hey guys adam savage and i'm here with vaughn davis and we are in grant imahara's shop with
grant imahara's droid uh you recognize this little blue guy as r2d2 um this came about as
part of a a collaboration between how many of us five or six at our ten of us are ten of us yes wow
uh you me billy brooks don bees john duncan john goodson pierre maurer later joined us mark buck
yeah and um we all wanted our own r2d2s and so we carefully built ourselves a set of r2d2s
totally from scratch yeah that was the ethos that was well that was the deal
too even though we we worked with the real r2d2 at lucasfilm we were never allowed of course to
make copies of any of the parts or anything like that so we had to create every little
detail you see here from scratch just i guess just like all the other r2 builders in the world
so but we split it up among the 10 of us some did these parts some did those parts i i just remember
endless amounts of machining yes for all these leg parts making whole bunches and then molds
um i did some fiberglass hard molds for the outer shells yeah i remember and you also wrote the
instructions for all of us to do the perfect fiberglass oh did i really yes because it was
a hard mold which is nerve-wracking a hard part in a hard mold yeah because if you do that wrong
you fuse your part to the mold so yeah i'm sure that that was why you wrote those instructions i
was taking um careful instruction from mike jobe and tony preciado about how many different layers
of wax go between the hard part that's casting into the hard world because the cost of failure
is absolute catastrophe yes um and so this was grant i'm i i i knew that he had finished it but
this is actually the first time i've seen it up close yeah yeah we had been working on them for
it was on our 20th year really that we finally got to this point where we could call them done
so we started that probably in just around 2000 well it would be 20 years ago 2020 so it was
2000 yeah yeah so i felt like i was late finishing mine six years later well you finished
yours you were the first to finish yeah yeah dawn was the first to drop out of the group
and then yeah yeah a bunch of people ended up dropping out because it was just
too much work it's a gigantic construction even for us like familiar with the process the number
of parts and pieces the amount of accuracy trying to get things to work mechanically it's a bear
it is under the best of circumstances absolutely i remember we had a really really fun
all of us brought our droids to your shop yes up in norcal when you finished yours
oh was that really what i did oh right because i fried i think i set something on fire inside
my bot while showing it off i think i like moved the head too far oh man i love the data displays
are you telling me this correctly these are fiber optic yeah so this is this is led right but we cut
lengths of fiber optic a lot of the artsy builders are doing this now um so it still has the visual
appearance of the fight the original fiber optic and the original fiber optic is kind of shitty
and it it's so perfect yeah that's what the color wheel yours has a color yeah right yeah yeah yeah
not only does mine have the color wheel i have the um bubbly uh epoxy pot in here because that's
true to the original it's like sitting there in this meniscus of crappy epoxy that is that is
the dilemma of building one of these is like how nice do you make it versus how
dirty and kind of run down because the originals didn't actually i mean they were made for
movies they're just props so they just rushed through them to get them on camera and that was
it yeah so they weren't polished then they weren't perfect not only weren't they perfect
but no two of them match yeah they're off by an eighth of an inch sometimes up to a quarter of
an inch on some of the parts and pieces between two bots built by the same people you're correct
yeah so but we stayed pretty faithful like this is a separate piece right here
um you know oh the fascia here yeah if you wanted to make that cleaner you would just build that
straight into the body but all these are you know um yeah my boys used to pull these out
so they could hug our two that's sweet clearly grant had not gotten around to filthing him up
because he is way too clean yes that was going to be my job oh yeah he was he was helping me
with the electronics naturally yeah yeah um and then i was going to help him paint it
because i'm really good at messing things up well i remember being really close to finishing mine
and i didn't have a skirt or there was a skirt mold and i lost it oh and so i was like ah and
then i realized i could just build this i could just scratch build a skirt in probably three or
four hours so i did and then i was obsessing about some lines and i was like r2 is totally beat to
hell why am i worrying about this yeah and again it's that like why make this lines because when i
was done i like took a ball peen hammer to him yep um that is the routine it is so lovely i just like
it was so many countless lunch hours oh yeah oh you're gonna make this part
this time oh yeah i'm gonna make this part and then we're gonna make it this is one
of those projects where the journey was more important than the the completion or arriving
because i think about all the times we'd huddle around uh you know photographs and plans and frame
grabs from the movie and try to figure out like does this you know does this stick out here what
color this is black in some movies but not others and this is not level in nearly any movie or it's
not parallel and correct yeah i mean there's all these things about it that you that don't work
unless you build it wrong but yeah and then you also find things that were inconsistent in
the movie like the right and left leg they're not they're not they're bilaterally they're not mirror
images they're not well no they are mirroring right sometimes it would put them on backwards
in the movie so even within the movie there wasn't consistency so it was always
that decision of which version right within the movie are you going to do i remember also this
we figured out that the copper jacketed uh braided wire was like i don't know it was like 40 a foot
or something but you could buy the stainless steel and painted copper for like a dollar
which is what we did yeah we got this this is like home depot yeah this is just like sinkholes um
oh man and this is what i love is that this aluminum panel that tops the the ankle there's
no there's no screws holding it down and even any of the ground tubes it's just sitting there yep
yeah it's remarkable uh the real kenny baker one was in the shop for a while and i always grooved
on seeing um inside the battery boxes here on the kenny baker r2 you can see his sneakers
yeah where his legs would come through here into here so anytime r2 did like one of these
kind of movements that was kenny inside yeah i remember that was the first one i got to work
on at ilm oh really they needed it repainted and refinished so i stripped it completely down to
aluminum and repainted it and i'll never forget the moment i took the head off i just because
this is just sitting on here just like everything else um it's not attached and i just lifted the
head off i set it down on the table and turned and i looked inside and you could see the straps right
that kenny baker would wear over his chest inside and the little footholds yeah it's just like
wow right yeah i was that that was one of those rare moments at ilm where i was
like seven years old again nope it was just one of those moments it was really cool you know a
friend of mine said when i was building my r2 he's like you know you're making a happiness machine
yes what do you mean he's like if you have r2d2 in your house how could you ever not be happy
i'm always telling people that like uh uh adam calls his a happiness
um i've actually just recently dubbed mine uh my emotional support robot absolutely that's
cool because i keep it in my office and i find myself gravitating towards it and just kind of
holding on to it while i'm talking to people yeah and then i realized this is my emotional robot
oh yeah if you want to build your own r2 there are tremendous resources online the r2d2 builders club
has amazing plans and all sorts of wonderful innovative ways to do it and it's still going
to kick your ass no matter what yes stupidest project you could start and i can't recommend
it like awesome absolutely between 6 and 20 years is the completion rate that sounds great