The One Item Grant Imahara Always Carried With Him
Some people are almost as well known for their tools as they are for themselves. King Arthur and Excalibur, for instance. Wyatt Earp and his Buntline Special. MacGyver's almost magical Swiss Army knife. Have the proper tools to do the job. You'll thank yourself later.
Grant Imahara, the 10-year veteran of the Build Team on MythBusters who died July 13 at age 49, was a working electronics engineer in the entertainment industry before he stepped in front of the camera, per NPR. Besides helping design and operate R2-D2 for the Star Wars prequels, he was a major contender (and winner, thank you very much) on Comedy Central's BattleBots. Remember Craig Ferguson's late-night talk show, and his occasional robotic sidekick, Geoff Peterson? Geoff was Grant's creation, says The Hollywood Reporter.
Imahara's hands-on aptitude and skills were on full display during his time with MythBusters as part of the Build Team, checking out the plausibility of legends and storytelling, both historical and Hollywood. Besides the analytical engineering expertise, Imahara helped create machines to test a premise that was judged too dangerous for a human being, though that didn't stop him from taking on stunt driving and even skydiving in pursuit of mythic truth.
Imahara was a hands-on electrical engineer and roboticist
He took all of that with him to the 10 episodes of Netflix's White Rabbit Project, where he was joined by two of his MythBusters co-hosts to explore similar questions, ranging from the historical to the just-plain-fun. So if you're an electrical engineer/animatronics/robotics-kind-of-a-guy, what's going to be on your belt? In a Reddit Q&A with fans, Imahara talked about his own preferences for the take-everywhere gadget (well, tool, actually) that was his must-have.
It turns out that Imahara was a fan of the Leatherman line of multitools. That love affair began with the Wave model, he wrote, a tool he carried "for many years." Leatherman's website describes the Wave as having "more features than any other Leatherman" and "the top of the Leatherman line." Nevertheless, Imahara moved on to the Leatherman Charge ALX model, explaining, "it had more tools like allen wrenches." This one's about the same size as Imahara's Wave, says Leatherman.