Adam Savage's Miniature Vault Door Build!

When I read the title, I thought that Adam was recreating a Fallout vault door given how nicely that show has popped off.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting fallout vault 33 door, but this is way cooler.

Fun fact. In industrial gear boxes that run at hundreds of RPM for years at a time, we actively seek out gear tooth combinations with no common factors, preferring prime numbers of gear teeth. These sets of gears wear more evenly over time. Definitely not the same design constraints that drove the gear tooth counts for vault doors!

Machinist Adam: "yeah, I'll get rid of those. It needs to be perfect" Propmaker Adam: "you know what? If I flip it over, noone will be able to see it". It's just fun seeing the mindsets interact like that. :D

"half a tenth of a millimeter" LMFAO god Adam never fails to make me laugh with his relationship of measurements

I worked as a bank teller for a couple years at the start of my career. I always got a thrill when I got to set the clocks on the vault doors at closing in the evenings. This was less than 10 years ago, and it blew my mind that such primitive mechanical technology was still the best way to ensure things were secure even in our modern digital age.

It inspires me that you are 56 years old and still into engineering stuff and learning stuff. You made my childhood with myth busters program. And you still make me a happy person with your interest in this world. I hope you will love the things you are doing for a long time.

Adam I know a man who is probably the last living installer and technician for Diebold and Mosler round vault doors. He owns a business that deals exclusively with used and antique safes from the late 1880s into the 1980s. I’ve worked with him in the past and was a wealth of information.

watching Adam enjoying playing with his ring piece makes me smile

The Lock Picking Lawyer 😮 my dorky world's collide

This is super awesome, but you know everyone wants to see you pull off a Fallout vault door next.

You have to love Adam Savage! He is brilliant, and he loves to share that with people in a way that everyone can understand. On top of that, he never stops smiling with laughter mixed in.

I may be mistaken, but I suspect it's built that way because base 12 is one of those numbers that makes for convenient math (being evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6), which is why we divide time in 12's, 24's, and 60's, and circles into 360 degrees. (60 being especially convenient because it adds in divisibility by 5.) So in other words, having it in base 12 means you can evenly split it in half, 3rds, quarters, or 6ths, and since circles are already measured into 360 degrees, using base 12 means it's easy to design for a circle. So they probably didn't say "we need to design this so it'll work well on a dividing head", but rather dividing heads are built the way they are for "math reasons", and the vault is designed that way for the same math reasons.

Love the addition of the drums during the tedious bits!

3 careers back, I worked at a radio station which was located in a former bank branch building. Their record vault was the actual vault.

There’s a H&M here in Dublin (Ireland) that is occupying an old bank, and downstairs in the man’s section, there’s a room that used to be the vault, but they kept the door. It’s a huge, square, heavy, thick metal door and it has the pins protruding. It’s really cool

I simply cannot wrap my head around Adam not owning a horizontal band saw. Inconceivable!

Love this.😊 I literally open up and almost 100 year old round vault door every morning. That still works beautifully and almost no change since the day it was new. I call it the highlight of my day.

153 isn't prime, and I determined that almost instantly with a little math trick. If you add up all the digits of a number, and then do that again (if necessary, over and over) until you have a single digit (the "digital root" of the original number), if that remaining digit is divisible by 3 (that is to say a 3, 6 or 9), then the original number is divisible by 3. In this case 1 + 5 + 3 = 9 so it is divisible by 3 and not prime. Another example would be 23643: 2+3+6+4+3 = 18 and 1+8 = 9, so it is also divisible by 3.

I worked in IT traveling to community banks for over 30 years. I always loved the mech of vault doors. One particular door that I was most amazed by was over 12 feet in diameter and was hauled in by horse teams. All the brass and jewelled parts are beautiful.