years
i gathered up the objects that it would have been uh that it would have been coupled with
so i have in addition to the main realtor reel unit i have a playback machine look at this again
i picked this up for a pretty good deal because it didn't work and it turned out to be a bad wire in
the battery compartment which i fixed i did a lot of restoration on this cleaning and polishing this
clear battery case look at that dude okay here's something i want to point out about the swiss
this is actually a playback unit for an snst a stereo uh one of these realtor reels um
and this was the plug that fit into it with two monos and yeah these two pulleys are simply for
staging the wire so that it has somewhere to go oh my god so awesome uh i also picked up
the the last item i bought was this one uh and this might have been the most expensive
i actually accidentally hit the buy it now button on this or i accidentally how did i do this
it's not that i accident yeah i think i committed to buying this by accident and
then i realized that's good i'm never going to see one for this price again i paid a lot
of money for it it is a balanced and adjustable microphone input check out yeah here check out
that's the interface that's the plug that goes in to there yeah right so this is all super
proprietary and then oh this has two different microphones it's got the cardioid and
it's got the the the general and the the directional yeah oh yeah
oh um all of this equipment works currently i've even got some extra cables an xlr adapter uh this
is a uh a separate lavalier microphone yeah it turns out sean charlesworth is also obsessed
with nagar hardware and then i worked really hard to find a pair of headphones that i thought
felt period correct to my niagara and i found this beautiful pair of pioneer sel-40s
look at how gorgeous these are i've never done any restoration on these
this is exactly how they came out of the box when i bought them on ebay but i feel like they
they complete the picture i even went so far as to hit all of the felt in here with
sandpaper to make it pilly uh and yeah i made a special double a battery holder here
um that is simply it's just a block of resin that i uh i machined to have two edges so that it sat
in this box there's nothing hidden under there and holds all the batteries i need to keep this
running and that helps make sure i don't actually leave the batteries in it because
there's always a place for them to go um i also have oh there's a little stand for it that sean
charlesworth designed yeah he's awesome uh and then these are some of the original reels um
these are so expensive now i think these are showing up on ebay
one of these is a metal metal and one of them is a plastic reel these are shown on ebay for like 50
to 100 bucks a piece i i could be wrong about that but yeah crazy like i said i probably should have
done this as a one-day build and yet at the point at which i decided to do it i i don't know it
looks bad i don't film everything that's just the way it is i know and i've covered a lot this year
but i don't film everything i take some builds to myself there's some times i just want to not think
about telling the story about a build and i just want to be part of the story of the bill
um oh yeah this is the proper case for a magnificent nagra kudelski spy recorder oh right
here's what you should know this is the coolest part about this nagra designed these realtor reels
in conjunction with the cia the caa had things that they wanted we wanted to be small we wanted
to be quiet we wanted to be battery efficient we wanted to be sound activated and nagra was
adding all of these features and each time they would develop a new version of the nagra
the cia all of this research has been gleaned online and so i may be wrong about giant chunks
of it but from what i came to understand is that the cia would each time they came up with a new
design for the naga reel-to-reel they would allow nagra to sell last year's model to the public
so the very first one i think was the sn and then there was the sns which i think this one
is and then there's the snst which is really hard to find and super expensive that's the
stereo version of this um and so whatever you were used in the 70s you could buy this but what you
later learned when you learned about the history of this is that the ca always had one that was
one one notch better now there's one super oh they they ended up actually making a cassette
uh one of the last versions of this was a little cassette and um i don't think i've
ever come across one of the recording units for those cassettes but the playback units show up
on ebay all the time and they're like in the thousands and thousands of dollars my friend
fitz tries to collect everything that ever came on a cassette and he didn't know about those and
he was very delighted to find out about them but apparently one of the versions of this that nagar
designed for the cia used a sinking crystal in it that was tuned to 60 hertz or 50 hertz if you
were in europe it was tuned to the same hertz of wherever it was so that it wouldn't be found
in a bug sweep so i guess a bug sweeper looks for certain signatures uh and it was replicating the
same kind of signature just like a normal piece of equipment plugged into the wall would have
yeah i love that stuff imagine like someone would have to take one of these make it put
batteries in it wrap it in a book or something with a microphone and sound activated and
then somehow sneak back into that room days hours weeks later and recover the recording
i can't even imagine how stressful it must be to be any kind of a spy um but uh this is this
is my fantasy spy equipment distribution case uh and while i did not film the construction of
it i'm delighted to share it with you today thank you guys for joining me for this uh show-and-tell
and if you have any pieces of this equipment lying around that you'd like to just put into my
collection i'd be delighted to receive it uh and i will thank you publicly for it yeah just throwing
that out there dream on thank you guys for joining me for this show and tell i will see you next time
thank you guys so much for watching that entire video if you would like
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