Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Popular Mechanics

When Major Will Andreotta began flying for the Air Force in 2006, he had to do a lot of work. He was training on the F-16, a fighter jet first deployed in 1978, and almost everything was analog. “I would tell my wingman to target something, then call over: ‘Confirm your this, because I’m seeing that,’” he says. In comparison, the F-35 that Andreotta flies now is a marvel: It has six external articulating infrared cameras and sensors that send maintenance data to the ground crew. And, as of this year, it comes with a helmet unlike any other in the world—one that synthesizes all the live feeds from the plane’s exterior cameras and sensors into a lucid, customizable augmented-reality display. Developed by Rockwell Collins, the company responsible for avionics…

MODEL: CONCEPT2 MODEL D PRODUCED: MORRISVILLE, VERMONT TIME TO DISASSEMBLE: 2 HOURS, 7 MINUTES NOTES: Before 1981, if you were a rower living someplace with a proper winter, your training regimen became very land-based as soon as the lake froze over. Indoor rowing machines existed, but they were too heavy, too expensive, or too different from being on the water to be of much use. Then Dick and Peter Dreissigacker nailed an upside-down bicycle to the floor of their barn in Vermont. This was the humble beginning of Concept2’s Model A, the first of its air-damped rowers, which are cheap and light enough that any serious crew team has scores of them. If you watch a major race today—like this month’s Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston—there’s a good…

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PRESENTED BY CHEVROLET Nicholas Moreau is a blacksmith at the forefront of a growing movement in America— makers who are returning to handcrafted techniques and community-based production. At his shop, WickÕs Forge, Nick draws from his family history in the welding trade and his studies in the Scottish metalworking tradition to infuse everyday objects with quality, longevity, meaning, and purpose. “BUSINESS IS SO OFTEN ABOUT ÔWHAT CAN I GET?Õ RATHER THAN, ÔWHAT CAN I GIVE?Õ IÕVE FOCUSED ON THE LATTER AND FOUND THAT, IN RETURN, IÕVE GOTTEN QUITE A BIT.” —NICK WHAT SETS WICKÕS FORGE APART? I look at every job—from a $10 item to a $2,000 commission—as a chance to make my customer’s life a little bit better. I love making things that are both artistic and functional, from…

OWNER: Adam Kochanski LOCATI O N YEARS OWNED: Three LOCATI O N : Atlanta FOUND ON: eBay Motors PURCHASE PRICE: $55,000 When I was a kid, I had a poster with every variant of the 911 made in 1989. I was a Porsche freak. I used to babysit these kids down the street, and their dad had one in his garage. I loved those cars, but I figured I could never afford one. I got older and searched. I realized, there’s a Porsche for everybody. You don’t have to jump right into the highest-dollar model. I thought about which one I could afford that still had some significance. The 996 is Porsche-speak for the 911 from 1999 to 2005. It was the first to have a GT3 model, a version…

These are the places we go when we’re stuck, confused, determined, or in possession of the wrong size bolt. And also when we’re in need of guidance. Not the bar, not a therapist— the hardware store. Behold our first-ever awards for the best ones across the country— the best at seeing our problems, and the best at solving them.…

Rittenhouse Hardware sits just south of Rittenhouse Square, one of Philly’s wealthier old-money neighborhoods, and just north of an area of working-class homes that is quickly gentrifying. The uptick in renovations means it’s getting in local contractors making runs for an extra box of nails alongside DIYers who don’t shy away from the trendier items the store makes sure to keep in stock, like Edison-style lightbulbs. A mile to the east in the Washington Square West neighborhood and the backyard of Thomas Jefferson University, 10th Street Hardware is serving a mix of homeowners looking to complete quality, long-term projects, students hoping to make their schoolyear rental habitable on the cheap, and apartment-management companies prepping for new tenants. Which is why it crams into the 1,250-squarefoot space both cheap and higher-end…

I get it. We’re trusting opaque mega-companies to guard our financial records and pet videos from theft, hoping that their employees aren’t reading our diary entries aloud at the holiday party. Committing to the Cloud, as with most modern technology, means conceding certainty of privacy for convenience. And my God is the Cloud convenient. You could mix my MacBook in cement and before I can find a lawyer to take you to small-claims court, I’m on a different device, resuming my Netflix series to the second that I left off while pulling up the photo from the time I met Will Smith. Everything important to me is a few logins away. Of course there’s still that pesky issue of privacy. After asking dozens of engineers, academics, and impartial industry veterans,…

1. PICK TWO APPS Using at least two separate apps means safety in redundancy, in case one Cloud provider loses your data. It’s like having two identical physical photo albums, one on your living-room bookshelf, the other in a safe deposit box. I use Amazon Photos, which is included with a Prime membership ($100 per year). Besides unlimited storage, a huge chunk of the world’s internet has run on Amazon’s Cloud division (Amazon Web Services, AWS) for years. The security and longevity is worth the ugly menu system. In addition, I use Google Photos, which has free unlimited storage and the most intuitive user interface of any app, including a Free Up Space function that deletes backed-up photos from your device. Unless you pay, it compresses images. But you won’t…

1. Which of the following do you own? ○Computer (+5) ○Smartphone (+10) ○Tablet (+10) ○Kindle (+10) ○Fitness tracker (+10) 2. Do you have any embarrassing affinities or collections? ○Yes (+1)○No (+10) 3. Would you let software analyze your photos or email? ○Of course. That’s how we get spam filters and virus scans. (+20)○Absolutely not. That’s my data. (+0) 4. What do you see? ○A marketing term (–5)○A mass of condensed water vapor (+0)○An analogy for the future of modern computing (+50) 5. Are you an enemy of the state? ○Not currently, no (+1) ○A what? (+10) ANSWER KEY Less than 6 points: You don’t want the Cloud. Keep your data on encrypted flash drives in a safe. 6 to 30: You’re ready. Get backup software such as Crash-Plan ($6/month). Secure…

Law professor Nancy Kim is the author of Wrap Contracts, the authoritative guide to those multipage policies you skim and agree to with Cloud accounts. We asked her to read the contracts of several major Cloud services. She found that most can use your information for targeted advertising, and none is accountable if it loses your data. Other notable conditions: box “In no event will Box, its affiliates, officers, employees, agents, suppliers or licensors be liable for (a): any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, cover or consequential damages.” If Box loses your data, you sue, and somehow win, it will have to pay you only however much three months of service costs you ($30 if you have a paid personal account) or $5 if you have the free membership. It’s called…

A few years back.one of Matt Artinger’s customers had an idea. “He had run into some scrap aluminum sheeting from an actual World War II B-24 Liberator, and he wanted to design a guitar with it,” says Artinger, a sturdy, five-footsomething son of Pennsylvania’s industrious Lehigh Valley, where he works out of a former elementary school in a town called Emmaus. “I thought it was the coolest thing on earth, so of course I said yes.” Dubbed “Final Objective,” after the nose art on the vintage bomber from which its materials came, the resulting guitar incorporated not only the salvaged aluminum skin, replete with rivets, but also scrounged cockpit parts, a fretboard inlaid with the U.S. Army Air Force logo, and a scaled-down rendition of the original nose art. Artinger…

PROJECT NOTES BATTLE BOTS ARE SIMPLE THINGS, miniature robots like the crazy ones you can see fighting on TV, only a lot less destructive and suitable for kids. And just as much fun. As we learned early on, it’s essential that the shaft of the motor extend off of the brush head. Otherwise, if it hits the brush head, the shaft won’t be able to spin freely and your bot won’t vibrate. And if the toothbrush bristles are too long, the bot constantly tips over. We found two solutions to this problem: The easiest is to simply trim the bristles with scissors, but if you want to add another design element, make legs out of pipe cleaners and affix them to the bot with hot glue. Instructions kid onlyparent onlyparent…

Historically applejack was a Colonial-era winter spirit made by freeze distilling: leaving hard cider outside and removing the ice to concentrate the alcohol in a process called jacking. It was a product of convenience, an alternative for settlers in the northeast who had a hard time growing grain for whiskey. In the early 21st century, Derek Grout of Harvest Spirits Farm Distillery in New York’s Hudson River Valley began making a modern variation as a way to use the apples that weren’t perfect enough to sell. “We didn’t set out to make applejack, but rather vodka,” he says. “When we decided to rest the vodka in ex-bourbon barrels, it opened up the possibility for applejack, something completely different from what other distillers were making at the time,” he says. The…

The Perfect Trimmer Take an Aero-Flex blade kit ($3 0) and a 360AF Glider head ($22) and us e them on the Troy-Bilt TB2 044 XP straight-shaft trimmer ($169) powered by a 27-cc two-stroke engine. The flexible nylon blades are much more durable than traditional trimmer line, less prone to snags , and don’ t require bump feeding (where more line comes out when you press the head against the ground). The glider lets you rest the head of the trimmer on the ground as you work, which makes the process a lot easier. And even a little fun. An Oil-Based Paint That Washes Off With Water I grew up in New England—alkyd-paint territory, where the experienced painters knew which paints could weather humid coastal summers and bonechilling winters. To…

EDITORS CHOICE Troy-Bilt CS 4325 ENGINE SIZE: 250 cc WEIGHT: 200 lb LIKES: Blew through everything, wet and dry, that we put down its chute or hopper. An incredible amount of chipper for the money. Feels very solid as it goes about its work with little to no vibration. DISLIKES: The tall hopper and long chute are deceptive, and make it easy to overfeed the machine and clog it. $900 Country Home Products DR 38212 ENGINE SIZE: 208 cc WEIGHT: 126 lb LIKES: Solid construction, with a toolsteel chipper knife. The DR exhibited decent pull-through and about as much resistance to stalling as you can expect from a machine this size. DISLIKES: The oil fill is difficult to access. $800 Earthquake 9010400 ENGINE SIZE: 305 cc WEIGHT: 133 lb LIKES:…

Why Preserve Your Own Food? BY EDWARD LEE FOR MOST OF human history, preservation was a survival mechanism. Fermenting and pickling, among the oldest forms of cooking we know, kept us from getting sick. Over millennia, we developed simple, almost instinctual techniques as varied as the cultures that span the globe. But in only a couple hundred years, technology has reduced the repertoire of most people to two—refrigeration and buying commercially processed foods. And in forgoing the time-consuming tasks we once used to maximize our harvest, we’ve abandoned two fundamentals of eating: nutrition and flavor. Medical studies are now proving what our instincts said all along: Good bacteria and microbes are essential to our health. Preserving food by fermenting is the easiest way to get them into our bodies, since…

That outlet below and to the left of your steering column is called an OBD-II (onboard diagnostic) port, standard on any car made after 1996. Plug in one of these and you can mine your car’s brain for useful information. OBD dongles are a recent invention made possible by smartphone proliferation, but I’ve always doubted their usefulness. They can tell you tons of specifics, not all of it helpful. I’ve never been broken down by the side of the road with an out-ofspec oxygen sensor. But new models have more capabilities, such as coaching you to use less fuel, displaying performance stats on your phone, and, of course, giving you a prognosis when that Check Engine light besmirches your instrument cluster. I tried three OBD dongles on a 2017 Ford…

A THE MANAGER At twenty-seven, Schmidt oversees the entire operations of the sprawling ranch, and even lives in a barn loft on the property. Carhartt shirt ($45). B YES, THEY STILL USE ROPES Schmidt’s boyfriend welded the dummy steer for her to practice her rope skills. She gets help from foreman Lance Fisk, who used to do rodeo. On Fisk: United by Blue shirt ($94). On Schmidt: Voormi pullover ($129). C DOING IT ALL Schmidt grew up riding horses. It’s how she came to work on the ranch. Driving a tractor is only a recently acquired skill. Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch, nestled in the Deer Lodge Valley along the Clark Fork River in Montana, wakes every day at 6:00 a.m. Maggie Schmidt, the manager, drinks her coffee and then she…

I always feel pretty damned good when I get into Headley Hardware (Greencastle, Indiana), because it keeps the birdseed on an end cap near the entrance. It smells oily and light. And 6-penny nails are clanked by the handful onto an ancient tin-pan scale, so the place sounds like the industry of the everyday. Headley’s is always lit like the top of the morning. No matter what the job, I’m always glad to be at Headley’s. They stack hope by the door in that place. Wood screws, glazing points, pipe clamps. I have my little lists. The things I need. Headley’s always has that. It’s a well-stocked larder and it may be that I underappreciate the remarkable anticipation of its inventory. But truth be told, I come to Headley’s for…

Convenient that you always seem due for a hardware-store run around lunchtime during a Saturday project. As a teenager with a fresh license in Dearborn, Michigan, I always made sure to bring a few extra bucks for the hot-dog cart out front of Great Lakes Ace Hardware when I’d be sent on runs for lawn bags during yard work. The store itself is good—accessible, friendly, well lit. You go there to get what you need. But you also go for the hot dogs. From the earliest hints of spring through the first frost, a young woman, usually blond with cutoff shorts and a fanny pack full of change in the summertime, hawks boiled franks from a gleaming stainless-steel cart in the store’s parking lot. The three-dollar combo—a slightly spicy pork-and-beef…

MICROSOFT’S UNDERSEA EXPERIMENT Data-center hardware generates a lot of heat, just like your thigh-singeing laptop. To deal with the problem, Microsoft built a prototype data center in an underwater cylinder, using seawater to keep everything cool. Plus, “In normal data centers, you see a lot of failure from connectors corroding,” says project head Ben Cutler. “This data center is sealed and has a nitrogen atmosphere, which makes issues like you’d find in land-based centers less of an issue.”…

Once, my house caught fire. We all were safe, but after the embers stopped hissing, my backup hard drives were soaked and crushed by debris. The toughest loss: many years of photos of my children. I should have put them in the Cloud, yes? The Cloud was supposed to make external backups obsolete. But here’s the catch: Using Cloud storage requires trust. Trust that no unauthorized weirdo will access your files. Trust that the company storing your files won’t accidentally delete them. And trust that when you want to delete some piece of data, it will actually be erased forever. I just can’t do that. Privacy issues aside, the Cloud quickly becomes like a self-storage unit for your household junk. After a couple of years, you can’t remember what you…

RANSOMWARE is one of the most prevalent cybercrimes. If you get hit, the program will look for the computer’s storage—thumb drives plugged into the USB ports, even Cloud storage, like if you have the Dropbox app running on your laptop. If you don’t have backup copies of your files, you’re at the mercy of the extortionist. I back up to multiple places, including an external USB drive. But unless I’m moving data to it, I unplug it. That way, the drive is in contact with the internet as little as possible, minimizing risk. Of course, I may be more paranoid than the average user. Ran.som.ware /`ransem.weer/ Malicious software, often contracted by opening a strange email and clicking a link or attachment. It encrypts your data to lock you out until…

Like many family decisions, it started at Ikea. Our two kids, Irish twins who were then two and three, had started to escape their cribs, and we were moving back with my parents into a small mother-in-law apartment. We needed new beds for our new living situation—small enough for the space and safe enough that the kids wouldn’t fall out. There were some cool options. I liked the old-style metal ones that accordioned in for a little tyke and could expand as the kid grew up. They were around $150, not including sheets and mattresses. We deliberated to the point where we became that couple no one wants to be, arguing with a fierce ness that only Ikea can stir up. I finally said I’d just build the damn things…

STUPID AMAZING THE UNITED STATES of America is an experiment in democracy. Essentially literally. Elections are run by the states, so we have a crazy patchwork of voting technologies that vary by locale—optical-scan, punch-card, and electronic systems (with and without paper trails). Lately, there has been a terrific amount of interest in the prospect of online voting. Why, the internet has made everything better, right? Right? Why not voting? Online voting has been tried in other countries, and—in very limited tests—here in the U.S. The hope is that its ease and accessibility will simplify vote counting and boost our dismal voter turnout, which hovers at around 50 percent of the voting-aged population. Unfortunately, every pilot has failed to prove secure. In one example from 2010, the Washington, D.C., Board of…

We all know that milk, cheese, and tilapia can rot, but what about shaving cream? It’s not an issue most men spend a lot of time worrying about. Take my friend Ari. When I asked him if he’d ever used a grooming product beyond its expiration date, he said, “Honestly, tons of them, and I can’t recall a problem. But then again, I’m male. If my shaving cream turned into sand, I would assume it was supposed to be that way.” I love Ari, but the truth is, some grooming products can spoil. Whether that happens and how long it takes depends on the product’s formulation and use of preservatives. And while an expired bottle of hair gel may not cause a national panic the way a batch of salmonella-laden…

Most garage-door openers do exactly—and only—what their name suggests: open and close the garage door. But Ryobi’s new Ultra-Quiet Garage Door Opener ($248 for the base) adds wireless connectivity and plugin modules. My workshop is in my garage, where I appreciate the articulating-head fan during the summer heat. There’s also a Bluetooth speaker that I synced up to Pandora on my phone, a CO detector, and a laser that would help me know exactly where to park my car if I were neurotic or a terrible driver. But my favorite addition is the spring-loaded power cord. With 30 feet of cord, it reaches anywhere in my garage. And when I am done with it, instead of winding it up and putting it back on the shelf like I would with…

Work Wear for Your Shop-Vac READER JASON ROBBINS of Rochester, New York, has found a way to make his Shop-Vac more useful: Give it an apron. For about a dollar, he purchased a cotton tool apron that he could tie around the vacuum to tote its extra attachments. It also serves as a cord caddy, as well as an easy way to lug around other tools commonly used on Shop-Vac jobs. Meet the Mallet Family When you’ve got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. When you’ve got a mallet in your hand, there’s no telling what you’ll see, because there are a variety of types, each suited for different tasks. Here are three. A wooden mallet is easy to construct in one of two main designs:…

Why does the metal connector between our furnace and the chimney keep rotting out? SAM W., BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA A I’m going to guess that you have a newer furnace. If that’s true, you’re probably getting condensation in the flue. Older furnaces didn’t have that issue. The hot flue gas they produced literally shot out of the chimney—too hot and moving too quickly to condense. While that method kept the flue clean, there was a glaring problem: All of that hot gas was wasted energy. So furnace manufacturers, obeying federal fuel-efficiency standards, now build appliances that use far less fuel. This results in a smaller volume of exhaust at a cooler temperature, giving the water vapor formed in the combustion process a greater chance of condensing in the flue. If…

Q: If I use the Cloud, is someone reading my emails and ogling my photos? A: Generally, no. Computer programs, not humans, are analyzing your stuff. It’s the same way spam filters and antivirus scans work— functions that exist because we let Google algorithms see our Gmail. Q: Can someone rob a data center? A: If, somehow, an unmarked van full of hackers physically or remotely accessed Cloud servers, your information would be ENCRYPTED, illegible without authentication. Q: Can hackers get my stuff? A: In the years since embarrassing breaches (Dropbox in 2012, iCloud in 2014), Cloud companies have gotten much more secure. Hacks you hear about at places like Target or state election databases are usually the result of imperfect in-house-built storage systems. Dedicated Cloud companies with huge corporate…