oh look at that oh my god yeah the belt and this is all like real brass yeah so
clearly it's beautiful oh my god now i really want to make one of these
all right hey everybody adam savage with brandon allenger from prop store here in my cave
brandon you guys have a big auction coming up we do yes we got a big auction november 9th 10th and
11th it's some of our best pieces of the year what we call the entertainment memorabilia live
auction and this is a special one because well of course you know this is aliens yes and aliens
gotta be one of the all-time great prop movies right top ten maybe i i do we just did a video
in which i painted up the camo on my colonial marines armor and it's cast from terry english
it's cast from bill paxton's original armor okay yeah it's a really lovely piece but this
the welder this is one in which i had real trouble finding good reference material for
this and it's really prominently shown in the film so as far as we know this is the only one that's
known to still exist it's the only one we've ever seen or heard of obviously there are some
production photos and of course you can see them in the screen captures but nobody has ever seen
one in the flesh until this showed up and you know again everything in aliens is wonderful to
design the pulse rifles the smart guns the armor the shoulder lamps the trackers and the welder
uh and it plays pretty prominently in the film you know this gets used multiple times by vasquez and
and hicks and hudson and it's it's part of the great like gadget vibe that that film has and
hardware vibe that kind of made it all feel so real well and so i mean i think this is
a real tig welder shroud okay right there but the surrounding pieces are all clearly handmade out of
brass this is hand braised and assembled out of brass by the original prop maker and that looks
like it folds over with a little relief there to not bend that part yeah i'm aware that i think
the aliens people aliens prop makers know this part and i have a this is a hammer camera uh grip
and this is not the right model but it's close you can see it's exactly the same shape yeah so you've
impressed me with that because i did not know what this was made out of so the fact that you not only
knew but had one here already is pretty darn cool well so you can also actually see if you look
at it close up you can see where the trigger was that they buried it and filled it and if you look
on the inside you can actually see the trigger yeah so they just buried it inside and you can
see they stuck a little piece of styrene in there yeah to like wedge it wedgie poo it and then they
filled it so this is not even cast this is the original part so it worked with the black plastic
that helps support that if there's another one of these maybe it was just a stunt but that like
they didn't have a production line for these right yeah and and you know what you were saying about
the brass work up here you know sometimes people just assume that all film props are going to be
just knocked out real quickly in a garage and it's going to be cheaply thrown together that's
not always the case i mean they frequently would go out to specialist vendors like a real brass
worker and say hey we need this made up nicely and i mean that's that's high quality work right
i mean that's that's that's not a hobbyist or fan work that's someone who really is a pro in their
trade and knows what they're doing this makes me really want to make this prop now i don't know if
anyone's ever done a good replica of it or not oh i believe i'm sure look the aliens prop guys the
prop guys the aliens prop community is they're pretty rabid they're they're deeply rapid but
now that i'm seeing this up close i'm definitely oh wow wait a second there's something going on
yeah so i think that that's actually yeah that's a tig welding collet there for uh so this is
the head of a tig welder here and even this part which looks like it's yeah that's rubber i won't
stress it to pull it back off again but uh they definitely used a part of a real tig welder for
that headpiece so then following that through do you think that this could have been a practical
prop that could have produced a flame no i mean unless that they had uh no it doesn't look like
it because in order to do yeah you'd you'd want both a gas line and like a heavy-duty insulator
coming out of there right because you're gonna feed a ton of electricity through it okay so it
doesn't look like it yeah and i think i remember looking when you see the extreme close-ups of it
it's always an extreme close-up of the tip it's not right someone so it's just a real welding unit
it's not this prop i could be wrong though it'd be interesting to go look at how they did that with
clever editing also um the color yeah shall we talk about the color the controversial
aliens color alien color is something there's probably more discussion about the color in
this movie than anything else if you just google aliens it's all about the color so this color
is you know potentially the color that was on the pulse rifles and of course the pulse rifle
is one of those mythical props that people are always studying examining breaking down debating
wait right there i'm just going to bring my pulse rifle out because see so and we didn't even cover
this cycle within five feet there oh well i mean because we were talking about it earlier but
i recently with my friend victor broadley did a tremendous amount of work on this beautiful
pulse rifle i have with mostly real gun parts but after looking at endless photos of production i
believe that brown best this brown that you can see you know in this it's like clearly brown i
believe that this is the color of the guns in the film and that it's the lighting makes the pulse
rifles look green sometimes because of the color balancing but i think that they're brown i mean
the interesting thing with this is this is actually a very similar color except this is
sort of i would call it brown red whereas this is brown green and it's and they're almost identical
values that's the thing that's really impressive is they have almost the same light dark value
right even though they're slightly different colors so the aliens fans and people who have
studied it it's you know they speculate it's like were things other hand props like this welder were
they painted the same color as the pulse rifle or are they slightly different because one guy was
building pulse rifles someone else was building welders ultimately we don't know it's a sort of a
fascinating debate you know what i'm confident is this is the original color for this product is it
the exact same brown green that was on everything hard to say you know i also really dig the belt
clip this is again a custom piece of brass very carefully and artfully bent again i think
you're right like this is a real brass crafts person understood the making this exactly right
i didn't know that they had a clip for your belt yeah neither did i but you know that's sometimes
the neat thing about that era of filmmaking too and of course these this movie made in england
shot at pinewood studios famous pinewood studios and i'm sure all the props were made in england
and you know sometimes there wasn't necessarily a prop making industry so again they would go out to
real world people like people who worked in the automotive industry yeah i know they talked about
it was a race car body fabricator who built these shrouds and casings for the pulse rifles it could
have been someone like that who did the the work on the welders yeah well famously r2d2 was built
by out-of-work aerospace engineering company right because apparently the british aerospace industry
had undergone a real contraction in the mid 70s yeah those guys were available yeah and you can
see it i mean you've seen those things it's like they're beautiful that really thin aluminum all
welded together very precise and i recently it was recently made clear to me by a fellow prop nut
job as i am one um that r2 is not welded together he's he's braced okay it's aluminum brazing and i
i have aluminum brazing rods and they're really weird to use they're hard to use it's hard to get
right the temperature and the cleaning your parts and pieces but yeah the original r2 is made like a
piece of jewelry right yeah and they built seven of them so it's yeah those pictures from nordic
engineering of the original silver ones are some of my favorite back behind the scenes photos ever
yeah i just wish there was more of aliens behind the scenes and it's interesting like that's a good
point i mean there's there's two or three photos that exist of the welders that were taken during
productions they're in the books and things right and that's it other than that you have screenshots
and production photos until now when this one shows up and this came in with a couple of other
aliens pieces that are also in the auction uh there's a set of hudson's webbing there's one
of hudson's knives which is very cool oh wow it's a real world knife but it's the do the thing oh
it's that one so that's cool and all this came in from a production source who's had this material
for a long long time so it looks like there was a bit here that got going or or another button that
got broken off at some point yeah i could see that um and it also i mean to be fair it looks like it
was put on after the piece was painted which would explain why it snapped off so easily but it could
be like a detail that you know cameron was like you know what make a little another thing over
there yeah you never know yeah and kind of the perfect size just needs a little display stand
to hold it up i mean yeah it's good to go oh yeah we need to do like a section of a door
like you're welding with the alien claw coming through there you go um the builder news coming
out i totally ideas are going off i i get especially excited when you tell me that
this is the first complete one you've ever seen in the wild because those these these pieces
uh are not just great pieces of film history but like for those of us who like replicating
they can finally answer questions we've had all these years from looking at screenshots
from all these different angles yeah and it's a little bit of like an archaeological study to
go like okay we used to think it was this but now that we've seen it from a new angle we understand
it's actually that and you know for us we talk a lot with collectors about what they might hope to
find you know people go oh this is my dream proper have you ever seen this and when something like
this shows up that's never been seen before it sort of gives you hope that there may be other
things other treasures that are hidden in attics garages barns rental houses whatever it might be
you hear them it could come out in the future you know yeah and that that is the most fun for us is
when something new is discovered that hasn't been seen before there's no other examples out there
like this welder it's uh it's a special thing what a wonderful piece brandon i thank you so much for
bringing it in here hey i knew you'd appreciate seeing this one it's so much great hand prop
ah i just wanna i wanna weld with it oh that was i could make a real working one there you go
one day one day one one day someday a someday build