Adam Savage Builds Bookshelves for Mrs. Donttrythis! 

I love how with all the super detailed complicated and skilled work Adam has shown over the years he draws the line at dovetails

When I watch Adam, sometimes I am like "He is so meticulous and safe and sets everything up so perfectly." And then other times you get a video like this where he just does something because he can and hes cutting boards on top of boxes. Makers are the best. Thanks for being human Adam.

I'm not going to lie, that double Adam cut scene caught me off guard. Very cool effect

Give it time, the finish will become closer as the natural light does its thing. I love the original dovetail detail but I quite like your solution, and I LOVE items like this that are amended throughout their life rather than replaced. These are the items that your family will cherish long after you are shuffling around in the cave.

As a woodworker, I'd love to see more woodworking content. There is a little bit of an issue with your design though. The joint is glued up cross grain. So the sides can't expand with the bottom. The dowels will probably hold everything together, but I think given enough time, the bottom will crack. (Notice with the original shelves, the grain wraps around in the same direction.) That being said, I know woodworkers like myself are sometimes more paranoid about wood movement than they need to be, so it's possible the shelf is narrow enough not to be terribly affected. Anyway, more woodworking videos!

They look awesome. Next time you might change the grain direction on your end pieces. The original had the grain on the base and ends going parallel to one another. Your grain on the end pieces goes perpendicular to the bottom piece. So when the bottom piece expands/contracts in the front to back direction it may cause a gap to form on the ends, which will contract top to bottom. If extreme it could possible crack the bottom. Also… it may not end up being a big deal at all. Regardless, it’ll probably not be noticeable, and they look great. It’s nice seeing you do detailed woodwork; would love to see more.

One thing they stopped doing was teaching the workshop class. This has to come back along with agriculture class and music and recess. Thank you for showing people how to do this.

13:05 I think you may have gotten there in the end but a little tip for cutting plugs is you can just go 3/4 of the way into the piece of wood, keeping the plugs all intact, then use a small chisel or screw driver to pop them out. Or even run the board on its edge through the band saw and cut them all loose. Love the content though!! Huge fan of the channel 😊

Those are some neat bookshelves. Next week the OCD kicks in and Adam takes the new shelves out and either touches them up to be a closer match or builds 15 new shelves so they all match!

Love to see woodworking! My only critique is that your side panels are running perpendicular to the bottom and that will inevitably cause wood movement issues at that joint.

I love when you work with wood! Reminds me of being in my Dad's shop in the basement- sawdust city! 😆

Couple pointers: - Use dyes not stains for coloring wood (it's all about particle size, and yes nomenclature matters) - Chisel skills: 1) Try "paring" the ends of the dowels with a chisel instead of a wild freehand muscle-thrust. That long flat back of the chisel is there for a reason... use it to register the cut to your datum surface. "Paring" properly across the endgrain of the dowels will require little or zero sanding. 2) Instead of trying to push the entire chisel edge through the work (the dowel), use just the corner of the edge to make a few smaller overlapping slices. More edge engaged in the work means more force required to make it cut, more force means less control.

First off, the wood color and grain is simply gorgeous. I respect his decision to forgo the dovetailing. I really enjoyed watching this project.

Woodworking! So i can finally yell at the screen 😂

A really cool one day build, books are awesome. Thank you.

For future note , making four shelves, and then sacrificing one of the existing shelves to slice into strips to glue to the front would give you an excellent match. That said, the system looks fine - wood is a natural product and variations are part of the aesthetic. Never knew about the guitar aged lacquer, going to file that away for future use - thanks!

Great build. I am not surprised your family are book lovers. And I see you spent some time in the sun.

Finally some wood working. I love when you do woodworking. It inspires me to do something as well

I picked up woodworking as a hobby in 2020, and enjoy it greatly. I feel I have improved a lot, and can make some decent things. I suck at dovetails and cannot make them look good. They are an art unto themselves, and I totally get the decision to go another route.

When the video was starting and he mentioned he would not be doing the dove tails, I thought if it were me I’d place them somewhere in the middle and move dove tailed shelves to the outsides…reach the end of the video and he’s doing exactly that Lolol. It doesn’t always happen, but it is immensely satisfying when a great mind aligns with my own.

Adam, just in case you weren't aware you can get a dovetail jig for a router that with a bit of fine tuning will give you great looking machined dovetails and be simple to use. Rockler has one for around $200 that is perfectly fine for the price. The company you've gotten the shelves from likely uses a very similar method to make their own dovetails.

6:50 It's not necessary, but it is structural: the major force on the joint is the weight of the books pulling the shelf down, and the dovetail joint is made for that scenario. Normally you'd have potential trouble with books pushing the sides out, but the design of the bookshelf means the steel rails on are the outside of the sides of the shelf, shoring up that weakness of the joint. Really cool bookshelf!

To be honest, I was a little disappointed when Adam didn't go with the dovetails. I now realize this was probably a more practical approach with the availability of modern tools. It turned out to be a very Adamic work of art, uniquely eloquent and oh-so Savage. Maybe, in a parallel Universe, there is a version where Adam uses dovetails.

I'm somewhat envious of that super sharp huge chisel.

The dovetail is nice, but I liked your finishing just as much. It looked awesome. Cool bookshelf.

Darn it !!!! I miss the days of cinder blocks and pine planks 😎✌️

Honestly my favorite kind of Tested content!!

I know you'll never see them but I want the screws that hold the shelves to the supports to be brass thumb screws. If you ever did see them it would look very nice.

What a lovely job, the joinery is in the spirit of the original, even if it is a slight deviation.

I can't believe you would knock us over like that! ;-; Seriously though, these shelves look great. You did an awesome job.

I'm not sure if a video about Adam hand-cutting traditional half-blind dovetails would be more amusing or horrifying. But it would definitely be one. Or both!

Never thought I'd see walnut on a milling machine

It never occurred to me to round the corners of the shelf walls, rather than squaring the corners of the shelf recesses.

Me and my dad before he retired from being a shop teacher. We plained down some old growth cypres planks and made prayer bowls out of them they turned out beautiful

4:42 I love how for all the technical expertise and the lovely equipment he has… sometimes you just gotta “dad in the back yard” style stand on a plank propped on some stuff with a circular saw.

Little tip Adam, Don't just shove a chisel through a dowel. Use a slicing motion. Less chance of any splintering. I've seen a lot of Asian woodworkers so that and it seems to chip and shatter less.

I have a George Nelson-designed Herman Miller CSS set. Very similar, but the aluminum uprights stand off from the wall about two feet and the shelves hang behind them. My most treasured mid mod possession. I feel your enthusiasm for a piece like that.

Hat tip to the editor, love Adam's little hop timed to the music at 9:52

As soon as Adam said "I'm not adding that dove tail" I thought "I hope he puts those in the middle and moves the original ones to the outside." As soon as he started trying to decide if the color was close enough, before the guitar lacquer, I then thought, "I hope he scatters those throughout the middle to make it look like the entire shelving unit always had that much variation and help sell the illusion." Now I'm curious to see what he actually does.

they look great! My 2¢, put them to the right of that drawer section. They darkness will be slightly hidden, and that drawer piece is a tad darker, so it'll just look like an optical illusion.

I really like how the audio stays normal speed when the video speeds up. Mosquito woodworking is no good! Great video

Perfect timing. Need to build a similar system like this for my books.

love bookshelves

Just for future reference, A box joint would look almost identical from a distance of a couple of feet and are very easy to do on the table saw.

Thanx, Adam. Nice job. 💙🌻💙

Brilliant job Adam , i love these video's .

Only just realizing that in many years of watching Adam build stuff, I can't remember him ever doing woodwork. Cool!

Wonderful work. You could probably "hide" the new sones better by dispersing them on the two interior rows and not have them all beside each other. That way the ends would not show and the slightly deeper color would be intermixed and not as obvious.

Wood is not isotropic; grain direction matters for both strength and durability. Wood is much stronger in the direction of the grain, and relatively weak in directions perpendicular to the grain. If you check the original shelves, the grain of the side panels is oriented vertically (matching the direction of the load from gravity). Your panels have the grain horizontally, and I'd be worried about loading those up with significant weight -- the side panels might just split and drop the shelf completely. Wood absorbs and releases moisture continually, expanding and contracting, but this change in dimension is not uniform. Wood "moves" primarily in the directions perpendicular to the grain, and barely at all in the direction of the grain. In the original shelves, the grain all "lines up" so that the shelf pieces will all expand in the same direction -- both the shelf and sidewalls will get "wider" relative to the wall, and at the glue joint they will expand / contract at roughly the same rate. On your panels, the shelf will get wider relative to the wall, but the side panels will get "taller". At the interface, one piece will be trying to grow / shrink while the other will want to remain relatively constant. For a piece of walnut that looks about 12" wide, in SF you can expect movement of about 70 mil, which can be enough to cause splits over time. I'd recommend rebuiding the shelves with proper account for the material properties.

This is exactly what I needed to chillout and relax today. Thanks Adam & the Tested team

I love how you guys are using one audio clip for all of that sanding sped up. Perfect.

Why does it always feel like the more Adam says he is not doing something the more he wants to. XD

Books + Shelves....can I love you any more!😃👍💛

Color matching is hard on walnut mostly because the wood oxidation. The rich brown turns pale.

There is a fascinating tool that I use for cabinetmaking called the Lamello zeta p2. For what you were doing it would be perfect. It's an expensive tool but I think you would love how it operates.

Great, now I want to have a milling machine for my woodworking... :D

I can’t wait for Adam to start chasing zeros with woodworking!

I will say a thousand jezaboos for raising that one misalligned shelf.

Adams has a home? I thought he slept behind the lathe and ate sawdust for breakfast. Great video!

Love these kinds of builds!!

Loved that edit of green screen Adam!

I think I would have gone biscuit joins over dowels, but otherwise, I like what you're doing. And I like that shelving system too.

While the dowels are perfectly acceptable, those existing dovetails are cut with a router and a jig - would have taken you a half hour to do all of them. Hand-cutting 6 ends for 'fancy' through dovetails could be done in 3 hours even with some learning curve. I bet you could get Roy Underhill out there to teach you!! (note:made the comment before he changed to screws - also totally acceptable...)

Sun light may yellow up the walnut naturally over time as well - also he should really have better dust collection - Festool should hook this man up with a sander and vacuum system :)

With a bit of wire along the top sides and bottom these will make lovely cd case shelfs.

When he waw, cutting across the walnut without a straight edge, my inner woodworker was screaming out loud.

Love the one day builds. If you did more cabinetry like more of these shelves than these three I'd suggest a good dovetail jig with a router. But for only these three shelves... nah, go for the dowels. Total no-brainer.

Another enjoyable video as usual. Your corner joint is a nice alternative when dovetails are not an option, although the grain direction conflict between shelf and sides may eventually lead to splitting of the shelves should the humidity level drop too much. This is a lesson that I've learned the hard way.

Really, really good editing by Mr. Self - I'm not a content creator, but for whatever reason, I noticed the exceptionally clean audio/video transitions between the timelapse and real-time shots. The timelapse behind the on-screen narration at 9:26 was marvelous! Very well done, Josh!

ADAM! 21:53 Spraying right next to you VAULT DOOR!?! Oh nooooo. The over spray 😢

Adam, you explanation of the difference between the two colors was like listening to Harris explanation of how she going to fix the economy she told a caller on Oprah. Lol.

Since walnut gets lighter with extended exposure to light (just the opposite of cherry, for example), the color difference should even out over time.

Great finish!

For color matching keep some cans of Mohawk color toner on hand! They come in clutch for getting tree he red, green, or yellow tone just right!

So much fun! Love your work Adam!

The whole woodworking youtube: NOoo you can't just.... Adam: Spray can goes brrrrrrrrrrt!!

The raw dog circular saw with no dust bag is wild 🤪 😂

ඔයාගේ වැඩ නම් සුපිරි ❤❤

9:26 This edit must have taken hours to do. Your work did not go unnoticed!!

Think it would have been cool to put the darker shelves in random

Editing's top notch this video!

Adam's shirt is hilarious

my Star Trek translator malfunctioned, and i wondered for WAY too long who "Mrs. Donttrythis" was. ARGH! love this vid though...

i dont think we ever will but id love to see more of adams house

The sun lightens walnut as opposed to darkening like cherry does.

Hey Adam, I would love to see a video of how you clean your shop after you do a wood project with saw dust and pieces of wood going everywhere, especially your open shelves. I know the vacuum system doesn't collect everything. Buy the way , love your content.

Nice column radiator you can increase and decrease those use to do it also did same with boilers

Paul Sellers released a video about building a bookshelf today. It’s slightly different.

drink every time he says 'not doing dovetail'

It pains me to see the Festool track saw used without the very nice Festool dust extractor that we've seen on the channel before lol.

I'm lazy and would've picked a stain that contrasted nicely with the original shelves. Then I'd call it a "feature" lol

Love the old cast iron radiators. Good old steam heat.

Older furniture is always harder to match color wise probably because of years of light exposure changes finish colors. In time I would expect them to blend in and be pretty unnoticeable. I assume even if you had ordered new shelves from that company they probably wouldn't match 100% for the same reason.

Correct, I saw the lower right section of shelving and it stood out more than the off color sections you made

*Gets home with the shelves* "What- no dovetails?"

I was surprised at the finished product. No dovetails. Did not see that coming.

this is the type of content i love, keep it coming 😁

Your shirt is amazing!

5:25 Imma need a short on that duck tape vacuum duct size adapter technique!

Books and recently applied finish … oh my. 😮