Jamie Hyneman
Jamie Hyneman
James Franklin "Jamie" Hyneman is an American special effects expert and was the co-host of the television series MythBusters alongside Adam Savage. He is also the owner of M5 Industries, the special effects workshop where MythBusters was filmed. He is known among Robot Wars devotees for his robot entry, Blendo, which, for a time, was deemed too dangerous for entry in the competition. He is one of the designers of the aerial robotic camera system Wavecam, used in sports and...
ProfessionReality Star
Date of Birth25 September 1956
CityMarshall, MI
We're constantly pushing these materials and processes to the extreme to see what will happen. It's an insight into things that you don't normally see.
We've found that the biggest thing as far as the danger is simply pressure.When we work with explosives, we've got bomb technicians there, bomb-squad guys who go into unknown situations all the time, and they've dealt with it safely.
One of the things I'm likely to start building in my shop is a vehicle wherein each wheel has basically a flight-simulator base as its suspension. It's known as a hexapod; it's basically a tripod but each leg is two pistons. So you have six axes of freedom on it. This will be something that can not only do what lowriders do, but shorten or extend its wheelbase and jump forwards, backwards, or from one side to the other. In an off-road situation it could be rolling at speed toward a ravine and then leap across it.
Any day we create that much shrapnel is a good day.
I didn't do the engineering, and I didn't do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.
The idea that you can contribute is really important, especially for a kid.
From our point of view, we're just curious, we're poking around and having fun. If it's science, if it's accurate, if it's not accurate, we did the best we can to keep things clean and understandable, but we're just having fun, so sue us if we got something wrong.
When I figured that I could do anything if I was simply methodical about it. I went to the library - and this was before the Internet - and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.
I've learned that I can pretty much do anything I've wanted to as long as I was methodical and diligent about it. It may not sound very exciting really, but it works.
One of our neighbors is a salami distributor, and they pretty well - I mean, we used their salami to make a rocket engine out of. They just look at us and they're amused, they're fine with it.
Duct tape is not a perfect solution to anything. But with a little creativity, in a pinch, it's an adequate solution to just about everything.
We have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science.
Fun for us just happens to be screwing around with anything that gets our attention and is thought-provoking.
I don't think our death ray is working. I'm standing right in it, and I'm not dead yet.