Santa Rosa YouTube star Peter Brown creates art, props using odd materials

It's not every day that someone gets to meet their longtime idol. So Peter Brown, creator and host of the popular YouTube channel "Shop Time," said it was a truly surreal experience when he got a call to meet up with former "MythBusters" co-host Adam Savage earlier this year.

It helped that the Santa Rosa resident recently made Savage's book, "Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It," into a hammer using ample amounts of resin.

“My wife and I watched every single episode of 'MythBusters,'” Brown said. “To be able to make his book into a hammer – I never thought he would see that. Then to have the fact that he saw it, he wanted it, and he invited me down to his shop, it was amazing.”

Brown, a computer network engineer for the County of Sonoma, began creating videos for "Shop Time" six years ago as a hobby. His channel has 722,000 subscribers and more than 96 million views; his most-viewed video has been watched 4.6 million times.

He's dabbled in woodworking and woodturning, copper and glass etching, and even “electroforming,” a slow metal-forming process commonly used to coat an otherwise non-metallic object.

His niche, however, is in resin-based artwork and prop replicas.

In one video, seen more than 2 million times, he recreated the mosquito-embellished cane that Richard Attenborough used in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." He's currently working on different prototypes of the "rose dome" from Disney's blockbuster "Beauty and the Beast."

“It's all driven by my viewers,” he said. “Basically, if I go to a video and make something, I get 2,000 comments and down there are all the suggestions I'm going to need for the next year.”

Scrolling through the comments on his videos might startle viewers accustomed to the often vitriol and bitterness that YouTube stars face.

His viewers tend to be makers, as Brown was sometimes featured in Make magazine, a publication devoted to DIY culture that shut down in June. Often times, commenters tell Brown that his videos help them unwind.

Whatever the reason, companies like Squarespace and Audible have approached him to advertise on his channel.

However big his channel becomes, Brown doesn't plan to quit his day job anytime soon.

“It's a total hobby. I have a full-time job that I'm going to work at until I retire,” he said. “I'm never going to quit my job to do YouTube.”

If you want to see more of Brown's unique creations, swipe through the gallery above or head over to his YouTube channel and see what else he's made.