You’ve been seeing metal artstar Hackett around these parts a lot lately. He and the Madagascar Institute made the Jet Ponies at last year’s World Maker Faire New York, he’s a guest contributor to our metalworking month skillbuilder, he was a guest on last week’s Make: Live, and now stars solo in a new show on the Science Channel. The premiere of Stuck With Hackett is 10:30pm ET on Thursday August 18th.
Couched as “MacGyver meets Survivorman,” the show promises solutions to interesting problems in an abandoned railway yard, an aviation junkyard on the edge of a dry lake bed, and plenty of other typically suboptimal locales filled with raw building materials he calls “obtanium.” The first episode has Hackett building a gasifier:
Alone in an abandoned rail yard, Hackett is faced with an enticing challenge…taking the rusted old wreckage around him, and using it as a life-sized train set to build his own working locomotive. But he hits a hurdle when he runs out of the only available gasoline in the yard. Without access to modern fuel…or any help— Hackett turns back time and resorts to Victorian technology. In order to get his train on the tracks, he must wrestle steel parts several times his size, fire up a super-hot invisible hydrogen flame, and resurrect Industrial Revolution-era techniques to turn wood into an explosive gas that will power his personal locomotive.
I got to see a bit of the filming of this episode, and I can’t wait to see the rest of the projects in the series. The episode guide has me looking forward to a scratch built washer/dryer, snowy mountain hot tub, thermite hamburgers, and something called a “dirt boat.” One Make: Live viewer writes, “I like Hackett’s teaching style. It’s entertaining enough that I don’teven realize I’m learning.”
14 thoughts on “Stuck With Hackett Premieres Thursday 8/18”
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Will be fun, but this may not count as a premiere – They showed what must have been the pilot episode last year. Hacket stuck in the middle of a desert, at an abandoned motel – Made himself a propane fired air conditioner. If they keep to the standard of that episode, it should be great.
Will be fun, but this may not count as a premiere – They showed what must have been the pilot episode last year. Hacket stuck in the middle of a desert, at an abandoned motel – Made himself a propane fired air conditioner. If they keep to the standard of that episode, it should be great.
Will be fun, but this may not count as a premiere – They showed what must have been the pilot episode last year. Hacket stuck in the middle of a desert, at an abandoned motel – Made himself a propane fired air conditioner. If they keep to the standard of that episode, it should be great.
Yep, that was the pilot!
awesome!! cant wait
Hi Becky, I’m really glad to have found your blog since you got to see some of the filming of this episode, because you might be the perfect person to answer this question when I can find nothing else anywhere on the Internet that would help. My question is: Where was this episode filmed? Where is the abandoned rail yard located? A friend and I have been guessing where this yard is that would have the hills close to the tracks as well as all of the eucalyptus trees in the area. Some of our guesses have included a few locations in Orange County such as the Huntington Beach area, Irvine, Costa Mesa, and Laguna Beach as well as possibly Ventura or Santa Barbara in Ventura County. Are any of these locations close?
Coincidentally, we live just down the road from the motel from the pilot episode which has been used in countless movies, tv shows, and commercials.
Thanks for your help. We’ll check back to your blog soon in anticipation of your answer.
If you’re a poor soul without access to the science channel, you can finally download the torrents on the pirate bay:
http://thepiratebay.org/search/stuck%20with%20hackett/0/99/200
The show is really good, I watched a few episodes and learned something new in each one of them!