hey guys Adam Savage here in my cave with a tool tip specifically about
getting a closer view on things as model makers some of us are nearsighted some
of us are farsighted some of us have perfect sight but all of us need a
little help from time to time getting a close-up view on things and I have spent
the better part of 25 years trying out different ways of magnifying my work so
that I can work on it and I'd like to give you the benefit of some of that
experience at the most basic level for magnifying there are things like
jeweler's loops like this which allow you to see things really close up yeah
that's really lovely and there are a pair of lenses in this one this is a
fine thing to get 5 bucks 8 bucks something like that these are
totally utilitarian they completely work for a little bit
more you can get one of these guys I mean I don't think it's that much more
and this is a jeweler's loupe this is for looking at jewelry and stuff super
close-up and again this is just fine I use this just last week when I needed to
see something that I was threading that was incredibly small this is a twenty
times jeweler's loupe and I love this thing this is great now we get into some
of the more surgeon type magnifiers and I had really high hopes for these like
actually back when I was a model maker at ILM I went and actually talked to
Zeiss about spending seven hundred bucks on a pair of their surgeons viewing
glasses and that's what these are these are provide a high degree of
magnification but a very narrow field of view and that may work for you for me I
need a little more depth of field and by depth of field I mean when I'm looking
at this the depth of field is such that that's in focus that's not that's in
focus that's not that that's the definition of a shallow depth of field
narrow bandwidth in which the stuff is magnified and this is similar except
that it's stereo and once you get the two once you get the two lenses there we
go once you get them aimed you still have that narrow field of view but you
have the wide magnifying distance so you don't have to work like this you can
actually work like this and I'd really I liked these when I bought them but again
sometimes I found them just a little too persnickety in terms of where I had to
place my hands so then I found these and I actually I really dig these these give
a wider field of view I there's a I think there's a Chinese company that
makes a bunch of these I will try and find a link on Amazon of these for you
but this whole video is geared towards telling you that after all of this the
thing I was told by my mentor Mitch Romanowski still holds true so Mitch was
he is not with us anymore and we are poorer for it Mitch
Romanowski was an unbelievable mono maker truly innovative really incredible
problem solver and I learned at his knee for several years while he was partners
with Jamie Hyneman Mitch ran the model shop for Nightmare
Before Christmas and for James and the Giant Peach and a more cynical and yet
loving human being you would have trouble finding and Mitch said after all
of these things that he tried nothing worked better than these dumb magnifiers
with the little replaceable lenses now this is a specific class of magnifier
that it's about the least expensive out there you know they run about 20 bucks
for a pair by contrast these I think are well above 50 or 70 and you can spend
into the hundreds and hundreds of dollars but this magnifier comes with
different degrees of magnifying lenses some of them are at high magnification
some of them are medium and you just simply clip them in here and I will say
that for peripheral vision field of view depth of field nothing is better
then these bad boys there are some that allow you to clip in two lenses at once
I think these these that oh yes I can so I can actually combine the magnification
of two lenses here in order to get super yeah so the versatility of these in
terms of where I can place my hands and the fact that I'm not looking through
two tunnels at my work but I'm actually seeing it in the wide expanse is why I
recommend these magnifiers as the best all-around magnifiers for any model
maker now all that being said if something different works for you then
that's what you should be using I'm a big believer that there is no one right
way to do things there is the way that's right
for you and I hope that some of the silly amounts of dough I have spent over
the years odd magnifiers helps you not have to spend so much because this will
get you there thanks everybody more tool tips later thanks for watching thanks
for staying safe see you next time