Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Popular Mechanics

THE ISSUE STARTS HERE. WE PRESENT OLYMPIA A STUNNING NEW WORK OF FICTION BY ACCLAIMED NOVELIST SMITH HENDERSON, THIS IS A STORY OF ALTERNATE REALITIES, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MARTIAN COLONIES, FAMILY, TECHNOLOGY, CLIMATOLOGY, REAR, LOVE, AND THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS ON EARTH. A LINE OF BLOOD runs from under her right nostril and then Rhea topples over at the market, clutching a bunch of tulips. She never rises. My wife is gone. Just like that. ¶ I travel for work so I shouldn’t be home for this, but I am. As soon as I jump off the running board at the depot, I feel every eye askance. Olympia is a small village, everyone knows everyone, word travels fast. ¶ I am taken to see her at the doctor’s house. He…

You could get a lot of holiday shopping done using the gift guide that starts on page 36. For everyone else on your list, make this: a trio of easy condiments packed with flavor, developed for Popular Mechanics by Raymond Chen, a star chef in Vermont by way of New York. (Eat and stay at his inn whenever you’re anywhere close.) The recipes below make enough to give a set of three to four of your friends and/or loved ones. Sriracha Vermont Maple Mustard We developed this recipe to use with a kimchi pulledpork egg roll as a riff on Chinese takeout egg rolls with spicy mustard. In the kitchen, we smear buns with the mustard and make sandwiches with any leftover pulled pork. MAKES 3 ½ CUPS □ 2…

2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio How Italy does the crossover. I want Alfa Romeo to succeed in the U.S., because a successful Alfa Romeo means that every now and then I’ll be delighted by the sight of a midengine 4C ripping past. That’s only going to happen if lots of people buy Stelvios. Fortunately, I think lots of people are going to buy Stelvios. The price is definitely right. The Stelvio starts in the low $40,000 range with a standard 280-hp turbocharged four-cylinder that sends power through an eight-speed transmission and rear-biased all-wheel drive. There’s a fat, square-bottomed steering wheel and aluminum paddle shifters mounted on the steering column, a setup more than a little reminiscent of Ferrari’s. If you need further confirmation of the Stelvio’s intentions, it has a lightweight…

Mark Melonas is the founder of Luke Works in Baltimore. He makes custom furniture and sinks, often out of concrete. MATERIALS • craft-store felt • thread • wax paper • West System epoxy • 200-grit sandpaper • acrylic tile sealer • paste wax • 1 x 1–foot piece of melamine or ¼-inch plastic • cardboard scraps • Smooth-On Mold Star 16 Fast silicone • Rockite cement mix • pigment or paint TOOLS • scissors • sewing needle • small paintbrush • hot-glue gun • mixing containers • gloves DIRECTIONS 1 Cut out two identical rectangles (or stars, hearts, or any other shape you want) of felt to the desired size with scissors. Measure the perimeter of one of the rectangles, then cut a 1-inch strip of felt to that length.…

People have the wrong ideas about knives. A knife doesn’t cut like a razor or a plane iron on the push stroke. It’s somewhat like a saw with teeth that cuts in a sliding motion as it’s pushed or pulled. A properly sharpened knife is honed to a fine edge, yet has an appropriate roughness so that it has bite, or an ability to sink into the cut. Understanding the subtleties of sharpening is what we’re about at Bernal Cutlery, in the Mission District of San Francisco. We’ve sharpened thousands of knives. We also sell knives and teach people how to sharpen anything from a kitchen knife to a meat cleaver We’ve learned there’s more to sharpening than a fine edge. Sharpening takes into account whether the knife is Japanese…

What are the odds of having a white Christmas anywhere in the United States today versus in 1942, when the song was written? Back when Bing Crosby first sang Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” his dreams came true about 33 percent of the time, which actually is a very respectable batting average, dreams-wise. Our own experience with dream realization has been considerably less satisfying. We are not bitcoin billionaires. We haven’t won an Oscar, Congressional Medal of Honor, Heisman Trophy, or the local Rotary Club drawing for a free car wash. The world hasn’t perfected a grilledcheese ATM, nor do we own a pygmy zebra named Octavius. Suffice it to say, then, that one out of three seems pretty darn good to us. That 33 percent comes courtesy of Ethan Gutmann,…

UNDER THE TREE! How’s your Christmas shopping going? Not great? Yeah, we thought so. That’s why this year we partnered with online men’s shop Huckberry to bring you a curated selection of Popular Mechanics– approved clothes, bags, and outdoor gear just in time for the holidays. Check out our favorite items on page 36, then head over to huckberry.com/popmech to purchase. Returns are free—but we have a feeling that won’t be necessary. THE MOST USEFUL PODCAST EVER THE PODCAST! On the Most Useful Podcast Ever, technology editor Alex George goes head to head with Dan Ackerman, senior editor at consumer technology site CNET. What’s the best tech item of the year? What shouldn’t you bother buying? Hear their useful opinions—which we hope will come in the form of a heated…

AFTER A SUMMER of wildfires, hurricanes, and nuclear threats, it isn’t hard to see the value in being able to surveil the Earth with daily—or even more frequent—updates. But traditional satellites, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, have orbits that mean they may not see the same target for a week or more. So an Earth-imaging company called Planet, in San Francisco, is doing something different. In the past year, it has sent nearly 150 satellites into space, including a record 88 at once from India on Valentine’s Day. That should be unthinkable, but Planet is using CubeSats, an emerging type of small satellite made possible by the miniaturization of electronics and sensors, like those in smartphones, that are creating new possibilities to use space technology for social and…

MODEL: TECHNIVORM MOCCAMASTER KBG 741 AO PRODUCED: 137 AMERONGEN, NETHERLANDS TIME TO DISASSEMBLE: 43 MINUTES, 23 SECONDS NUMBER OF PARTS: 137 NOTES: One of the undersung pleasures of our growing appreciation for formerly quotidian beverages like coffee and beer is uncovering people who were doing them right before the rest of us cared. Before anyone had any idea what a third-wave coffee shop was (first wave = Folgers, second wave = Starbucks, third wave = hipsters), Gerard- Clement Smit founded Technivorm and started making a coffeemaker that got water hot enough and dispersed it effectively enough to yield quality coffee at home. Five decades and many imitators later, Smit’s Moccamaster is still many coffee snobs’ brewer of choice. THE WATER Coffee begins as water in the reservoir (15). Ideally, it…

CAN YOU FIX IT YOURSELF? SYMPTOM LIKELY CAUSE CAN YOU FIX IT? The interior has developed a rattle. A pothole or general wear has shaken parts loose. Yes. Remove the culprit panel and apply Dynamat adhesive sound-deadening material. It’ll add mass, changing the resonant frequency, stopping the rattle. Your garage smells like maple syrup. There’s a leak somewhere in your coolant system. Maybe. See if it’s coming from a place you can fix yourself (i.e., a nice, accessible hose). Otherwise, as long as the leak isn’t too ferocious, drive to the mechanic. White exhaust smoke. Coolant is entering the combustion chambers. No. This is caused by a blown head gasket, which is as bad as engine problems get. Call AAA. And possibly start shopping for a new car. High-pitched squeal…

DECEMBER 2017 P 40 YOU ARE HERE OUTSIDE THE MALL, three boys sat on the sidewalk in front of P.F. Chang’s, in the shadow of a giant horse statue, looking at their phones. One of them had his feet up on his skateboard like it was an ottoman. Nearby, a telephone contractor held a clipboard up, blocking the sun, scanning the roofline. A woman drinking a Cool Lime Refresher from a massive plastic Starbucks cup stood in a slender blade of shade created by an eight-foot-high sundial, also looking at her phone. Two parking valets wore identical sunglasses. They stared at the horizon. From the mall doors, two women, fingers dangling Lord & Taylor bags, emerged into the sunlight, looking like an artist’s rendering of the verb to shop. I…

Nokia 3310 This one’s for anyone who just wants the real essentials—phone calls, texts, and a battery that lasts forever. It uses such old technology that it was a challenge to get an old-style SIM card that would work with it. When we finally turned it on, it only did five or six things. But the fact that it all works perfectly is pretty cool. ($90) HTC U11 All the stuff you expect from a flagship phone, like a nice display, build quality, and this good-looking reflective back. But the squeeze thing—where you press the sides to turn on Google Assistant or the camera or whatever—that’s also for a person willing to try something new. ($650) iPhone X The most beautiful iPhone ever. It looks like you would need big…

READER NOTE Old Records Become Flowerpots Maybe you don’t dig the vinyl revival, or maybe your dad’s taste wasn’t so good, and you inherited worthless LPs. Try this suggestion from reader Herb Graham of Chiefland, Florida: Take a small ceramic flowerpot and put it upside down on the center rack of your oven. Put a record on top of it and turn the oven on to 300 degrees. As the vinyl heats up, it’ll soften and droop over the clay. At that point, take it out. When the record has cooled but is still malleable, shape it by hand into a shiny, undulating receptacle. It’ll shortly harden and be ready for planting (or anything else you need a psychedelic bowl for). Clever Fence for Cutting Bolts When using a hacksaw…

As the site of the first railroad union station in the world—where lines connect, enabling train transfers within the same building—Indianapolis was the Midwestern migration gateway. By 1860, one in five newcomers came from a German-speaking region, bringing cultural craftsmanship with them, including cabinetmaking and veneer. Over time, regional workers used hardwood from the state’s 22 tree varieties to produce iconic furniture styles including Old Hickory and Amish, as well as the Hoosier Cabinet, a kitchen cupboard and work counter popular through the 1940s. Today, these makers continue to create furniture the homegrown way. THE MAKER BRIAN PRESNELL HIS COMPANY INDY URBAN HARDWOOD My mission is to keep damaged city trees from becoming mulch by preserving the hardwood, which I do by on-site milling with a Wood-Mizer LT30, a portable…

Gifts for the SELF-SUFFICIENT MAN Shop these gifts and more at HUCKBERRY.COM/POPMECH…

BACK IN 1990, a Corvette cost $31,979 and the ZR-1 option added another $27,016. What that bought you, mostly, was the most fearsome engine ever bolted into an American car. Instead of the pushrod, two-valve heads used in the standard Corvette engine (and every other Corvette engine before and since), the ZR-1 had a 5.7-liter V-8 with quad overhead cams and four valves per cylinder. This allowed it to rev high and breathe deeply, spinning out 375 horsepower back when a Ferrari 348 TS made only 300. A friend who was reviewing cars at the time managed to wreck a ZR-1 so violently that the car broke in half. “When the GM people showed up,” he said, “they only cared about the half with the engine.” That engine, dubbed LT5,…

THE GROWN-UP GAME BOY Nintendo Switch $300 Attribute some of the Switch’s appeal to its namesake trick— you can carry it around and play anywhere, or detach the controllers and play it on a big TV. That flexibility makes it appealing to frequent flyers. Among those spotted with Switches: musicians Ben Folds and Ariana Grande, wrestler John Cena, and rapper Danny Brown (see right). For us, it comes down to the familiar names in the game library, which, thankfully, developers didn’t carelessly exploit. The latest Zelda, Mario Kart, and Sonic are all fantastic experiences that just happen to have nostalgia appeal. It all combines into a device so fun that it could push anyone claiming to have outgrown video games to reverse his or her stance. WHAT I’M INTO The…