Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2014 i Popular Mechanics

Before he made the axe on page 98, Peter Buchanan-Smith, founder of Best Made Company, made a pipe (left): “I was probably 10, and at that age you make a lot of pretend swords and guns. But I made a pipe that I still have on the mantel in my apartment in New York. It was the first thing I ever made that I could use. It was something that, even at the tender age of 10, I actually smoked out of. There was something that was so adult in the fact that I’d made it. I rummaged through my father’s workshop, found a dowel that I hollowed out for the stem. Then I cut the top off an old broomstick and hollowed that out as the bowl and connected…

FEAR AND FEARMONGERING THE BOY WHO DREW MONSTERS, by Keith Donohue Three years after Jack Peter Keenan, the 10-year-old referenced in the title of Keith Donohue’s engrossing new novel, almost drowns off the coast of Maine, he develops a near-crippling fear of leaving his house. Narratively speaking, this is a risky wager. Donohue has essentially put his characters— and thus his readers—under house arrest, and yet the bet pays off again and again. The novel is a pressure cooker, an airtight room with limited oxygen, and an astute study of the mysterious demons that loss breeds. There also may be real demons in The Boy Who Drew Monsters, and, to the author’s credit, that possibility is altogether more menacing than any concrete knowledge would be. Donohue suspends the characters—especially Jack…

GRILL A TURKEY CUT ANYTHING CORDLESS SAWS ROAD ASSISTANCE THE CHALLENGE: COOK THANKSGIVING DINNER ON THE GRILL EVEN IF YOU’RE IN CHARGE, a substantial part of cooking Thanksgiv-ing dinner is waiting for the turkey to happen. Sitting in the din-ing room, peering through that little oven window at it like it’s some kind of zoo animal. There is a better way. Cook your feast on the grill and you control the elements. You add the smoke and the flavors. You change the temperature. You’re actually cooking your food, the same way you’re actually driving a car with a manual transmission. Ben Ford, chef at Ford’s Filling Station in Los Angeles, is a guy who believes in this kind of elemental sorcery. He’ll roast anything. His backyard looks like it was…

SMART SKIS EVEN THE ATHLETES WHO MEDALED at Sochi didn’t have these: the new Madshus eMpower Redline Carbon Classics ($760), cross-country skis equipped with a radio-frequency identification tag. If you’re one of the more than 3 million Nordic skiers in the United States, you’ll love them. If you’re not, they may lure you in. What it is and why: The RFID tags collect data during every major step in the manufacturing process: pressing and molding, flexibility testing, and camber, or arch, profiling. Madshus then uses this information to pair skis nearly identical in key characteristics like flex profile and camber. Eliminating even microscopic inconsistencies leads to better performance on the trail. Precision in flexibility and camber also ensure you get the right pair of skis for your body type. Cross-country…

A LEAKY FURNACE, GREASE STAINS, AND A PROBLEMATIC PAINT JOB I bought a top-quality roller for a paint job, but it looks lousy because fibers from the roller are trapped in the paint. What’s with that? Even a good roller can shed fibers into your paint and make your wall look mangy. Try running some masking tape over the roller to remove any loose fibers, or rinse and dry your tools thoroughly before painting. And, of course, never use a low-quality paint roller. The situation can only get worse from here. The kid knocked a bucket of fried chicken onto the carpet. Nothing we’ve tried can take the stain out. Suggestions? Grease is tough stuff. Getting it out requires an alkaline cleaner, a solvent, or both. Start with an alkaline…

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 greatunknowns@popularmechanics.com. Questions will be selected based on quality or at our whim. TRAIN TRACKS, RECYCLING, AND ARMED INSURGENTS Are trains designed such that if a person were about to get run over, he could lie flat between the tracks and avoid death as the train passed over him? In much the same way that every chandelier is deliberately engineered to support the weight of an adult male swinging from it by one hand while firing an automatic weapon with the other. Which is to say: only in the movies. While you could get away with the lie-flat-betweenthe-tracks…

UP AHEAD: 44 Why F1 engineers might be obsessive-compulsive. 46 In which we slather the Ford Flex with praise. 48 America’s luxury fleet keeps growing. What gives? INFINITI Q50 EAU ROUGE How to Turn a Sedan Into a Supercar Infiniti needs direction. The Q50 Eau Rouge is the solution. Carmakers use England’s Millbrook Proving Ground for development work, but it’s an uncommon place for a debut test drive. Millbrook, with its bumps, off-camber corners, and looming guardrails, is designed to torment cars rather than show them off. So Infiniti must have had a lot of confidence in its first proto-type of the Q50 Eau Rouge when the company invited me to the track for testing. The Eau Rouge is a monstrously power-ful mutation of the production Q50 sedan. Its general…

Building Instructions • Staining Like a Pro • How to Cut a 4 x 4 There’s no better way to give thanks than to gather family and friends around an enormous table to share a feast. And if you’re grilling your entire Thanksgiving dinner the way we recommend on page 51, you’ll need somewhere to put all that food. A farmhouse table would be the perfect spot. You could make one out of construction lumber and ordinary hardware in a couple of days. We’re not talking precision woodworking here. If you can handle a circular saw and a chisel, you can do this. Farmers used to build these tables themselves, not furniture makers or carpenters, so it’s okay if it turns out a bit rustic. That’s half the fun. The…

A MIND-CONTROLLED QUADCOPTER Bin He, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, made news this year when his grad student, wearing a high-tech hairnet with 64 electrodes, controlled a drone with his brain waves. Aside from being a great party trick, these drones would be a major step toward helping victims of stroke, spinal-cord injury, or neurodegenerative disease. EXPECTED ARRIVAL: Less than 10 years INSTANT DISEASE SCREENING FROM A SINGLE DROP OF BLOOD • Anita Goel, a Harvard-trained nanobiophysicist, has designed a handheld diagnostic lab the size of a smartphone. The Gene-RADAR analyzes a single drop of blood or saliva for DNA irregularities that indicate the presence of cancer, deadly viruses, and other diseases. HIV researchers in Rwanda are currently field-testing the first devices. EXPECTED ARRIVAL: Five years SELF-ASSEMBLING…