Former Mythbusters host and geek media personality Adam Savage shared a new video with fans this weekend, showing of his Captain America shied replica and giving his audience the lowdown on how to “upgrade” a beautiful shield he had been given, without doing any damage to the crafsmanship in the original build. You can see it above. The short version? Nearly everything in this Shieldworks replica was perfectly true to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s take on the First Avenger’s vibranium shield. The only thing that wasn’t? A 3/4 ring that ran all the way around the interior of the back of the shield.
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That might not seem like a big deal to you, when the rest of the piece is so beautiful. But you are (probably) not someone who builds special effects models for a living and has been in the presence of a screen-used version of the shield in question.
The video comes from the Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube series, and is one of his fan-favorite one-day builds — although, as he is quick to point out, it isn’t really a build but an upgrade, and doesn’t take anywhere remotely close to a full day. And outside of maybe ruining a router bit along the way, it seems like the whole thing was pretty easy, and (aside from a giant piece of aluminum) required only tools and supplies found in a reasonably well-stocked workshop.
While Savage himself seems fairly astonished by the ease of this, he admits that’s largely because he has simply never tried this process — which he has known about for years, and which was used on a battle robot build that Savage himself was a part of.
Besides Mythbusters and his career as a TV personality, Savage has worked for decades as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others. He co-hosted The Darwin Awards and Mythbusters with his longtime collaborator Jamie Hyneman, and has been feted and awarded by Hollywood and the scientific and educational communities dozens of times over the years, sometimes for his technical achievements but often for helping bring kids closer to science and technology education through his TV shows, which more recently included a kid-focused Mythbusters Jr.
