Hey everybody Adam Savage here and I know.
I am not in my cave. That is because I am on a vacation of sorts that I'm taking some time
out of to answer some questions from you guys. And here is the first question. Or here is
the question I'm answering in this video. I'm answering one. Here we go. Jack Builds asks: I
was wondering how you find garage kits. He says he found some like the cosmonaut — that's a one day
build we did a while back on on Tested. Do I have sites that I prefer? And he says thank you for
being a maker inspiration.
Well you're welcome Jack Builds. I appreciate that. I'm very lucky.
On one level a lot of garage kits find me. People who know the kinds of things that I'm interested
in often send me stuff that people are making and that's everybody from close friends, colleagues
like Sean Charlesworth, friends like Tom Sachs and also people in my twitter feed. And
people send stuff to Tested all the time, send links the things they think I would like to build
so a lot of that stuff comes to me and that's a benefit of this position which is really great
but when i'm interested in a specific kind of kit or a kind of kit experience um the internet
is an amazing sort of free association machine and i love using it in that capacity which is
an inexact search capacity and yet it allows me to search for things i'm not even sure that i'm
looking for which is the key here right i don't just want to go find a garage kit of a specific
thing necessarily i want to know about the garage kit that i might never find out about so i will do
image searches that's that's one of my main ones but i'll also do image searches on more than
one search engine because i want to see what what other algorithms have archived that i might
be missing just by using google so i'm certainly not above using bing and i've used go um i i don't
love the interface with pinterest so i often do a boolean search and remove it from the search terms
because i find clicking through all the endless click-throughs on pinterest to be super annoying
despite the fact that it can be a great compendium of of reference for me it's hard to go find the
origins of that reference and that makes me cranky so i will also use multiple search terms again
i'm often like i said my way of looking for for garage kits is i'm looking for specific
kinds of experiences so if i'm on a 2001 kick i was recently working on the helmet from
my clavius-based costume and that just got me interested in other kits that people had done of
howe uh the hal 9000 panel and then i was curious if anyone had done kits of the ares 1 or of the
space plane uh so i start searching for things like 2001 garage kits um and again like i'll do
that search as an image search but i'll also look on deviantart i'll also look on ebay i'll also
look on etsy and ebay and etsy are awesome because they give you two very different worlds to search
through uh and again this is like what i'm looking for is not necessarily just an exact specific
kit although i certainly go looking for that it is looking for a specific uh uh an experience
for instance the cosmonaut kit that kit betrays a an attention to detail that is really almost
intoxicating to me as a maker so those guys it's like when i go do an image search for their stuff
other ancillary stuff might show up in that image search stuff that was like that because of sites
that are linking to both the cosmonaut kit makers site and other stuff like that it's like i'm using
the internet in the same way that that netflix was promising to show you what other people liked i
have to say on that front the netflix algorithm has never understood me it doesn't seem to have
any clear understanding of the kind of movies that i love and i wish you would stop recommending
things that i've seen and hate based on things that i'm watching and love but that's just a small
complaint if you guys have tips about search terms for finding things you didn't know you needed
or finding things that you didn't know you were looking for i would love to hear those hints
because um searching for stuff on the internet is a it's a dark art it is non-straightforward and
you have i feel like i have to approach it uh in a kind of a non-linear or even orthogonal way like
i'm coming at right angles to the thing i want i hope that was some semblance of an answer i know
that was i kind of went all over the place but i i hope that helps thanks very much for that
question and i'll see you guys next time
