Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2016 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

AT LEAST, I’M TOLD, it kept me out of trouble. My end-of-year holiday assignment was to build Meccano’s Meccanoid robot. And it ended in Mission Accomplished, not that it involved any great skill on my part: sheer bloody-mindedness, mostly. You can read the full story on Page 30. Until my holiday experience, my last hands-on time with Meccano happened when I was still in short pants, not necessarily out of choice. Meccano has moved on since then, but you can’t mistake the philosophy of learning through play, even if the style has changed from when it first appeared a little over a century ago. There was a time that Meccano figured large in the formative years of a certain type of individual. Geeky, shy, studious… yes, that was me. And…

JOHAN VAN STADEN was one of the first people in the country to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The only catch was that he couldn’t bring his wife along and couldn’t tell anyone about the movie or the 4DX experience. It helps that he designed the cinema and knew exactly what to expect from the system. It all starts with a steel structure. You strip the chosen cinema bare and install the framework, which will then hold all your seats. “The seats (which come in pods of four) weigh about 450 kg empty,” explains Van Staden of South Africa’s first 4DX cinema seating at Nu Metro V&A Waterfront. “With the 0,3 G movement it has we talk about weight displacement of about 868 kg when it moves.” Pitch and…

Something about an intimate bar makes music sound rich and stirring, but a tiny apartment doesn’t have the same effect. Any speaker configuration that fits in the space usually sacrifices acoustics. I have Sonos speakers (R3 000 and up) in my pint-sized Manhattan walk-up because, in addition to producing stellar sound, they get periodic software updates that actually make them sound better with age. The latest add-on, Trueplay, is an idiot-proof way to optimise the sound for a specific space. Plant a Sonos speaker wherever it ties the room together, open the app, and follow the video. As the speaker makes laser noises (pew! pew!), walk around the room’s perimeter waving your phone up and down. The app uses the phone’s microphone to determine which frequencies are getting accentuated or…

Popular Mechanics We’ve got a million ways to quantify power. Horsepower. Ergs per second. Gigawatts. But power is more than just numbers. Power is experience. How something feels is just as relevant as how it performs. Especially now, in this new age of automotive ingenuity. Nissan’s GT-R Nismo gets 600 horsepower – as near as dammit to 450 kilowatts – out of six cylinders. The Dodge Hellcat tearing up this page has 527 kilowatts and can hit 328 kilometres per hour. You’d have to be soulless to drive them without at least a small smile. And then there are the less quantifiable displays of power: like an extrusion press that squeezes metal like Play-Doh, or a whale with a tail that creates the thrust of a fighter jet. Ultimately, though,…

Ahead of the North American International Auto Show, CES 2016 may as well have been called the car electrics show – with some of the world’s largest manufacturers vying for the eyes of consumers before the strictly automotive spectacle in Detroit. Fifteen years ago – even as we stepped into the 21st century with all the futuristic hype generated around the millennial changeover – gesture control, autonomous driving and remotecontrolled parking would have been the makings of a 007 flick, or dismissed as the very best science fiction. Whichever side of the fence you may have been on, these are now the realities of the automotive industry. General Motors’ first real attempt at the electric vehicle, the EV1, was ill-fated. Nonetheless, it went down as a pioneer. It’s paved the…

WHEN WE SET OUT TO DESIGN an indoor firewood rack, we wanted it to be sturdy and made from materials you can buy at any hardware store or timber yard. So we designed our rack from ordinary 100 x 100 timber, steel angles and flat stock. To turn a rough 100 x 100 (nominal) beam into flawless 50 x 50 stock is no great mystery, and we show you how. But you do need a table saw and a benchtop thickness planer. If you don’t own those machines, you can still build this rack by ordering clear 50 x 50 stock from a timberyard. This material is quite attractive and will make the rack look lighter since its actual dimensions are 40 x 40 millimetres, whereas our material measures a…

RECYCLE AND CURB SOCIETY’S ILLS No one is immune to the threat posed by poverty, which underlies most home-invasive crime. There has always been the scope, and money, for locally focused poverty alleviation programmes. Now, landfill airspace has a high financial cost, which all municipalities must pay. Materials diverted from the waste stream reduce that cost. Recyclable materials consume large volumes of landfill airspace; ergo, the potential for massive financial savings. Recycling reduces our carbon footprint, water and electricity consumption. In contrast, crime: l Suffocates the economy, contributing to local job loss, poverty and the (high) crime rate. l Increases our rates, electricity consumption and VAT contributions, all sources of municipal and governmental income. Our only defence is, through manual sorting and processing of recyclable materials, to create work and…

AS QUICKLY AS THE Islamic State can destroy ancient relics, researchers are trying to save them. Early last year, the Institute for Digital Archaeology, a partnership between Harvard University and Oxford University, started the Million Image Database project in an effort to collect 3D records of endangered archaeological sites all over the world. The group developed specifications for a stereoscopic camera with the plan to distribute it to people who would have access to sites threatened by conflict, natural disasters, climate change, or lack of resources. When ISIS attacked and partially destroyed millennia-old ruins at Palmyra in Syria last year, it imposed a new sense of urgency. The IDA began distributing cameras in August, ahead of schedule. It also sent out three different camerabodies in order to make the photographers…

The Beach Boys Pet Sounds The most unimprovable version of an unimprovable album, with brighter percussion and harmonies. Skip James Hard Time Killin’ Floor Cleaned up so you can hear his picking and those haunting vocals, but never sterilised. The rare proper blues remaster. Georg Solti Der Ring des Nibelungen Quintessential Wagner talent, this 1997 edition was the first to clear background hiss from previous remaster attempts. Maria Callas Maria Callas Remastered: The Complete Studio Recordings (1949– 1969) Hearing the first lady of opera shuffle her feet makes this feel like a private recital. The Smiths Complete Guitarist Johnny Marr helped remaster this collection of all eight albums. Superior mixing to previous cash-grab compilations.…

Do you have unusual questions about the world and how it works and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za Questions will be selected based on quality or at our whim. Q How do you know if a car mechanic is on the level or scamming you? Are there telltale signs? A IF A MECHANIC suggests replacing more than four wheels, two axles, or one steering wheel, you may wish to investigate further. Repairs that propose to employ “an X-Acto wrench”, “liquid staples”, or a microwave oven should be declined. Also, note: no current production vehicle requires dilithium crystals to function correctly. Actually, despite the old stereotype, the kind of mechanics – or to use the…

JUST THE FACTS: H x W x H: 47 x 22 x 27 mm WEIGHT: 216 g BATTERY LIFE: 2 years SHACKLE: 7 mm hardened boron carbide WARRANTY: 2 years BATTERY: CR2450 3 V disc PRICE: R2 000 mackiediy.co.za EVEN IN THIS E-EVERYTHING WORLD, it’s a valid question: does humankind really need a Bluetooth lock? For most of us, the answer is probably no, we don’t need one. Yet… as we drown in passwords, there’s something extraordinarily compelling about the prospect of never needing to remember a combination or, for that matter, a key. Master Lock offers two versions of its Bluetooth lock, similar apart from shackle length. The 4400D version on test here is the standard length, with 22 mm shackle clearance. In this guise, it’s suitable for lockers…

WINNING TIP BELT UP We were spending a lazy December at our family holiday home on the South Coast when we needed to replace the pool pump selector valve due to a severe leak. We had no tools other than a braai tongs and a bottle opener. So, we used a nifty belt trick to tighten and loosen the large-diameter plastic plumbing fittings. Simply take a sturdy leather belt, wrap it around the fitting with the buckle facing inwards, and use the remainder of the belt as a lever to loosen or tighten the fittings. FREDERIK STRYDOM PRETORIA BLOOM BUSTER Having spent many hours on the Internet looking for ways to remove the “bloom” on wine glasses caused by dishwashers, I could write my own website on failed attempts. This…

September 1985 The promise of more efficient steam-driven locomotives was irresistible to the nostalgic journalist. While we now know that coal lost to diesel and electricity in the battle for rail dominance, the 3 728 kW Chattanooga 611 is an undeniably mighty machine. Elswhere in the magazine the Detroit manufacturers take the fight to the importers with the Buick Riviera and its CRT touchscreen’s six main computer systems and 30 pages of interactive sub-menus. Buick stole the 2016 Detroit Motor Show with the Avista concept sports car, a spiritual descendent of the Riviera, which will also feature a touchscreen interface while borrowing a V6 engine from a Camaro. It was also a landmark year for smartphone development and video cameras. 1968 While not technically a smartphone because it couldn’t actually…

Late last year at the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, at least 30 people – including doctors, nurses and patients – died during an American firebombing. Investigators suspect that Taliban fighters may have established offensive positions in and around the hospital and Afghan National Army soldiers – American allies – were allowed to call in help from an American AC-130 gunship. The help they received would have been close air support, one of two types of combat air support the US military commonly uses. The other is deep air support. 1 Close Air Support (CAS) is used by combat units to call in air resources when friendly ground units are involved in direct fire with enemy ground units. Ground units usually radio the aircraft, providing co-ordinates or directing…

COMING SOON TO SA Sennheiser Orpheus The reigning most expensive pair of headphones in the world is many things, but it isn’t portable. Sennheiser have gone to great lengths to squeeze out every last drop of sound quality, concentrate it and pump the crispiness into the listener’s ear. All the audio fidelity preserving equipment like the ESS SABRE ES9010 processor and eight digital to analogue converters (DAC) – four per channel – is contained in an impossibly dense Carrara marble slab, a set-up that Sennheiser is calling the “vault of silence”. Yes, it’s the same marble from the same Tuscan city that supplied Michelangelo and the builders of the Pantheon. On the actual listening side of the device is a set of headphones with Cool Class A MOS-FET high voltage…

I WON’T LIE: watching the first few creaky movements from this bag of bolts at switch-on, I felt an unexpected surge of pride. After all those years, it was nice to know that I was still up to the challenge. I could, more to the point, call on impressive reserves of skill, patience and sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with a big box bearing the legend: “NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER 10 YEARS OF AGE.” Okay, in my case let’s say I went heavy on the bloody-mindedness; skill and patience, not so much. Three days of finger-numbing, eye-straining, back-breaking labour it took. Funnily enough, I don’t begrudge the time: concentrating on Meccanoid over the 2015 Festive Season meant I could avoid being exposed to TV coverage of the Slaughter of Kingsmead,…

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ONE OF THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF SPACE EXPLORATION A civilian – a schoolteacher, an emissary of the hope for tomorrow – was going to space. Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old mother of two, had been selected from 11 000 entrants to NASA’s Teacher in Space contest. She became a symbol of optimism and progress amid Cold War tension. And the rest of the shuttle crew was itself a representation of the strength of American society: Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael Smith and Commander Dick Scobee. Two women, one of them Jewish. An African-American. An Asian-American. They were the most diverse group of astronauts NASA ever assembled. On the morning of 28 January 1986, despite concerns within NASA and among…

It’s not that I don’t like Apple devices. Right now, I have an iPod plugged in to my car. Also, I am one of the few people I know who loves to use iTunes (mostly for its superior tagging). I just haven’t seen the value in the premium price for the devices. Is the iPhone 6S really R4 000 better than say, a Huawei P8? No. And it all starts with the iPhone. It’s the device that truly changed the game and turned smartphones into a market that supports an entire accessories industry. Each new iPhone announcement points the related industries into the direction of that year. The buzz surrounding the upcoming iPhone 7 possibly doing away with the 3,5 mm audio jack has triggered a global debate. But that’s…

For some reason, the digital clock in the gauge cluster reads 20 September, 2000. Factory glitch. This is appropriate, because the Lamborghini Aventador Superveloce is a time traveller of sorts, a car that evokes a bygone conception of an exotic: the definitive Lambo. Like its predecessors – the Countach, Diablo and Murciélago – the Aventador SV is an impossibly wide, ridiculously low-slung blade of a car, with doors that scissor skyward and a huge V12 behind the seats. That is the formula. On the cover of his album Mack Daddy, Sir Mix-A-Lot poses with a Diablo, its open door pointed to the heavens. That was in 1992, but it could’ve been 1982 or 2002, because the top-flight Lamborghini is always on the scene, so long as that scene demands a…