Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2015 - August 2015 i Popular Mechanics

Welp, that was fast. It’s been a year since I got here. This year was a big deal for me, of course. But for Popular Mechanics? My first year was its 113th. I’m just the latest lucky sonofagun to be entrusted with a piece of its existence. We’ve done our best with this issue to continue its long tradition of explaining the secrets of the universe, and in fact (as you may have noticed on the cover) we’re loosely calling this the “Secrets of the Universe Revealed” issue. Holograms (page 62), electricity (page 86), pirates’ treasure (page 56), the science behind everyday products (page 88)—these are topics that could have been covered in almost any era, which is kind of cool. Still, I’ve been thinking about what it means to…

Letters to the editor can be emailed to editor@popularmechanics.com. Include your full name and address. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. CUSTOMER SERVICE/SUBSCRIPTIONS online: service.popularmechanics.com, email: popcustserv@cdsfulfillment.com, mail: Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593, subscribe: subscribe.popularmechanics.com. FROM A FELLOW FAN OF THUNDERSNOW You’ve given me yet another reason to renew my subscription. The Jim Cantore article (“The Storm Chaser,” May) was outstanding. I thought I was the only person who was transfixed by thundersnow. Now, I’m sure that someone will complain about Jim’s language and about the torn-up parking ticket, but to me, both of those elements helped to make one fascinating story. Readers met the real Jim Cantore, the guy we’ve been watching ever since he had hair. In addition to the meteorologist, we got…

The first time I swung a tennis racket, the ball got stuck in the V of the handle, and I got humiliated. More recently I lined up a sure backhand winner only to send it out of the court and into the windshield of a passing car. I like tennis, but clearly finesse eludes me. So I was eager to try Sony’s new Smart Tennis Sensor ($200), a device the size and weight of a large acorn that snaps into the bottom of your racket and records data as you hit, then sends everything to a smartphone app for analysis—and a chance to improve. A COACH IN YOUR RACKET To set it up, you remove the racket’s end cap (currently Head, Prince, Wilson, and Yonex make compatible rackets), install a…

BEST OVERALL A mower may not snort and turn surly, but other than that it’s not so diffierent from the work animals our forefathers toiled behind in the fields. Depending on its temperament, a mower can make cutting grass easier or harder, and you don’t really know which you’re getting until you take your preferred model to some grass and let it show of. This is why we tested our self-propelled walk mowers on acres of pristine lawns belonging to the charleston, South carolina, parks department. We mowed coolweather northern grasses and tough Southern species. We mulched fallen leaves and weighed all the clippings from a 450-square-foot rectangle. We let five mowers out into their natural habitat to see what they could do. The mowers did not disappoint. Honda HRX217VYa…

WHEN THE FREEDOM High School Auto Club in Freedom, Wisconsin, finally installed new engines in the 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and a 1981 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 we’ve been watching them restore, Ryan Lucier, a 17-year-old junior, worked with three other students to mount a fuel line to the Camaro’s underside (see instructions, right). Lucier, now in his third automotive class, took his first class last semester and realized he loved it within the first week. He immediately dropped his art elective and added another auto-shop course to his schedule. Next year he plans to sign up for at least one more. “It gives me something to look forward to in the day,” he says. There are far worse things to say about high school. THE ESSENTIAL SUMMER BUG REMOVER My…

Q We have a nice cedar picnic table and bench set, but the tabletop is weathered and there are food and beer stains. The benches also need to be refinished. Can you give us some tips? ART L., EDEN, NEW YORK A This is pretty straightforward. Begin with an application of an exterior wood cleaner that contains oxalic acid, such as Flood Wood Cleaner. Scrub the tabletop and benches with a coarse synthetic brush, being careful not to score the surfaces. You can use a putty knife or a painter’s 5-in-1 tool (a hookshaped putty knife) to remove any junk that’s built up between boards. Now rinse everything and let it all dry. Next, sand offsplinters and flatten dents with 120-grit sandpaper. Brush offany dust and gently wipe the surface with…

CHIN, A FRIEND OF A FRIEND of my father’s, with a nickname whose origin was obvious when you looked at him, sold cars in Florida. His stories of auction deals had made their way to Pittsburgh, where they’d inspired in me dreams of driving something other than an inherited ’83 Camry. And so, with my paperboy savings fully liquidated, my dad and I flew to Orlando and found ourselves walking aisles of cars in what looked to be a barnyard parking lot. We saw the crowd first. The car was running, hood up, and when we walked over Chin plucked the throttle on the carburetor. The car roared and shook. When the attendant drove it into the barn a few minutes later, chirping the tires as he failed to hold…

ILEARNED ABOUT the smoke point of oil by destroying a perfectly good piece of black bass. I was just out of cooking school, and I couldn’t get the skin to stop sticking to the pan. The last thing I thought I should do was crank up the heat, but that was the answer: The oil needed to get close to its smoke point, the moment just before it lights on fire. Approaching this magical smoke point (and staying there) would be simple if all cooking fats were the same, but of course they aren’t. Less refined, saturated fats like butter, lard, and coconut oil are packed with enzymes, minerals, and other compounds that create smoke at low temperatures. More refined, unsaturated fats like canola oil begin to smoke at a…

1 How does expanding foam work? Pulling the trigger on a can of spray foam is about as close as most of us are ever going to get to releasing a genie. A twelve-ounce can produces thick layers of solid foam, the equivalent of about twenty tubes of caulk. How is this possible? Inside the can is a chemical reaction on the brink: Two long-chain chemicals called polyols and polymeric isocyanates have already started reacting, creating a precursor to polyurethane. When you pull the trigger, another chemical, called a hydrocarbon blowing agent, shoots the precursor out of the can, creating bubbles that turn the polyurethane into a foam. Water vapor from the air adds the final piece, curing the foam into a solid. “We do almost all of the chemistry,…

01 STROMER S ELECTRIC BIKE The ST2 is the moped of the twenty-first century, except it can go almost 30 miles per hour, has a range of more than 90 miles, and won’t embarrass you when a friend sees you riding it. The digital display lets you regulate motor output and shows your speed and battery life, and you can use the app on your phone to track the bike or lock the wheels if you think it’s been stolen. $6,990 02 DYSON CINETIC BIG BALL VACUUM Traditional cyclonic vacuums use centrifugal force to expel most dirt particles into a collection bin. Everything else is trapped in a filter. For the new Cinetic Big Ball, however, Dyson added a series of smaller, more powerful cyclones that remove all of the…

HOW TO SPY ON A MAKO The Shark Eye system allows scientists to record more and better footage than ever before. Mako sharks don’t make things easy on scientists. They’re pelagic, for one thing, which means they live in the open sea. And they’re fast. Faster than any other shark, believed to hit burst speeds of sixty miles per hour. Those factors have kept the mako largely unstudied, so much so that no one had seen live footage of a mako in its natural habitat. Paul Matusheski changed that. Matusheski is the executive producer of Monster Mako: Lightning of the Deep, a show that premieres as part of Discovery Channel’s cult phenomenon, Shark Week (starting July 5). To capture footage of the makos, he knew he needed a better version…

POPULAR MECHANICS: No one paid attention to the Wright brothers when they first started working on their airplane. Why do you think that was? DAVID MCCULLOUGH: The fact that they were so ignored is astonishing. Ignored by the press, by serious scientific magazines, by the federal government, and by the newspapers right in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Nobody even bothered to go out and take a look. They did it all themselves. They didn’t have any foundation backing them. They didn’t have the facilities of some institution or corporation. They didn’t have political contacts, or an angel funding their experiments. They were paying for it out of their own relatively meager earnings from a bicycle shop, and giving up a hell of a lot in life in order to…

If We May... EMBRACE THE ECCENTRIC LAWN PATTERN Growing up, mowing the lawn was my job. Every weekend I trailed a brightred Snapper mower around our quarter-acre yard. The work didn’t take long—maybe an hour, tops—but I hated every minute, until I figured out a way to make things fun: patterns. At the time I still hadn’t realized how dull regular-season baseball is. I watched a lot of it, and I saw no reason that our backyard couldn’t look as good as Fenway or Camden Yards. I started out easy. One week of vertical lines, followed by a week of horizontal. No one complained, or really noticed, and, if nothing else, at least I was doing something good for the grass, since variety meant I wasn’t running the wheels over…

STEP ONE Find the leak. If a spot of gas appears on the driveway, you’ve got a fuel-line leak. To find it, jack up the vehicle and scan the steel fuel line that runs from your gas tank to the engine for holes. There will be multiple sections: for example, between the gas tank and the fuel filter, and between the filter and the pump. Note, however, that fuelline damage is usually caused by rust, so it is often found near the fittings that attach the line to the tank or the fuel filter. Use the location of the gas spot on the pavement to help you locate the damage. STEP TWO Remove the line. Detach the damaged section by unlatching the clasps that hold the line to the underside…

THE PREREQUISITE: Have Something to Say TRUTH IS, there are already entirely too many podcasts. For every engrossing show on iTunes there are another sixty bordering on torturous. But don’t let that discourage you. Your podcast will be different. That’s because you understand one very basic principle: You have to be interesting. And to do that, you have to know what you want to talk about, why you want to talk about it, and how you want to talk about it. This is important for more than just style— it also determines how you record. A show built around banter between cohosts puts a burden on studio equipment. A scripted show with one host requires tight editing, emphasizing software. We cover it all here. 1 Assembling Your Studio MICROPHONES All…

HORSEPOWER: 60+ PRICE: $16,349 With a modest 700-cubic-centimeter inline-twin riding behind the seats, the Wildcat isn't one of those rides you see on YouTube ripping wheelies across California's Glamis sand dunes. It's more like the Subaru BRZ of side-by-sides, a machine that prioritizes balance over outright power. The Wildcat weighs only about a thousand pounds, and it has more than a foot of suspension travel front and rear—about the same as that of the desert-conquering Ford Raptor-which means it flits lithely across terrain that ought to make you feel like a carton of eggs that was dropped on the supermarket floor. The Arctic Cat should have no problem keeping up out on the trails, where its electric locking front differential gives you true four-wheel drive. A n d while the…

eBay Motors I bought my 1998 BMW M3 convertible on eBay. Lesson learned: Make sure it’s such a good deal that you’re okay with any foibles undisclosed by the seller. So how do you know you’re getting a nice price? Do an advanced search and look at the completed listings. You’ll see what sold. Maybe even more important, you’ll see what didn’t. TrueCar TrueCar is a great tool for removing the mystery of the MSRP. Say you want a 2015 Chevrolet Silverado 1500. For that truck, TrueCar has more than 10,000 actual transaction prices that help you see what you should pay (probably $2,000 under invoice). Be forewarned that if you do sign in and search a particular model, dealers will begin calling you within about three minutes. AutoTempest This…

BY THEN I WAS ABLE TO KEEP THE PLANE STEADY as we raced down the centerline. I was able to climb out in a coordinated and measured way, searching the sky for traffic, until I hit our cruising altitude. By then I could arrest our climb with forward pressure on the yoke—a modest achievement as piloting goes, but one that really pleased me. A climbing plane wants to keep climbing, you see, and a hard nudge on the stick implies a willful hand and a madeup mind. I acted with authority and know-how to keep the plane in line, and on that day I remember feeling that at last I had command over the single-prop Piper Cherokee we called Six-Two Romeo. By then I also knew how to keep our…

ONE OF THE goals of science education is to create excited researchers, and the best way to do that is to let college students play with extremely expensive machines. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a facility for exactly this purpose, the Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex (MCAC), allows students to use equipment they might not otherwise have access to, such as mass spectrometers worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. We always wondered why Oatey sells dozens of different plasticpipe cements, so we asked the MCAC to help us learn what is inside Oatey’s Purple Primer and Regular Clear PVC Cement. They used four different instruments, worth a total of $750,000, to find out. PRIMER The main ingredients are solvents—acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, tetrahydro-furan, and cyclohexanone. "Like…

SOMETIMES IT DOES TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST The only sunglass technology certified by the Space Foundation for UV and blue-light eye protection. Eagle Eyes® Navigator™ Black Sunglasses $49 + S&P. PLUS receive the Navigator™ Gold absolutely FREE!—2 pairs for the price of one! Call 1-800-333-2045 with offer code EEN106-01 or visit www.stauer.com for more information. AMAZING NEW TINY & AFFORDABLE HEARING AID Fits like no hearing aid before, with nothing behind your ear or in your ear canal. Its patented shape uses the ear’s natural curves to fit comfortably and securely without any unsightly tubing. Call 1-800-873-0698 and use promo code CA48 for a full year of FREE batteries or visit www.MDHearingAid.com to find out more. DUPLI-COLOR® CUSTOM WRAP Removable Paint specifically formulated for automotive customization, Custom Wrap provides a…

Building a basic bocce court is pretty simple. It’s mostly fun to build, although not every step is fun. But it’s always fun to use, bocce being an ancient recreation played on sundappled afternoons by weathered Italian men wearing panama hats and drinking jug wine. The construction requires not much more than marking out a big rectangle, some digging, and spreading and compacting granular materials. It’s a little work, but a court gives your game the predictability that rolling a ball on a lawn never will. PLOT THE COURT First decide how big you want your court. Regulation is 8 to 14 feet wide by up to 91 feet long. A more reasonable size is 8 to 10 feet wide by about 60 feet long. Really, you can make it…

Turn the page for the finished product and schematic diagrams Materials Instructions parent only kid only parent and kid 1. Use a 3/16-inch bit to drill a hole in the 1¼-inch end cap. Carefully run the bit through the hole in the opposite direction to remove any burrs that may have formed. 2. Apply pipe cement primer to the inside of the 1¼-inch end cap and the last inch of the 1¼-inch barrel, followed by a thin film of cement. 3. Push the parts together and twist slightly to distribute the pipe cement evenly. Repeat steps two and three for the end cap on the 1-inch piston pipe. 4. Ream out the other end of the piston pipe with an abrasive sanding drum attached to your drill, until you’ve made…

+ THIS MONTH IN FOUND TIME Since 1972, to account for the difference between the atomic clock and Earth’s ever-so-slightly-irregular rotation, every so often a second is added to the world’s official time. At midnight on June 30, enjoy the extra sleep. I shouldn’t be this nervous. But standing in line at the drugstore waiting to buy Speed Stick, I can’t help it. Almost a dozen customers are behind me, and a good number of them would probably be annoyed to know that I intentionally left my wallet at home. All I have is my phone. When I get to the counter and ask the clerk if I can pay with my phone, he shrugs, says, “You can try,” and gestures toward the terminal. I hold my phone over it,…

MICHELANGELO COULD HAVE saved a team of experts a lot of time if he'd signed his work. Instead, earlier this year in England, those experts spent months studying two bronze statues of men riding panthers. The works were previously credited to a 16th-century Dutch sculptor, but last year a Cambridge University professor discovered a drawing of a similar panther and rider by one of Michelangelo's apprentices, which would indicate that he used one of his master's works as a model. It seemed like more than just coincidence, and upon further investigation, enough evidence was found to make a compelling case that the statues were done by the most famous ceiling painter ever to live. That conclusion will be defended at a conference on July 6. In case you want to…

YOU ARE: A fiamiy man. you enjoy nature, but would just as soon drive up a mountain as hike it. YOUR CAR: 2005–2008 Subaru Legacy GT TYPICAL PRICE: $9,000 This might’ve been the car that triggered the dawning public awareness of Subaru’s virtues. This Legacy paired all-wheel drive and a 250-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder with sharp styling and manual or automatic transmission. Sound like a bargain Audi S4? That’s pretty much what it is. YOU ARE: Practical, with a lot of things to haul around. YOUR CAR: 1997 Ford F250 Power Stroke YPICAL PRICE: $6,000 In terms of reliability, it’s hard to beat a mid-nineties Ford truck with the Power Stroke diesel. The 7.3-liter Navistar V-8 was used in International buses and doesn’t break much of a sweat in a pickup.…

SEE PREVIOUS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS Project Notes Our water cannOn is modeled after a version on the amazing website instructables.com. The abuse-tolerant design means the cannon can be dropped, stepped on, and left outside. You’d have to try hard to break it. Working with PVc pipe is straightforward. We used a miter saw and an 80-tooth blade that cuts plastic and nonferrous metal, but if you don’t have that, you can just as easily use a simple backsaw and a plastic miter box, a $15 hardware-store item. We experimented a bit with the o-rings too. our frst attempt, no. 13 (7/8-inch outside diameter), was too small, so we moved up to no. 15. For lubricant we used WD-40, but you could also use waterproof silicone grease or even Vaseline. after…