hi Reddit! This is grant Imahara, one of the host of Mythbusters on the Discovery channel and this is my AMA, ask me anything. first of all i want to say thank you for the amazing response, there were over 2000 comments from the Reddit community. so, thanks for your support and your interest.
So, question number one. What is the biggest screwup you have ever had on Mythbusters? Well, we've screwed up plenty, believe me. the one that comes to mind is from a myth called "saw dust cannon" and i stumbled on it because the thing we did was actually a step up from the original myth of the saw dust cannon. The original myth was to have a a bunch of saw dust in a little cylinder and you put a little flare in there and use compressed air to fire it up and it makes a huge fireball once the firedust reaches a certain point. It goes up and we did this and it worked. So what we wanted to do was the next step up. What would be the bigger response? So that would be something as flammable as sawdust - non-dairy creamer. So we used not one, but five flares and we used a really big cylinder and a really big air tank and maybe we'd get something bigger. so we set the whole thing up and we fired the thing off. The intial thing that happens is actually nothinmg, it goes up and *poof* then big cloud of craemer and we were like ummmm.. And then about a second later, it erupts into this massive wall of flame. and er the crew up comes in because really we have no idea how big this thing was going to be and because of the volume of thec reamer and the power of the air, it didn't go up in the saw dust cannnon did, it sort of went lower. and we had no idea what was gonna happen here. but what happened here was this low cloud of incredibly flammable non-dairy cmrea has caught fire and is now advancing towards us. this wall of flame is raining down little tendrils of fire and it was advancing towards us. this was the point when i thought, you know what? i am entirely too close to this and i thought what should i do, should i go or should i stand by ground? and i look around for tori and kari and they were just gone.. so yeah i call that one of our biggest screw ups. fortunately no one was hurt.
question 2. why don't you tori and kari work together with adam and the walrus anymore? i dont thing jamie likes that, you shouldn't call him that, at least not to his face. Is it simply because Discovery found better ratings with the two team format? or does jamie just simply depise Tori? No i don't think jamie despises Tori at all. the truth of the matter is that, it is a logistic problem. we got the two teams; and at any one time, we are each working on two to three different myths because if you run into a roadblock on one, you can leap frog and start getting ahead on the enxt one. you know onces a location get becomes available or something. But if you want to do a really big myth that involves two teams, it essential means that both teams have to stop working on whatever they are doing at that moment and then come together and it's really otugh to line up all the schduels to make that work logistically. you know the ones that we;ve done are really good fun. i dont know it's just really otought to do. its hard to pull of that kind of scheudling acrobatics. oh and you know what, as far as the ratings go.. i just don't think so.. i don't think so.. i dont think there has been any major bumps as a results of that. there may be bumps because of other things, but not because of that.
question number 3. do you ever feel awkward as a result of the script conversations? script really? you caught on that? They don't seem necessary as the best quality of the show is that everyone has the same character. yes i agree. other than that, love the show. the thing is certain parts of the show needs to be scripted. there are facts and figures that is necessary to be laid down for the rest of the show that is not scripted. before that used to be done by the myth lady. but before long we started doing them ourselves. oh by the way, the myth lady was scripted to, but they thought since we're paying these guys, why not have them read the script. but that's it, i mean it is awkward because we;re not used to being scripted. we're not good actors you know. but you hit the nail on the head. we do what we do, which is make stuff and test things and have fun and that is what the essence of the show is. and if the scripted part of the show looks awkward because they are scripted, they ARE awkward because they are scripted. so, but sorry, that's just how the show goes, it's part of the show, we need to have that and maybe in future we'll get better at doing scripted stuffs.
question number 4. Thanks to the magic of editing, it appears as though constructing a robot takes you about 5 seconds. How long do they actually take, and is there one robot in particular you remember being a complete ass along the way? erm, yes it does take awhile, to built a robot and it just depends on the complexity of the robot. for example the surd swinging robot (?) took about 5 or 6 days.. some of them you do the intial built and then you have t make a lot fo changes along the way. some of them are roguehd in wihtin the day and a lot of finessing has to go. you know like the robot that we had for the Wanted myth with the swinging gun. it has to swing with the shoulder, with the wrist and fire with the gun at the same time every time. something like that requires a lot of noodling to get working properly. so basically the short answer is it depends on the robot. within the bounds of our show, we get about 10 days to finish the robot. so usually it'll just be a couple of days with our robots. is there one that was a complete ass along the day? yes, the dental floss robot. i initially tried to make it out of materials that you might be able to smuggle into a prison. this was on the myth "can dental floss over time cut prison bars', because it has a slight abrasive quality. the original version of that robot, i attmpted to make it out of a motor from tape recorder that i could have stolen from the library of the prison, i don;t know how many libraries in prisons still have tape recorders but anyway, that was the reasoning. but i used that motor and a couple of other things, dental floss, this robot would spin the dental floss really quickly. spin the floss real quick, and then spin it back, and then spin it up really quickly. but that totally totally fialed. had to throw it out. and i was really frustrated by that. and if i'm really frustrated by thigns. there are two tells. one is i carry a lot of stress in my neck, so i -twists neck to left and right- and the
other thing is i throw things across the room. which i did with the dental floss robot. and that was the one i did for the prison break episode. that one really pissed me off. that one got working after i tried ti with other materials that could not be smuggled into the prison.
question number 5. Since you are the only person on Mythbusters with formal scientific education, do you tend to approach problems differently from your fellow Mythbusters? And what this person is referring to is that i have a degree in electric engineering while the other members in the cast have degrees in other areas. I think i do, approach things from a more engineering perspective. instead of jumping in with trying to figure things out either with paper or popsticle sticks. i'll just get into CAD and try to work something out really quickly. i have a lot of experience with drawing things in CAD from working in industrial light magic. and one of the things i used to do is cut things on the laser cutter board. (which if you ever have access to a laser cutter, i highly reccommend it.) So basically, you drw something in CAD, whatever you can think of, whatever 2D shape you can think of, and you send it to the laser cutter. it cuts it out really quickly and smoothly.so yeah i'm really familiar with CAD i can do things fairly quickly. so usually i'll approach something from that perspective or i have an idea and i'll sketch things on paper and try to figure things out that way. my co-workers will probably prefer a method where yo go in and maybe gather some materials and try to fgiure things out. an example of this is during our recent myth of "the mash of the flying guilitine" which is based on this awesome 60s kungfu movie. anyway long story short, kari had an idea and it involves knives and she got knives and tried to figure it out that way. Tori tried to use form board and he made little prototpyes and then he cut it out of steel. and then I went directly into CAD and designed somthing with 5 blades and the whole thing. but anyway, i think that is the fun thing, that we each have different style of approaching a problem. and in the case of this, its fun to see how everyone has an idea, or takes an idea and hten make it into something real that we work with. so ye
ah there we go. Also, i have a lot of textbooks from college. so sometimes i will hit the books rather than the internet. and er you know, people ask this. how do you do your research? do you consult your books? (which i do) do you go to the internet? yes yes i do. i have been known to oook at various sources on the internet. but the single best thing for us is now that the show has been on air, and people know about us. we can actually call people and be like "hey we are from mythbusters and i see that you're the world's expert on, you know for example, laminar flow or something. or any biology or physics field, we can just call any expert up and consult them. instead of going on the internet and looking for answers there.