Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2020 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

HEAD DOWN Sir Lowry’s Pass, then look to the right when entering the Somerset West business district, and you’ll likely spot Pon Steyn Motors. There will be a host of 4×4s parked outside, but it’s inside the workshop where the magic happens. Established back in 1983, Pon Steyn Motors has become one of the premier businesses that restore and care for off-road vehicles – mainly Land Rovers and Mercedes-Benz trucks. It’s not just locally that these upgraded vehicles are enjoyed – many are shipped to happy customers in the US too. In this image, a 1976 Land Rover Series 109 2.25-litre petrol (named ‘Pegasus’) gets a new lease on life. Finished in mid grey, with limestone-coloured roof and rims, the entire restoration project took 16 weeks to complete. Ernicus Steyn…

CAR PARTS, fertiliser, roof tiles … a random assortment of items, but they do all share something in common: the lesser-known but remarkably prevalent mineral, zinc. You might vaguely recall having seen zinc on the ingredients list of some or other product that you use, but never gave it a second thought, or perhaps you’re fully aware of its versatility and multitude of uses. Either way, some of its applications may well still surprise you. Zinc, in various compounds, can be used in numerous ways. Its uses in the world can be traced throughout history, even as far back as 1000 BCE. These days, it plays an important role in many aspects of our day-to-day lives, from agriculture and building to wellness and X-ray machines, and much more in-between. Simon…

FIRST OFF, some good news, because we all need more of that in our lives. Traditional Roubo wooden try squares are quite easy to make, use very little wood, and will serve you well for many years. Custom wooden try squares have several advantages over modern metal- and wooden squares – they’re quick and easy to make, simple to true up, can be made in any size you wish, and will never rust. Our squares are Roubo reproductions. André Jacques Roubo was an extremely accomplished French cabinetmaker working in the mid 1700s in Paris, and was one of the very few craftsmen of his time to write and illustrate books on woodworking practice and tooling. His works have dramatically helped to enlighten woodworkers the world over about our craft, thanks…

NOW THAT air travel is more perilous than locking yourself in a tanning bed while inhaling a can of CFCs, you will need to get used to driving everywhere. But rarely does a car make us question our sanity and want to call off the whole drive… Just for a moment, though, the Jeep Compass TrailHawk was that vehicle. It happened somewhere outside Caledon on Route 62. Plodding along at 110 km/h, the Compass sat unerringly at 3 500 rpm. It has a nine-speed automatic gearbox, but so painstaking and poorly judged are its shifts that watching paint dry would be more indulgent. Its forays into ninth gear are exceptionally rare. It’s gutless on-road – it really feels ancient, mechanically speaking. There’s also little to suggest it’ll conquer a 4×4…

1. The overall cost to participate is at least 100-times cheaper than the real thing. 2. You get unlimited laps on all the best tracks in the world. 3. Racers have no excuse of inferior equipment; the playing field is level. 4. More than in real motor sport, it’s down to the skills of the driver to make a difference. 5. At least 80 per cent of the fundamentals of driving can be learned and refined in sim racing. WITHIN 10 YEARS WE COULD SEE THE FIRST SI RACER REACH THE EIGTS OF FORMULA ONE.…

In the article on planting a tree that ran in the March issue of PM earlier this year, there was a recommendation to ‘dig a dish-shaped hole that’s twice the diameter of the root ball’. Many years ago, when I was planting trees on my farm, a horticulturist friend told me that this method is incorrect. It causes the tree roots to grow around and around in the dish-shaped hole and will, in the future, not provide the tree with sufficient anchorage when it has grown in size, resulting in it potentially falling over during high winds. Rather, he suggested that you should dig a square hole, slightly larger than the tree root ball, ensuring the bottom of the hole is larger than the top, and deep enough for the…

WHO SAID electric vehicles can’t do hard labour? Meet Elektro Dumper, the biggest wheeled EV on the planet. eMining AG, a Swiss manufacturer of smart construction equipment, modified a standard Komatsu HD 605-7 truck, an off-highway vehicle used in quarries and mines, to operate entirely with electric energy. Plus, the thing recharges itself using rocks. At 9.1 m long, 4.2 m wide, and 4.2 m tall, the ‘eDumper’ isn’t an obvious candidate for electrification. But eMining AG didn’t just paint the stock dump truck green. The company also added a 600 kWh battery pack to the vehicle – enough to power six long-range Tesla Model S cars. Those lithium batteries tack on another 4 000 kg. Here’s how it works: The eDumper weighs approximately 41 tons and ascends a hill…

300 BCE The Babylonians invent the world’s earliest calculator, the abacus. 1622 William Oughtred invents the slide rule, a mechanical analogue computer designed to both multiply as well as divide numbers. 1849 Charles Babbage designs ‘Difference Engine #2’, which is a mechanical contraption that solves equations autonomously. He never sees the machine in action. 1936 Alan Turing publishes his seminal paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. 1949 George Reitwiesner, Clyde Hauff, Home McAllister and W Barkley Fritz use the newly invented ENIAC computer to compute π to 2 035 decimal places. 1967 The first handheld digital calculator, Texas Instruments’ CalTech, is invented. It costs $85. 1976 A computer cracks the Four Colour Theorem, making it the first computerassisted proof to be solved. 1984 The software MATLAB debuts. 1996 The first volunteer computing…

MY JOB IS TO MAKE SURENO ONE IS EVER TRULY COMFORTABLE. INSIDE GORE’S ENVIRONMENTAL TESTING CHAMBER, THE AMBIENT AIR temperature is a balmy 35°C. Huge lights on the seven-metre-high domed ceiling beat down. Near one of the treadmills, a tester named Walter is running in place. He’s an integral part of the research team, who’s there every day, helping scientists test new outdoor apparel. He’s got sensors on his body measuring sweat rate, skin temperature, and range of motion. There are also hoses coming out of his eye sockets. Walter, as you may have guessed, is not actually a human. He’s a $400_000 (±R6.6 million) mannequin, to be exact, with more than 100 sweating pores on his fibreglass and carbon-fibre body. And he’s just one of the high-tech tools in…

1 Wheeled trolleys help the athlete get the waveski into the water but pop off in the shallows to maintain the performance of the board. 2 The seat well and seat back of the waveski keep the rider in place and allow them to control the board with their hips and torso. A deeper seat makes the waveski more stable, but sacrifices manoeuvrability. 3 A lap belt secures the rider and allows them to use their paddle to propel and manoeuvre the waveski. 4 The athlete uses a kayakstyle paddle to get up to speed and catch waves. It’s leashed to the board in case the rider takes a spill and loses their grip. 5 Like the seat well, foot wells are reinforced with fibreglass and epoxy resin for durability.…

IT’S HARD TO imagine a time before the Corolla Sedan existed. Indeed, for whatever reason, the humble Corolla rose to the top and became the de facto choice for more than 45 million wanting family wheels. Does that secretly make it dull? Yes, it does, and the new one is no different. No matter whether you try it quick, slow, aggressively, relaxed, forwards, backwards, in its various drive modes … it remains exactly the same – every inch an unflappable Toyota Corolla. Even the specs are a study in correctness: 2.0-litre petrol, 125 kW/200 Nm, 6.5 L/100 km, 150 g/km, 0–100 km/h in 8.0 seconds, 200 km/h top speed, seating for five and 470 litres of luggage space. Could it be any more in order? ’Course not, it’s a Corolla.…

SOAPY SOLUTION Those readers with kids who love playing outside will know that it’s hard sometimes for them to keep the dirt from coming back inside with them. That’s when I usually have to send them back out to wash up at an outside tap. Undoubtedly, their reply is that there’s no soap outside, even though I know I left a bar near the tap just for this purpose. Inevitably the bar has vanished, or it’s been dropped in the mud and is unusable. I found a solution that ensures the soap stays clean, and in one place, as well as our house tidy and mom (aka ‘me’), sane. I simply stash a bar of soap inside an old stocking, and tie it to the tap. As has often been…

1 SEPTEMBER 1930 Plane with Rotating Wing Acts as Parachute Partially resembling the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, the cover of this issue was graced with a striking illustration of a flying boat, equipped with a single disc-shaped wing. The inventor believed it would require less power for lift than conventional planes. At the time of print, two scale models had shown ‘promising results’. Retractable wheels would allow for land- or water landings. 2 OCTOBER 1942 How a Ship is Launched Several dramatic black and white photographs showed ships being launched, and the accompanying story told of how much preparation and planning goes into setting a new vessel free. It explained that, though most ships are launched stern-first, if the channels are too narrow, new ships are constructed parallel to…

When you accelerate, the battery powers electric motors that allow the wheels to spin and create forward motion. When you brake, the motors become generators that harvest the kinetic, mechanical energy created by the vehicle’s movement and transform it into electrical energy. The electrical energy is sent back to the battery and stored as potential energy for the next time the vehicle accelerates. In vehicles with combustion engines, up to 70 per cent of the kinetic energy created by moving downhill is lost as heat. EVs do lose some kinetic energy from movement and heat loss, but Tesla says that regenerative braking is about 90 per cent efficient.…

Time travel already happens. Kind of. The Large Hadron Collider can send subatomic particles at 99.9999 per cent the speed of light (just below 299 792 km/second). At that speed, the particles experience time 6 900 times as slowly as the scientists working the thing. According to general relativity, by travelling at that speed, those particles are going into the future. The same principle applies to astronauts, just on a much smaller scale. In September 2015, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka returned to Earth after 879 days in orbit, where he travelled around at 27 400 km/h. ‘When Mr Padalka came back, he found the Earth to be 1/44th of a second into the future of where he expected it to be,’ says J Richard Gott, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton.…

1 HAVE SIGNAL DEVICES Search parties will look for anything from flares to the light on your sports watch – yes, a Coast Guard helicopter can spot that. The more devices, the better. McCrum recommends torches, mirrors, whistles, flares, retroreflective tape (which can go on a life jacket), and anything else that can increase your visibility. 2 VHF CHANNE L16 A radio on board can save your life, and so can channel 16. It’s solely used for boaters, and in the US, the Coast Guard monitors it. If you’re in need of assistance, this is where to summon aid. McCrum also recommends having an EPIRB – an emergency position-indicating radio beacon. Both are preferred over a cellphone with spotty reception. 3 STAY WITH THE VESSEL If you can’t see the…

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN fascinated with aeroplanes. I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, where there were barely any roads. The main road out of our area wasn’t tarred, and during the rainy season it would become flooded and muddy. When my sisters and I walked along the flooded road to school, I’d see aeroplanes flying above us. I’d be envious of whoever was in the plane because we were down on the ground, walking in mud. My family moved to New York City when I was about 12. At that time, I never imagined I would be flying planes. None of my friends or family members encouraged my obsession with planes, and still when I fly, I don’t see many pilots who look like me. When I was in my 20s,…

PIPAMOKA GOOD COFFEE, made quickly and simply, is a time-tested method to get through a hard day’s work, or freezing morning while out camping. In fact, the applications for good coffee are endless, so you could say our Pipamoka discovery has knock-on benefits for almost all aspects of life. This portable filter-coffee maker is made by Wacaco, inventors of the innovative Nanopresso. The secret to the travel-mug-sized Pipamoka is the twist-action mechanism, which creates vacuum pressure that draws pre-boiled hot water through the reusable coffee capsule. All it takes is two minutes of your time, and a little bit of effort as you twist the cuff, and you’re left with piping-hot and perfectly brewed coffee, directly in the insulated stainless-steel travel mug. No disposable pods or even paper filters are…

THE ULTIMATE BURGER Prep time: 30 minutes Cook time: 35 minutes Makes: 4 mega burgers (or 6 medium-sized) Difficulty: Easy What you’ll need: FOR THE CARAMELISED ONIONS • 3 tbsp vegetable oil• 3 red onions, sliced• 1 tbsp brown sugar• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar FOR THE PATTIES • 1 kg beef mince• ½ cup raw oats• 2 eggs, beaten• ½ onion, finely chopped• 2 cloves garlic, minced• 1 tbsp Worcester sauce• 1 tsp mixed dried herbs• ½ tsp paprika• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper• 6 slices cheese TO SERVE • 1 tbsp sriracha sauce• ½ cup mayonnaise• 6 hamburger rolls, cut in half and toasted• 2 baby gem lettuce, leaves picked• ½ cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained and sliced• 6 pickles, sliced• 2 red chillies, sliced STEPS TO SUCCESS 1 For the…

STEP 1: STOCK PREPARATION As we did with our previous build, begin by cutting all of your workpieces to size and four-squaring them. Don’t concern yourself yet with squaring up your end grain. Ensuring all faces and sides are the correct dimensions and are 90° to each other is all you need to do to start. STEP 2: TEMPLATES I suggest that you make templates for the ogee profiles out of hardboard, MDF, thin cardboard, plastic, acrylic or Perspex. Both Mattheus and I prefer to use clear, 2 mmthick acrylic as it’s simple to shape, keeps a clean profile, is mostly transparent and is hard-wearing against repeated use, however any stiff, easy-to-shape material will do the job. LARGE ROUBO TRY SQUARE PLAN VIEW LARGE ROUBO TRY SQUARE BLADE-END PROFILE LARGE…

’SIMULATORS ARE for racing drivers what treadmills are for runners. It’s not quite the real thing, but at least you’re running,’ is the tweet permanently pinned to the top of David Perel’s Twitter feed. Although it was posted back in 2018, way before the outbreak of the coronavirus, the statement’s true gravitas has only multiplied in light of world motor sport’s unprecedented lockdown this year. Since March and the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown, sim racing has enjoyed a massive increase in popularity and has become a necessary adjunct for sponsors seeking new outlets for exposure while real-world racing was off the table. South African David Perel is a three-time Blancpain GT Champion, two-time Spa 24-Hour winner and Ferrari GT racing driver for the Italian-based Rinaldi and Kessel Racing teams.…