Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

MONDAY 08/01 Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist who is one of the world’s leaders in his field. His principal areas of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity; Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS for short), Hawking is confined to a wheelchair and is unable to speak without the aid of a computer voice synthesiser. However, despite his challenges, he has utilised his intelligence, knowledge and abilities to make remarkable contributions to the field of cosmology. The author of, among others, A Brief History of Time was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2015 movie The Theory Of Everything. MONDAY 15/01 In 1861, the Otis safety elevator was patented by American inventor Elisha G…

AYANDA THABETHE is an actress, model, presenter and businesswoman. Her favourite gadgets are her iPhone 6s and her Snug portable charger. iPhone 6s Q What are some of the things that you do on your iPhone 6s that help you in your career? A I use Internet banking a lot and all my scheduling is done on my phone. It literally tells me where to be when. I believe in writing things down, so the Notes section helps me document all my ideas and things to do. How long have you had your iPhone 6s for? Two years, I think. Would you say that this is a musthave gadget for someone in your line of work? Yes, definitely. It’s easy to use and has everything you need to make life…

A Beats Studio3 $350 Looks like what Dr Dre would’ve worn while producing Straight Outta Compton (the 1988 record, not the movie), except with Bluetooth and noise cancellation that adapts as you go from the coffee shop to the sidewalk. We’ve dismissed previous Beats products as marketing compensating for a bad soundquality- per-rand ratio. The Studio3 changed our minds. The only gripe: if the battery’s dead, the wired connection doesn’t work at all. B Mighty music player $86 This year, Apple stopped making the iPod Shuffle and Nano. For those who miss using a dedicated music device, there’s the Mighty, which holds more than 1 000 songs from Spotify. Good news for joggers, because these big phones are annoying to carry in an armband. C Master & Dynamic MA770 speaker…

I LOVE ALL vanilla ice cream. After my own, I’d get a pint of Häagen-Dazs, and then the Dairy Queen vanilla cone I grew up with. Vanilla is a big, round flavour that makes you feel good. It’s rich and emotional. As an ice-cream maker I’m always trying to find the next vanilla, another flavour with feeling, but nothing quite matches it. Everyone thinks it’s plain; it’s not. Vanilla is so complex, like a wine, whisky, or chocolate – definitely chocolate – and it reflects where it’s from. Each vanilla has its own personality. Madagascar beans are smooth and creamy. Beans from Indonesia have smoke and caramel flavours. When I first opened the Ndali Ugandan beans I use now, they smelled like jasmine, honey, leather and doughnuts. A lot of…

HAND-CRANK MIXERS connect you to the task, says Brian Smith, owner and instructor at a Creamery. “That’s what we use in our icecream- making classes. I love the community aspect of making it the old-fashioned way, taking turns churning.” To make ice cream, layer a cup of rock salt and ice between the coffee can and the paint can. Pour the cream into the coffee can and crank for about 10 minutes or until the cream thickens to soft-serve consistency. MATERIALS □ two 20 mm x 50 mm x 600 mm oak boards□ one 6 mm x 50 mm x 300 mm oak board□ one 12,5 mm oak dowel□ one unused 5-litre paint can, handle removed□ four 6-20 x 30 mm round-head bolts and nuts□ two 6 mm x 40…

There was a steady drizzle, even heavy rain in some parts, on the morning my dad died. Racing to be by his hospital bedside as he slowly acquiesced to the great parking lot in the sky took a large helping of my talent behind the wheel. Bleep-bleep, bleep-bleep: “Vehicle is nearing top speed.” I stare down in disbelief. Surely the 132 kW and 240 N.m turbo-petrol 1,5 Ecoboost motor can propel the Ruby Red Kuga’s 2 100 kg to the claimed terminal velocity of 200 km/h? The warning kicked in at a mere 20 km/h over the national limit. Foot flat, time ticking away and the replacement long-termer refused to push the needle above 140. I later discover that the MyKey feature was activated on this car, which allows the…

WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND? • popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za WINNING LETTER WE CAN DO THIS. OURSELVES. WE HAVE TO. We live in Botswana, an extremely dry place mostly, and until recently droughtstricken, so I follow all matters relating to water very carefully. We also use grey water and some roof run-offs, so Daniel Louw’s letter in your October issue was of great interest. Daniel raises good points. One of the most important is that it’s better to use a city’s recycling system than use a household one. Two issues thus arise: (a) how good is any given city’s use of runoff? and (b) since shower/bath, kitchen sink and dish-washing grey water all go into the same drains as toilet water, it is not recycled in many places. Since these are the main sources…

I’D TRIED TO cut my own hair a few times before, both to save cash and to learn a useful skill. The results were always bad enough that the barber I would finally visit usually asked, unprompted, “Did you do this yourself?” This time, instead of relying on YouTube, I got help from Mike Martinez, a stylist and instructor. SIDES AND BACK I moistened my hair with a spray bottle, then dragged the corner of the comb from my right eyebrow to my crown to create a lengthwise part. After clipping the hair above the part out of the way, you attack your hair in quadrants [Fig. A]. Sides first, then back, then top. For a longer cut, you use your fingers to hold the hair off your head, and…

Step 1 Pass the end of the rope around the item to be tied. Step 2 Pass the end of the rope under the main length, then bring it behind itself. This gives you a loop with the main length running through it. Step 3 Bring the end in front of the main rope, then come forward through the loop. These two steps should form a figure eight – in fact, what you’ve done so far is called a figure-eight knot. Step 4 Pull the figure eight tight. Then, holding it in one hand, use the other to pull on the main length of rope, tightening the wrap around your parcel. Step 5 Add the securing knot, called a half-hitch. Make a loop in the main length of rope, going…

GOOGLE ASSISTANT The OG universal artificial intelligence is, essentially, a talking version of the knowledge service. Google is great at serving up factoids, doing calculations and context awareness. It’s bizarrely less great at remembering personal information. I need to teach it who my wife is on every new device. SIRI Apple has quietly made Siri amazing. In iOS 11 Siri can sync your personal information across your Apple devices and it can dynamically decide which device is better placed to respond to you. There are also improvements in context awareness and the ability to type your interaction. That does, however cause some voice feedback confusion. BIXBY Samsung’s much-maligned service is the most powerful voice interface of the lot. You can tell Bixby to do almost anything on your device that…

The Dyson supersonic hairdryer is finally in South Africa. The hairdryer that’s known for never getting hot was said to have been tested on 1 625 km of real human hair – 1 625 km of Caucasian and Asian hair, that is. How would it fare when put to the test on my Afro-textured hair? Firstly, the Dyson is a stunning-looking product. As well as being aesthetically pleasing it is easy to handle, with three magnetic attachments and four heat settings, three airflow settings as well as a cold shot. The Dyson uses a fast but focused airflow and intelligently controls the temperature to help protect hair from extreme heat damage. A glass bead thermistor measures the temperature 20 times a second and transmits this data to a microprocessor, which…

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. HTC U11 All the stuff you expect from a flagship phone, like a nice display, build quality, and this goodlooking 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. iPhone X The most beautiful iPhone ever. It looks like you…

Phumzile Tshelane on… …uranium enrichment “Enrichment is a red herring. We’re looking for beneficiating of uranium and some of the capability we have. It’s a matter of how much money we want to spend to get the uranium beneficiated. We are continuously talking to government and advising government on how to do this. Enrichment is not something we want to do tomorrow. The government may decide we need to do it in 10 years, but whatever they decide, we will do it because we are an implementing agent of the government.” …government funding “Government gives us some money, about half a billion rand each year to do what we’re doing here, but then we go out and generate R1,5 billion from our activities here. Our revenue here is over R2…

Ben Jourdan is an American economist who works for a non-profit in Cape Town. Ben’s a regular at WMC, mostly but not entirely because he has been restoring a battered 1981 Suzuki GS450 for the past six months. “It sounds a bit cheesy, but this place has a good attitude. I’ve never experienced the kind of community spirit that I feel here. It doesn’t matter whether you arrive with a shiny new bike or an old wreck… you get treated the same.” Ben’s sentiments are echoed by Nigel and Ann Bailey, a “corporate freelance” couple who have attended a couple of bike maintenance classes at the WMC and have every intention of tackling more. Says Nigel: “All questions, no matter how basic, are answered with competence and respect, and the…

The ice-cream sandwich always feels impossibly light when you first draw one from the box at the bottom of the filling-station freezer. You weigh it in your fingertips on the way to the cashier. It barely registers. There is nothing meaty or substantial about its component parts; the cheapo ice cream blown light with air and the reliably damp wafer have no appeal on their own. But stack the former between the latter, create a single nest deck and freeze, then wrap in a mysteriously opaque freezer paper, one that unpeels from the resultant confection like the untroublesome membrane of a summer’s day, and you have the commercial-grade ice-cream sandwich, the inarguable king of small, pleasant treats. The ice-cream sandwich works. While you may have brand preferences, that basic product…

A water stone is an abrasive block that uses water as the cutting lubricant. Its stone particles wear away as you sharpen, exposing fresh, fast-cutting surfaces. To sharpen a stainless-steel Westernstyle kitchen knife, soak the stone for a few minutes and place it on a non-slip utility mat (a cheap accessory available online). As you work, splash some water on the stone or use a small spray bottle to keep it lubricated. And let the “mud”, which consists of stone particles and water, build up. It helps the stone work better. Hold the knife at an angle (the height of two R5 coins from the spine of the blade) so the bevel makes complete contact with the stone’s face, and draw the knife straight back and forth along the length…

I can divide my life into two distinct segments: the time before I owned a welder, and every day since. When I bought my first pickup, a 20-year-old Toyota with a rusty frame, my welder made it roadworthy. When I started my blacksmith business out of my grandparents’ garage, I used my welder to build a forge out of scrap metal. And when a neighbour needs a railing fixed, it’s my welder he wants me to use to fix it – usually for free. My great-grandfather was the first welder in my family. He started out running a welding shop, and later, during World War II, a school named Wicks Welding in Queens, New York. In his day welding required a complicated set-up of machines and gas tanks that looked…

Mark Melonas makes custom furniture and sinks, often out of concrete. MATERIALS • craft-store felt • thread • wax paper • pre-packaged epoxy • 200-grit sandpaper • acrylic tile sealer • paste wax • 300 x 300 mm piece of melamine or 6-mm plastic • cardboard scraps • Smooth-on Mold Star 16 fast silicone • Pre-packaged 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 25-mm strip of felt to that length. This will form the edge of your dish. 2 Sew the…

1964 Radioactive isotopes are a hot topic in this issue. In the ’50s, scientists had discovered a low-cost way to control radiation. Called miniature laboratories, cheap plywood boxes were used to control and work with low-energy radioactive isotopes. Using gloves coated in a resinbase paint, the scientists could handle the isotopes and provide complete contamination control. 2007 In this issue, we visit South Africa’s very own nuclear research centre, Pelindaba. Ten years ago, we paid the centre a visit and found out how they were using radioactive isotopes in medical advancements. The plant produces radiopharmaceuticals, radio chemicals and radio technology products. 1979 Another radioactive emergency team, operating in New York, were the industrial sea divers who routinely dived into nuclear reactor pools. The team worked at depths approaching 300 metres, facing cold,…

IN AUGUST 2013, disappointed by the highspeed- rail system being built through the centre of California, Elon Musk released a white paper called Hyperloop Alpha, describing a system of pod-cars shooting through vacuum tubes at nearly 1 300 km/h. The paper ended with a plea for “the community” to work on an “open source transportation concept” – he was too busy, he said, to work on it himself. Here are the key questions that have arisen since. Has anyone taken up Musk’s challenge to develop hyperloop technologies? Yes – initially, two main companies, one called Hyperloop Technologies and another called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). The former, now called Hyperloop One (H1), boasts a flashy venture-capitalist co-founder and more than R2 billion in funding. The latter has taken “open source” to…

SPEAKING OF SECURE COMPUTING, Apple also equipped the iPhone X with new Face ID tech in the shape of a new camera array. The infrared dot projector flashes a matrix of contour-defining markers on your face and the infrared camera decodes it and checks it against the data it has in memory. If there’s a slight alteration to the face, the file gets amended. This process is all done electively by the neural engine and is stored in the secure hardware enclave. The A11 Bionic neural processing extends to photography functions of the cameras as well. On the main camera it does some level of scene recognition and plays a big role in the image signal processing; iOS 11 has dramatically improved the iPhone’s high dynamic range functions, for instance.…

The future will be hand-drawn The newest thing in gaming is actually really old. IF YOU HAVEN’T played Cuphead yet, here’s what will happen the first time you do: while battling a malevolent potato the size of a minivan, you will become so distracted by the extraordinary detail of the watercolour pastoralia behind it – the subtle rotation of a tyre swing in the wind, the word Acme stencilled on a bag of fertiliser – that your avatar, a personified latte mug with a ridiculous barbershopstriped straw sticking out of it, will get hit in the face by one of the realistically textured dirt balls the potato spews continuously and the words YOU DIED! will flash across the screen like a title card in a Charlie Chaplin film. This will…

“Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.”– attributed to Henry Ford There’s something about the idea of cars taking flight that has captured our imaginations. Yet we’re still stuck with cars that are as flightless as the dodo, though perhaps not quite as extinct – yet. Clearly, the obstacles to flying cars, both practical and administrative, seem intractable. So what makes the Chinese so interested in flying cars? And not just any Chinese, either: to be specific, the company whose full name is Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. This is the company that not only makes cars under its own name, but also happens to own Volvo, Proton and Lotus. Those brands number among the world’s foremost in car innovation. Geely…

Mo-99 is a product of uranium-235 neutron bombardment. The uranium fuel is produced through the Helikon vortex separation process, which goes as follows: “A mixture of uranium hexafluoride gas and hydrogen is injected tangentially into a tube at one end through nozzles or holes, at velocities close to the speed of sound. The tube tapers to a small exit aperture at one or both ends. This tangential injection of gas results in a spiral or vortex motion within the tube, and two gas streams are withdrawn at opposite ends of the vortex tube; centrifugal force providing the isotopic separation. The spiral swirling flow decays downstream of the feed inlet due to friction at the tube wall. Consequently, the inside diameter of the tube is typically tapered to reduce decay in…

POPULAR MECHANICS: How did it all begin? BEN COHEN: So, what can I tell you? The story goes, ice cream started with Marco Polo. He had runners who would bring ice from.. cold places, I guess, and they’d flavour it. PM: Did you have this interest in ice cream before Ben & Jerry’s? BC: No, not really. We never planned on, you know, having a big ice-cream business. It was an era of homemade ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream in Massachusetts. We just wanted a shop like that. PM: What the company grew to – was it just as surprising to you guys? BC: Well, we were just trying to survive. We opened in Burlington, Vermont. It gets cold there. In the winter people stopped buying ice cream. We…

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s latest report, revenue from music streaming in South Africa over the past year has increased by more than 300 per cent. Apple Music, Google Play and Deezer are SA’s largest streaming services and, with more people owning smartphones and Internet access becoming easier, streaming could mean the end of traditional CD sales the world over. I haven’t yet crossed over to streaming. I am unusual among millennials, I suppose, in being the kind of person that still haunts the CD aisles. But, if ever I were to join the 21st century, I would have quite a few excellent options. APPLE MUSIC is the go-to streaming service for iPhone users. It integrates the user’s music library into the app and works on…

Sky, Ocean, River, Air, representing the Earth’s water cycle, is the name for a new bus. Well, shortened to just the acronym “Sora”. Toyota plans to launch sales of a commercial model based on the concept vehicle in 2018. Notably, the company expects to introduce more than 100 Sora, mainly within the Tokyo metropolitan area, ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Toyota aims to create a bus that works for the world and for people, is environmentally friendly, and can contribute to communities beyond its role as a mobility service. The Toyota Fuel Cell System (TFCS), which was developed for the Mirai has been adopted to deliver superior environmental performance with no CO2 emissions or Substances of Concern (SoC) emitted when in operation. The Sora’s high-capacity external…

I didn’t see them coming. Exploring the hinterland to the strains of a retro Rod Stewart song (don’t judge me), the meandering dirt road promising all manner of adventures, I rounded a bend to see two tortoises behaving in a very reckless manner. In short, they were crossing the road from opposite directions, oblivious to the approach of a 3 100 kg Isuzu bakkie hurtling towards them at 70 km/h. Tortoises are a bit like old-school journalists in pursuit of a free drink; they simply put their heads down and go for it, blissfully dismissive of the potential consequences. In this instance, I was able to avoid them with a measured but vigorous twist of the steering wheel, at which point I developed a new respect for the off-road handling…

Best advice to give to someone who wants to start doing car restoration as a hobby: Don’t. Classic car enthusiast Paul Koski of Johannesburg is blunt: “It’s a long, unrewarding process. It takes an incredible amount of hours. You can never recover the hours you put in, unless the car is extremely rare.” Few are more intimately acquainted with the principle of the cost-benefit analysis than chartered accountants and Koski is one of that breed. Yet at the same time, Koski is one of the happy breed of people who spend their spare hours up to their elbows in grease for the sheer pleasure of being able to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of technology from a bygone era. He owns several classics. He has probably spent more time…

Best OVER ALL McLaren F1 Only 72 McLaren F1 road cars were built. Each came with a hardcover manual with immaculate pen-and-ink drawings that could serve to educate generations of technical artists on clarity and wit (example: a humanised crash dummy is used to show seating, exit, and entering positions). DISLIKES: None, but we wish McLaren would license the printing of these just so the rest of us who will never own an F1 can enjoy its artistry. Bosch HDH183 and DDH183 drills If every manufacturer took its owner’s manuals as seriously as Bosch, the mechanical world would be a better place. Its illustrations are magazine-worthy, and its instructions on drilling, driving, and hammer operation are clear. DISLIKES: None. Browning A5 semi-automatic shotgun Honouring the long history of this gun,…

HOW TO PLAY • Stand 1,2 metres from the board and bounce a ball into the holes. • The biggest holes are worth 1 point. Medium holes, 3. Small holes, 5. • Alternate turns with an opponent until one of you reaches 21. GIVE Start a child you know on a lifetime of projects with a gift subscription to Popular Mechanics. Go to www.magsathome.co.za DIFFICULTY MATERIALS LIST 4 25-mm round-head wood screws 1 6 mm lauan or similar plywood 6 6 mm x 75 mm x 600 mm poplar or similar boards 1 piece of 50 x 100 mm scrap, at least 750 mm long 6 balls (40 mm) tennis, practice golf, or nerf-gun balls) TOOLS • table saw and 80-tpi blade • mitre saw • drill • 50-, 62,5-…

WINNING TIP HOLD IT! I recently purchased a Bluetooth OBD II interface tool. As required, you would need at least a 7-inch tablet to display Torque Pro or Dash Command. In order to use the tablet properly, I purchased a windscreen tablet holder. On the first set-up for use, the weight of the tablet lowered the holder with the slightest acceleration and its jaws kept on muting the tablet volume. Plus, it looked horrible and clearly out of place on a Toyota 86 dashboard area. It also ruins the driver’s visibility. Since I loved my new gizmo so much, but also love my car and its sweet interior, I experimented with heavyduty sticky Velcro tape. I cut out four discs of Velcro. I then stuck the male side on the…