Innholdsfortegnelse for Jan/Feb 2018 i Popular Mechanics

Volume I I REMEMBER WHEN Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits album came out. I was in college, and I walked through the snow down to the record store (the record store!) and bought it on compact disc. For a fan of any musician, greatest hits albums were always a little strange. You were used to hearing songs in the context of the other songs on the record. Now here they were all out of order, and only the hits, not the B-sides and non-radio-friendly tracks where they belonged. In Springsteen’s case, all the hits were there, of course— “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart,” “Born in the U.S.A.” (And also, curiously, “Atlantic City.” Was that a hit?) I loved them all as songs, but I wondered if this album would sound like…

It isn’t Tesla or Faraday Future—it’s Genesis, Hyundai’s luxury division, which officially hung its shingle in late 2015. Hyundai has sold Genesis-branded cars for years, but those were merely the beachhead to get U.S. buyers accustomed to the idea of an upscale Korean car. Now, Genesis is its own company and its latest sedans crib directly from the Lexus strategy in the early ’90s: Meet or beat the established player in quality, performance, and luxury at a significantly lower price. New Genesis models, like the twin-turbo, rear-wheel-drive G80 Sport (left), are an enticing proposition for the brand-agnostic: You’re paying for the car, not the badge. At least, not yet.…

AT SOME POINT, when you’re a half mile out to sea and at least forty-five minutes from a hot shower, your body will tell you that it’s time to go in. Not like summer or fall, when you quit if the wind changes or the tide gets too high. In February, I turn back only when my hands and feet stop working. My fingers curl up into a claw so I can’t grip the board, or I lose feeling in my feet and can’t stand up. That makes me sound tougher than I am. Modern wetsuits are very good at keeping you warm, even comfortable. You can spend hours getting tossed around in the 45-degree Atlantic Ocean. Besides, the fun of riding waves is usually enough to make you not…

Leather is the default interior upgrade on any car. We urge you to reconsider. Yes, leather cleans up nice. But it’s also freezing in the winter, scorching in the summer, and generally not that imaginative. Cloth is anything you want, the canvas upon which Porsche paints houndstooth and Volkswagen stitches plaid. You can heat it, if you like, but you needn’t build an entire HVAC system into your seat, because cloth breathes. In trucks, cloth is honest. And in a sports car, it grips. The Shelby GT350 has Recaro cloth seats that glue your torso in place. But if you’d rather be plastered against the door when the car pulls a g, get that upgrade to leather. Did you know that Rolls-Royce uses hides from Alpine bulls that live in…

Guarded by sandbags, a man sits before a panel on which are rows of gauges. As he turns valves, needles of the gauges spin and gyrate. From behind the sandbags comes a hiss, a puff of smoke.1 The man relaxes, the gauges come to rest.2 If it were not for the tiers of protecting sandbags, it would seem undramatic, almost unimportant. Yet in those few seconds all the fires of hell have been raging in the little cylinder behind the sandbags. Terrifically explosive gases have just reached a temperature half that of the sun and a velocity of 3,600 miles per hour—and one more experiment has been added to the long list by which men have sought to gain knowledge which will enable them to conquer outer space. Scientists are…

JANUARY 1906 “Socker” Football “The appalling list of 19 deaths and 132 serious accidents during the American football season of 1905 has called forth the demand from the press, public, and college presidents for an immediate and radical change. ‘Socker’ football [Ed: Today called ‘soccer’] is suggested as much less strenuous.” MARCH 1910 1 Football Armor OCTOBER 1939 2 Touchdowns in the Making “ ‘Stub’ Allison, head football coach at the University of California: ‘Twenty-five years ago the development or selection of varsity football material was largely a survival of the fittest. The emphasis was on weight and strength; today it is on speed and brains. Only the fastest, brainiest, and best-conditioned men make the California Golden Bear teams.’ ” OCTOBER 1944 3 Football—Tougher but Safer “Medical attendants have learned…

You can use Peg-Board to mount narrow shelving for holding jars and other small objects that can’t be hung from a hook. And because the shelves are hung on the Peg-Board, they’re completely adjustable. It takes 4 feet of wall space to mount a standard ¼-inch-thick sheet of Peg-Board, and the shelves can be made out of 4-foot-long 1 x 4s supported by modified Peg-Board hooks. To reshape the hook, secure it in a metalworking vise, then use a hammer to tap open the hook so it’s bent at 90 degrees and projects horizontally. Next, bore two holes in the back edge of each shelf in which the hooks will be mounted. Bore these 1½ inch deep using a 13/64-inch bit. For a 4-foot-long shelf, locate the hooks about 6½…

Popular Mechanics: You’d been at the magazine a few years before this story ran. What took so long? Roy Berendsohn: Popular Mechanics followed the apprenticeship model—not unfamiliar to me from my time as an apprentice cabinetmaker. It was a given when you were hired that you had a lot to learn mechanically and journalistically. PM: Planning a project with a computer seems pretty advanced for 1989. Was this a big step forward? RB: Yes, it was quite advanced then and continues to be. On the other hand, having a neatly drawn plan to present to the building department has always been important. That was true before the computerized Design Center, and is still true now. PM: How have things progressed in the last 30 years? RB: Having a kiosk in…

FROM THE MOMENT the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the world has asked one simple and compelling question: How could it happen? Three and a half years later, not everyone is convinced we know the truth. Go to Google.com, type in the search phrase “World Trade Center conspiracy,” and you’ll get links to an estimated 12,300,000 websites. Thousands of books on 9/11 have been published; many of them reject the official consensus that hijackers associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda flew passenger planes into U.S. landmarks. To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, Popular Mechanics assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals…

Racing Motor Car Literally Flies Through Air JULY 1911 Sheep-Killing Parrots Escape into America DECEMBER 1917 Sharks Are Cowards MAY 1927 Energy Expended in Speaking Found of Little Value MAY 1932 Pacific Ocean Not Big Enough to Hold the Moon NOVEMBER 1932 Half Brain as Good as Whole One, Surgery Finds DECEMBER 1939 Jigsawed Dutch Boy Holds Your Pipe with Both Hands MAY 1940 Jar Rings Aid African Courtships MAY 1947 Railroad Tosses “Passengers” Over Cliff at Supersonic Speed JANUARY 1955 Are We Licking Our Missile Fizzle? MAY 1961 Men Go to Antarctic to Flee Women but Have Problems Just the Same NOVEMBER 1961 Walking Wastebaskets Eat Trash and Like It MARCH 1975 Novel Surgery for Detached Heads JULY 1999…

I. “Like insurance, lifesaving devices are hard to value. If you don’t need them, they’re useless, even a bother. If you do need them, they’re priceless.” —POPULAR MECHANICS, 1962 December in Chicago and there’s some loon pretending to drown in the Sheraton Towers Hotel pool. It’s an indoor pool, but still. This guy is floating in there in a white T-shirt and jeans, upright, with his head lolled back and his eyes closed, sneakers just grazing the bottom. An inflatable plaid life vest barely holds his face out of the water. Later, he grabs for a floating cushion, but that slips out of his hands and he sinks up to his forehead reaching for it. This man’s name is Bayard Richard, and you shouldn’t worry about him. He swam backstroke…

We’ve all seen those yellow and black signs, emblazoned with three triangles, announcing the presence nearby of a fallout shelter. These are, at this point, antiques, vestiges of a more innocent time; a time when we liked to cling to the notion that a nuclear attack was readily survivable, sort of like a tornado, but with more gamma rays and fewer flying cows. Truthfully, fallout shelters were never all they were cracked up to be. Rolled out in the early 1960s by the now-defunct Office of Civil Defense, they were never as well-equipped or funded as originally envisioned, which, frankly, didn’t much matter. The advent of thermonuclear warheads— high-yield hydrogen bombs much more powerful than those dropped on Japan during World War II—rendered them moot. Fallout shelters were often spaces…

Ziploc Bag For car-key fobs and such. Roll it up in a Ziploc, and stuff it down the back of your suit. Surfline Buoy readings and weather forecasts to predict the surf. Plus: live surf cams! ($70 a year) Xcel Drylock TDC Split Toe Boot 5mm You can go up to 7mm thickness, but unless you’re in Scandinavia, 5mm is plenty. ($85) Vaseline A layer on your face minimizes windburn. Works on land, too. ($4) Xcel Drylock Texture Skin 5 Finger Glove 5mm Some like a mitten. I use a glove, which gives you more grip when duck diving and popping up. ($70) Patagonia R4 Yulex Front-Zip Hooded Full Suit No heated vests. This is all you need, a 5-mil or 5/4/3 wetsuit. Fit is vital, so visit a surf…

Fifty years ago, a tragic fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal left nearly 300 sailors and Marines dead or injured. On that Saturday morning in July, as I sat in the cockpit of my A-4 preparing to take off, a rocket hit the fuel tank under my airplane— and the fire erupted. As I scrambled out of my aircraft and ran across the burning flight deck, I watched as sailors carried hoses and extinguishers toward the flames. A moment later, the first bomb exploded, and those brave men were gone. As ready as the Forrestal was for combat, nothing could have prepared us for the calamity that befell us that day. But while the men on board may not have been prepared for that particular enemy, they fought it…

GRIP the hammer near the end of the handle. This hold gives the maximum leverage, power, and drive. The trick in starting a nail is to use light taps, holding the handle approximately at right angles to the axis of the nail and utilizing the wrist as a pivot. After starting, or setting, the nail, use the full stroke. When heavy blows are required, the wrist, forearm, and upper arm are brought into simultaneous use to deliver the full driving power of the hammer. As the head of the nail nears the work surface the force of the blows should be lessened. When pulling a nail, proceed by stages, as undue pressure may break off the nailhead. Raise the nail slightly, then release the claws and take another bite. The…

1. The setting, curiously omitted in the original article: Arroyo Seco, California, circa 1938. 2. The researcher had good reason to be tense: The scientists had already been thrown out of CalTech for explosions on campus. 3. According to Conway, the men simply knew that a rocket that could reach the moon was a long way off. In fact, Frank Malina published an academic paper in the late 1930s that explored what it would take to launch people into space. 4. Rockets had never been formally studied because they weren’t as useful as balloons. Of limited military application, rockets were mainly of interest as a potential tool for atmospheric studies—but balloons could go higher, and were less likely to demolish a lab building. 5. The formal creation of the Jet…

If you have a spot as small as 10 x 10 feet, you can grow and harvest luscious vegetables starting in a few weeks and continuing through the first fall frost. Using a system called intensive gardening, you can produce more in your small, carefully regulated plot than most gardeners tilling much larger plots. SELECT THE SITE Choose a spot that can get a good water supply and at least six hours of direct sunlight each day. Be sure your site is at least 15 feet away from any large trees or shrubs whose roots will compete with, and steal, vital moisture and nutrients from your vegetables. Also make sure it is not a low spot where water will collect and rot plant roots. Once you’ve selected a location, put…

Trex, a company that builds composite decking, continues on with this idea. Its Trex Deck Starter Tool is a user-friendly means to approximate the cost of using Trex materials to build a deck (or just add Trex surfaces and railings). We used the tool to map out a simple 12 x 12 deck and received, in minutes, a pdf that gave us approximate materials pricing ($2,700, not including the pressure-treated posts over which the Trex railing sleeves would fit) and data sheets that would simplify filing for a building permit.…

NOVEMBER 1942 1 Miracle on Wheels “Army men call the jeep a miracle on wheels. Engineers at the huge Willys plant, where thousands are rolling down assembly lines devoted to automobiles, believe the jeep’s uses are still relatively unexplored. After the war, its designers see it as a prime farm tool. Right now, however, it has a wartime job to do alongside the fighting men. They’ll do it, too, these jeeps and Yanks.” FEBRUARY 1948 2 Jeep Posse “While overseas, thousands of GIs dreamed of the day when they would be turned loose with a jeep and a tankful of gasoline. Today that overseas dream has come.” AUGUST 1955 3 Uranium Hunt by Jeep “Old-time prospectors are somewhat startled when they see the latest uranium-mining equipment whiz by. Atop the…

I WASN’T SURE Kia would go for it. I was going to visit the factory in West Point, Georgia, an hour southwest of Atlanta, and drive 400-something miles home to North Carolina in a Sorento SX Limited plucked straight off the assembly line. Handing a freshly built car over to a magazine writer requires confidence in your product—no break-in mileage, and no making sure that I get a perfect car. But Kia agreed. It’s a bold play, one that demonstrates that it has a point to prove. Kia spent the early 2000s, its formative years, as the butt of jokes. Its cars were a reliable fixture at the bottom of the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study (IQS), which tallies owners’ complaints after three months of driving. As recently as 2005,…

Last winter, we hired an interior designer. She scheduled a time to come over, spent 30 minutes measuring our living room, and sent that info to a CAD artist who set it up with all the proposed furniture. We had to pay that CAD artist, too. PLNAR, a new room-mapping app that runs on Apple’s ARKit, doesn’t totally replace that, but it definitely would have saved us time and a little money. With my iPhone, I measured the same room in less than two minutes. After you mark out the perimeter by aiming the phone at the floor and tapping a button at every corner or new surface, you can mark off walls, doors, and openings. There’s a lot of clutter in the room while we figure out where to…

THE IPA BOOM that you may have noticed at your local restaurant/bar/beer shop/ bodega/grocery store is forcing brewers to innovate in the quest to cram more hops into every batch. Conventional brewing wisdom saw hop pellets and dried flowers go in at the start of a boil, the end, and then after fermentation. But the hoppiest brewers have already hit the limit of how much physical hop flower can go into a beer (about three pounds per keg) before a soggy kale taste sets in. Nobody likes soggy kale. Here are the new tools and tricks for making ridiculously hoppy beer that you will want more than one of. Lupulin Powder • Used for flavor and aroma, this yellow-green powder is three times more potent than traditional hop pellets, says…

The ten-year-old set it up. He had a friend over, they were running around the backyard screaming and chasing each other with a Wiffle Ball bat. I gave them the box. They took it, looked it over, and ran to the treehouse. Worked on it for an hour. Had to go back and forth to the barn a couple of times for a hammer (to drive the staples to run the wiring) and a screwdriver. They positioned the 6-watt solar panel to the southwest. They got the MP3/FM radio going, filling the autumn air with pop songs. They hung the three daisychain lights from branches above. From across the yard I heard them talking and debating each step, like miniature guys on This Old House. The system is from BioLite,…

3-4 medium potatoes1 small onion, chopped1 lb ground beef1 can Campbell’s condensed tomato soup1 large carrot1 green pepper1 cup green beans, blanched and chopped½ cup milk2 Tbsp butter salt and pepper 1. Peel and boil potatoes until soft enough to be mashed with a fork. Drain. 2. Add onion to a frying pan and cook over medium heat until translucent. Add beef and brown. Drain fat. 3. Add tomato soup to beef and stir to combine. Spread beef mixture on the bottom of a castiron pan. 4. Rinse frying pan, and sauté the carrot and green pepper for about six minutes. Mix in blanched green beans, and then place all the vegetables on top of the meat mixture. 5. Mash the potatoes with milk, butter, salt, and pepper. 6. Cover…

I GREW UP in Minneapolis, so I can say this for sure: Winter is more bearable when you have something to look forward to. We knew it was going to get dark and cold for five months, so you either embraced the opportunities snow brought—pond hockey, snowmobiles, and skiing—or bought a timeshare in Orlando. As a young kid with poor hand–puck coordination, I was put on skis by my parents. The sport opened up a new side of Minnesota. I could now glide through silent white forests and trek up frozen creeks I’d fished a season before. Here’s how to begin exploring the snow-covered world outside your back door. 1 WHERE TO START Visit a cross-country ski center with groomed trails, rent some gear, and try it out. These carved tracks…

A SET OF PLAIN WHITE locking cabinets in the Popular Mechanics offices houses the PM archives. The editors here pull these hardbound copies—big, black things with gold lettering, like volumes of a mail-order encyclopedia—off the shelves with surprising regularity. Sometimes it’s to find a dusty Shop Note that still works, or to check on a prescient old story whose subject is finally news. But much of the time, it’s just to smile. This is a magazine that has predicted flying cars in no fewer than six separate cover stories. We once suggested rejuvenating a sputtering ballpoint pen by tying it to a string and swinging it around until centrifugal force pushed the ink to the tip. We wrote about photography by carrier pigeon in prewar Germany. The thing you’ll notice…

GETTING IN AND OUT WHEN stepping into a small boat, always place the first foot in the center of the floor, never on the gunwale. Then immediately place your weight on this foot and crouch down, resting a hand lightly on each gunwale, and sit down. When getting out, keep one hand on the dock or landing platform, to hold the boat against it. Then rise to a crouching position and step quickly and smoothly to avoid pushing the boat away from the dock. Also, while transferring your weight from the foot in the boat to the other on the dock, pull your feet together to prevent the boat from being pushed away. BECAUSE AT SOME POINT. YOU'LL FALL IN GARMIN's Quatix 5 is the latest, all-new marine smartwatch, meaning…

MARCH 1912 1 Remarkable Weather of 1911 “It has been found that if the air contained more carbon dioxide, which is the product of the combustion of coal or vegetable material, the temperature would be somewhat higher. Since burning coal produces carbon dioxide it may be inquired whether the enormous use of the fuel in modern times may not be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance, and consequently indirectly raising the temperature of the earth.” MAY 1930 2 Is Our Climate Changing? “The belief that appreciable changes of climate occur within the compass of human memory is at least 99 percent illusion. The other 1 percent of the idea may be based on facts, more or less.” APRIL 1940 Coal Dust Speeds Melting of Ice by…

MIRACLES YOU'LL SEE IN THE NEXT 50 YEARS FEB.1950, P.113 Some of Waldemar Kaempffert’s forecasts (Personal helicopters! Food made from sawdust!) were a smidgen off. Others, like video calling, were prescient. What about 2068? Futurist Amy Webb suggests completely automated transportation, personalized medicine and education, and the primacy of the Amazon–Whole Foods conglomerate. Intangible changes, too. “Human data will be equivalent to any other natural resource, like precious metals. The country that has the ability to mine and refine its citizens’ data—you could see shifts in global superpowers.” HOW MUCH OIL IS LEFT? MAY 1944, 01 Amid national anxiety about oil draining off to the war effort, Wayne Whittaker was unconvinced our energy supply was in danger. “We shall find more oil—lots of it,” he blithely concluded. The 74 years since…

As do-it-yourself projects go, building a deck is among the most complex. Weyerhaeuser intends to make the process less daunting with its computerized Design Center. Poised in front of the computer’s screen, homeowners plot the deck’s outline and then progress to a finished plan, requiring only the help of a home center employee trained in using the system. You can save time and money by not having to make repeated trips to the lumberyard to buy or return materials due to inadequate plans. Do-it-yourselfers can quickly explore different designs. The system can design one- or twolevel decks that are square- or rectangular-shaped. It can also yield decks with cutout areas or ones that are U-shaped or L-shaped. Any design can have decking (flooring) 90 degrees or 45 degrees to the…

THE SUNROOF is nonsense. (February 2017) WE AMERICANS ARE convinced we can do most things better, and certainly much quicker than anybody else. (April 1907) STEP ONE: Scratch head. (November 1997) AMONG THE HUNDREDS of nail types available at any hardware store, only one size and shape is the best to use for a particular job. Other nails may do the job, but the right one will do it better. (June 1968) ASSORTED RUBBER BANDS can be cut from worn-out rubber gloves. (March 1952) THE DIAMOND WAS once such a dull little pebble you wouldn’t even stoop to pick it up. (February 1950) FOR THE LAST TIME, there is no spinning in foosball.(February 2015) YOU THINK YOU’RE SAFE in sleep, you think you’re beyond fear, but the reeling mind is…

I still can’t explain why I decided to solo any more than I can understand why I agreed to learn to fly, unless it is to say that I could solo, just as I could learn to fly, and like the man who looks at the bird and senses the possibility of human flight, what is possible is often simply what is done. That is the human record, to the world’s delight and the world’s dismay. I don’t want to oversell it, but if I needed any reassurance that year that I was not dying as my father had died and that I had things to live for despite his painful absence, I found it that day in front of the double lines of the runway waiting for clearance from…

Ahydraulic press is expensive ready-made, but you can make one from a few dollars’ worth of structural iron and a $20 hydraulic auto jack. My press uses a 3-ton jack; do not use a larger one. The base and top parts of the press are 10-inch lengths of 4-inch channel; the movable jaw is made of two 10-inch lengths of 2-inch angle. The two rods are the result of cutting a 3-foot length of ½-inch-diameter threaded rod in half. Weld together the pieces of 2-inch angle to create a box—the moving platform. (For a wider platform, bolt an extra length of angle to the platform, as pictured.) Then create a cardboard template to help locate ½-inch-diameter holes 7 inches apart, center to center, on the platform and both pieces of…

OCTOBER 1980 OCTOBER 1959 Winch Mired Car to Firm Ground with Spanish Windlass Campers who get bogged down off-road need not fear if they have enough rope or chain to set up a Spanish windlass. The windlass is used to winch the car to firm footing as illustrated. To do this, a small log is placed upright in a shallow hole dug next to a tree to which it is linked with a rope as shown. One end of a tow rope is then tied to the car and the other end is wound on the log, after a loop is tied on the end. A stout pole inserted in the loop is used as a lever to operate the windlass. —Contributed by E.V. Reyner, Salinas, California OCTOBER 1905 HOMEMADE…

FEBRUARY 1976 AVOID CUPPING BY ALTERNATING When tabletops and other wide panels are built of random-width boards, the heart grain of the boards should change direction from board to board and bar clamps should be placed on alternate sides of the work. FEBRUARY 1940 Playing Cards Serve as Template to Copy Irregular Work Accurate fittings for moldings, cornices, etc., can be cut using two decks of playing cards to form a template of the work to be copied. Just stack the cards and then press one end over the contour of the work as shown. After squeezing the stack tightly to avoid slipping, remove it and trace the contour on the piece to be cut.…

We all want the best for our children— even when their creative endeavors seem to overtake every surface in the house. How do you know when it’s gone too far? Well, when you start writing checks with a Day-Glo pen or get the cold shoulder for accidentally sitting on your finger-painted portrait, it’s time to bring some of your own skills into the act. To help out, we’ve designed an easel to help focus your kids’ expressive energy. It features a dry-marker board on one side and a corkboard on the other. 1 Use a router and edge guide to cut the mortises in the easel legs. Then, readjust the bit depth and rout the panel grooves. Use a table saw to cut the tenons on the rails. 2 Cut…