Adam Savage's One Day Builds- Upgrading Captain America Shield!.

Hey, Adam Savage here in my cave with a, this isn't exactly a one day build. It's more of a quick and dirty technique, but one that served me incredibly well. You recognize this is Captain America's stealth shield. And if you were wondering if he has more than one shield, the answer is no. There's only one vibranium shield. Apparently they repainted her mission. I didn't know that. But when I went to look up cap shield information, that's a fact. This was made for me for my costume by Shield Works. You can find him on Facebook. Beautiful work. His paint job is magnificent. I've actually seen one of the real cap shields in Dan Lanigan's collection. And I will tell you that Shield Works bullet hits are exactly right. It's a great bit of kit. And I love it. And when it arrived, it was missing one little detail, which is this border around the edge. For me, that border is really critical. And it wasn't on the Shield Works shield when it came. And I wanted to put it on. But I was confronted with this problem of this is a 24 inch ring. It's about three quarters of an inch wide. How am I going to cut that? Oh, I'm going to cut it with a jigsaw. Oh, it's a lot of sanding. And no matter how well you file it, none of us are click spring. We can't get that good. And I'm going to send it out to my friend Kevin for water cutting. I guess I could, but that's not going to happen in a day. And I don't want to make my problem his problem. And then I remembered a technique for cutting out aluminum shapes that Fon Davis used on his first BattleBots robot, Mouser Mecha CatBot. Yeah, yeah, it's actually required to say, yeah, yeah. Every time you say Mouser Mecha CatBot, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Fon cut out the main half inch thick aluminum frame of Mouser CatBot using a normal router. Wow, I helped him do it, and yet I've never used a router and a template to cut large chunks of aluminum out. So I decided to on this and I'm going to walk you through the process because it was easy peasy. Now, sometimes people ship me stuff in foam board and I save all the foam board. So this is a piece of scrap half inch foam core board that was part of a thing that got mailed to me. And this is my perfect flat base for this operation. This. This is my piece of aluminum. I think I cut the real one. No, I cut it out of just about this stuff. This is like 80 thou. So I'm going to lightly glue this piece of aluminum down onto the foam board. I'm going to use a pro stick high strength spray adhesive. I really like this stuff. It's very it's tenacious. So here we go. This stuff is nice and tenacious, but you got to glue it at the right time. You can't just stick the aluminum down immediately. You got to let it flash off a little bit. Get a little bit tacky. Yeah, still still a little too wet. Happens quickly, but you need the stick. I'm just going to make sure I'm fully covered here. All right. I like that tack. Here we go. I'm just going to lay this piece of aluminum down on here. I'm just going to start with the center on the diagonal. One of the complications is, is it all my stock in this shop? It's 24 by 48 inches. That's the largest size I store. And this ring is exactly 24 inches in diameter. So I don't have a lot of margin of error. And an eighth inch bit. All right. Milwaukee were sponsors of my discovery show, Savage Builds, and one of the bits of the kit was this router. Look at the number on this. This is a. Dallas, this is their 56 15 dash 20 router. And I have to say, this is a really nice bit of kit. This router, it is a workhorse. It is beefy and powerful and simple. I really dig all that about it. And this is going to be our main tool for cutting out the aluminum. Now, I'm going to want to use a short shank. There we go. This is the one. So you could go with a quarter inch shank or a half inch shank, because I'm cutting metal and I don't want the cut to get too hot. I'm going to use a half inch shank and a half inch acts as a kind of a heat heat sink, pulls heat away from the cut. This is a bit I used the first time I did this in preparation for this video, and I screwed it up because I let it get too hot and it shattered the carbide edges of the blade. Yeah. It's the cost of being impatient. So I'm going to use a nicer bit. And this one is three eighths. OK. Best practice with a router. Always leave it unplugged when you're working on it. I've told you that I'm terrified of table saws. I'm way more terrified of routers. Now, now it's time for a little bit of math, because what I want is I want to cut out the inside and the outside of a ring, which means I have to account for the three eighths of an inch of the width of this bit on the radius that I'm going to be cutting. So that's easy to figure out for the first part, which is that the radius is going to be exactly 12 inches from right here to the edge of that blade. I'm going to set my calipers to zero. Bring them out to 12 inches. Yep. All right. So exactly 12 inches from that line to the inside of that bit. That'll give me a 24 inch diameter ring. And if I pivoted in the center here, it should all work out nicely. Now, before I plug it in, let's just check my extents. Damn, brother. Yep. It's pretty tight. So we're about to make a crap ton of noise. Oh, here we go. This is noisy and it's messy. However, I must say I've been really impressed with how fast this technique works. So we're going to turn it on. There we go. Turning. Making sure I have room to move all the way around. OK, I think I start here. Yeah. you saw that as it came free of the sheet, it wanted to run because I'm cutting in the direction. But come take a look at this edge. That is beautiful. That's that's a machine edge right there. At at this point, when I was making that ring before C2E2, I was a very happy camper. Now it's time to make the second cut. Now it's about the thickness of the ring. And on this, I went with what I thought was aesthetically correct. About point eight, seven, five. Oh, that's the thickness of my ring right there. So now I need a new measurement, which is the measurement, the depth measurement between these two. Yeah, there we go. So right there, the amount of extra space there, that's simply the width of my ring added to the width of the bit. Because now I'm measuring to the outside of the bit. Oh, that seems close enough. So then now we're going to the outside. Oh, now we're going to the outside. And oh, look at that. If it's neatly right through that hole right in the middle there, that's awesome. OK, it's important to note the order of operations. I cut the outside of the ring first because I want the glue of the entire piece holding it in position. If I cut the inside first, then I'm only holding on to what I'm cutting with this outside. You want as much surface area as possible to bring to bear on holding your work down. The other thing that I really love about this is the use of the foam core. It's super flat, but it totally does not interrupt my bits at all. It's really, really friendly to them. And I dig that. I dig that about you, Jerry. Perfect. All right, here we go. Plugging in my other router still works, but its switch is broken in the on position, which it makes it a router for those who like action, but not for most people. All right, here we go. Start here. We're going to move around. We're through. And there we have it. Look, I'm as impressed as you are. I really dig this technique because many of the ways to do and get a ring of this precision and this size involve big, expensive pieces of machinery. And that was literally 20 minutes start to finish. You know, and I stopped to talk to you for a while. So it's like it's a very, very fast technique. And what it yields is amazing. All right. So let's get this puppy up here. A little bit of a solvent like bestine or acetone will clear up the glue that's sitting on there. To be honest, I'm going to leave this piece of aluminum attached here because I can use it as a I can use it as my baseboard for any other template, like if I wanted to make a certain smaller ring and I wanted to make a template to run it through. This is it's already mounted. And look at this. This is that is without any finishing. That's not even an overly sharp edge. I got to say, like I knew about this technique intellectually. Now I'm in love with it emotionally. And then when it was time to attach it to this, I simply used epoxy glue. I've talked about glues before. For a wide, flat surface, you want a bit of tooth. So I actually hit this with like 80 grit sandpaper all the way around. Really made it rough on one side. Then I applied some 10 minute epoxy all the way around the ring, turned it over and laid it down. And then as a clamping mechanism, I used a whole crap ton of clothespins just to hold it down. Normally, I don't like the idea of using epoxy and aluminum for a structural hold because aluminum moves a lot. It's flexible, it's lightweight, like things will work themselves away. However, with a wide expanse like this on the bridge, on the brace of a bowl of aluminum, I had no problem with that at all. I think that heaven or hell won't rent us under these two now that I've clamped them together. And that was a half hour solution to what felt like a full day problem. Hey, everyone, Adam Savage here in my cave, and we are living through a completely strange moment in time. Six months ago, the entire world changed. Everyone went into lockdown and so did tested. We became a virtual workplace almost overnight. And now I see all my colleagues almost exclusively on video chat. I am shooting only on the phone. I know the sound quality has gotten worse. Norm, Joey and Gunther are all editing from home. And maybe the biggest change is output. We have radically increased the number of videos that we make because, well, that's what I'm doing all week long. Here's to shooting everything on my phone. And eventually the world will return to normal. But one of the things we want to keep up is the pace of videos that we've been releasing. We've been ecstatic about your feedback about this and we want to keep it going. But in order to, we need to ask for your direct support. And so I'm here today to announce tested channel membership. If you're not interested in becoming a member, that's fine. Tested is not going to change for you. You still get all the same great one day builds, tool tips, the podcast, etc. But if you are willing to join, we've got some pretty cool extras and two levels at which to join for about ninety nine a month. We have our supporter level and for nine ninety nine a month, our patron level, which includes all the stuff from the supporter level and some live streams, some direct access to me and the tested team and some sneak peeks into our entire tested workflow and process. We are so excited about the new possibilities that channel membership opens up. And we know that many of you have been supporting us all along as tested premium members. And to you, I say thank you. Your support has meant everything and you can keep it going by hitting our brand new join button somewhere on this screen. Thank you guys for watching. And between you and me, I am most excited by the live streams. I really love doing those earlier this summer, and I can't wait to pick it up again.