Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Terminator T-800 Endoskeleton

The newest addition to Adam’s Cave is a replica of the Terminator T-800 Endoskeleton. Adam acquired raw castings, had them chromed, and then applied weathering effects himself to make it look like a realistic human-hunting machine. Watch Adam paint and add weathering effects to his T-800 in this member video.

Comments (26)

26 thoughts on “Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Terminator T-800 Endoskeleton

  1. A friend of mine used the copper paint to metal-plate flowers and other non-metallic items using electroplating. Not so easy to brush it onto a delicate flower stem 🙂 the deposits were also pretty heavy. I can only imagine it must take a lot of skill to maintain all the detail through the several layers required for this thing.

  2. Wow, that is amazing! I’ve done a project with face tracking and can give some advice if you’re interested–check out the project here: http://learn.adafruit.com/creepy-face-tracking-portrait

    An Arduino alone won’t have the horsepower to do face detection, but I found a Raspberry Pi with webcam or Pi camera works great and doesn’t take up too much space. Face detection algorithms are implemented in OpenCV and surprisingly not too difficult to use.

  3. When the resin casts were made did it rescale slightly? Looks like the body is about 102% doesn’t sound like a lot but with the skull being to scale it becomes noticeable.

  4. Was just going to leave the exact same comment!

    Here in Chicago it’s been so cold for what feels like so long that I keep coming back to that one line from The Fifth Element.

    “Negative. I am a meat popsicle.”

  5. This is very timely!

    I am in the process of creating a 3D (CG) T-800 endoskeleton, at work. Unfortunately, the license holders were not very helpful in providing references for this project. So after searching the internet top to bottom, I can say good references are hard to come by, lots of horrible toys, but very few photos of the real props, and they don’t cover all the angles. So this video is a goldmine for me!

    My main concern (and that’s my perfectionist side talking), is that I know I didn’t get all the proportions exactly right, and I’d really need orthographic sketches of the real thing for this. And that’s just not possible, of course. But perhaps I could ask you guys for the next best thing?

    Norm, any chance you have or could take some photos of Adam’s T-800 next to a ruler/tape measure/some regular pattern? And have him exactly from front/back/side, shot with a long lens, preferably (to minimise distortions)? I’ll be finishing the model in a few days now, but could still make some last minute changes, if I know that I get it that much closer to the original. But hey, if you do this, I’m sure there will also be people on the RPF who will be infinitely grateful as well 🙂

    But In any case, this video alone is super helpful already, you guys made my day!

  6. Following on from Adams planned pose of the T800 chilling with a beer, I couldn’t help but think it would be cool to be holding a china cup and saucer. I think that would make for a very civilised Terminator, but that might just be because I’m British…

  7. Absolutely have to make a Lobrau label for the beer. Or make it Mom’s Old Fashioned Robot Oil instead. And a cigar. I’d crack up.

  8. Discord  that just leaves the question of “Kill all humans” or “Bite my shiny metal ass!”

  9. me too. i appreciate the very un-terminator-like layer of casualness of a bottle of beer, but i am much more partial to the even more absurd notion of a cup of tea in good china.

    it’s like, the gap between beer and shooting people in a postapocalyptic wasteland is smaller than between afternoon tea and shooting people in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

  10. you know what would be awsome? get one of those self playing pianos for it to sit at… creepy good fun

  11. Any possibility of getting close-up pics of the pieces? Either before or after plating. I’d love some close-ups of the hand/forearm to try to recreate 🙂

  12. there are actually really good pictures of an arm of the original 1984 terminator here on icollector. The cutout “cyllindrical” part covering the upper part of the forearm is somehow rotated to the inside, though, but you’ll see what I mean if you look at Adam’s T-800, or one of the other T-800 props on icollector.com website.

  13. also may I nitpick Adam’s assembly one one point? 🙂

    the box shaped piece at the bottom of the chest shouldn’t follow the curve of the chest, but sticks out. Easier to illustrate than describe:

    green line- bottom of the chest, orange- contour of the piece I mentioned (first image: Adam’s T-800, next two: screengrab, and prop photo)

  14. Any chance you can tell us the name of the shop in LA that does the plating? I’ve been having a hard time finding places here in town that will do one-off runs.

  15. This is so cool, I love all of these videos and am so impressed with every project Adam takes on. Really cool stuff!

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