Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2021 i Popular Mechanics

KYLE MIZOKAMI Contributing Editor Wherever you go, there you are. Current Passion Project My wife and I are stepping up to a singlefamily home, and I have the opportunity to plan out a garage workshop from the ground up—a lifelong dream. PRODUCTS I’M USING RIGHT NOW Best Thing POP Ever Taught Me I’ve been reading Pop Mech for more than 30 years, and the one consistent lesson is I can do it—whatever it is—myself. IMPERIAL OR METRIC? I’ll admit metric is the better system for overall measurement, but Lyle Lovett sings about a girl who is “5-foot-2,” not “157.48 centimeters.” Attack Submarine or Fighter Jet? Your fighter jets are sexy, but when my submarine closes the shipping lanes, I’ll see you at the armistice table. What Keeps Me Thinking… North…

CHARBAY R5 | 49.5% ABV | $60 Now in its fifth bottling, Bear Republic Racer 5, a 7 percent IPA, is doubledistilled into R5. The nose is extremely bright and aromatic, piney and dank with hints of lemon zest. The palate leans more toward chocolate. INTERBORO STRAIGHT MALT WHISKEY | 50% ABV | $48 The first whiskey release from the five-year-old Brooklyn outfit, this is a blend of two barrels aged for three years in first-use American oak before spending their final year in barrels that had previously held Woodford Reserve Double Oaked bourbon. The result a heavier char flavor than a typical Scottish single malt, with notes of dark cherry, vanilla, and caramel. ARROGANT BASTARD WHISKEY | 48.5% ABV | $60 The Escondido, California, brewery produces their typical Arrogant…

The diamonds in NDB’s battery have a beautiful blue hue, thanks to the trace amounts of boron contained in their carbon structure. These blue diamonds are artificial, but are reminiscent of true blue diamonds, which are some of the rarest gemstones on Earth. According to findings from an August 2018 study in Nature, they’re formed in Earth’s lower mantle, which is about 410 to 1,680 miles below the surface. As such, you can only find blue diamonds in three mines in the entire world, which helps explain their hefty price tag: roughly $15,700 for a 0.3-carat light blue diamond, and $75,000 for a 0.25-carat dark blue diamond.…

Marti Head, Ph.D., had a bad feeling. It was mid-February of 2020. She’d just returned to her home in Tennessee from a work trip. Somewhere, probably in an airport, she’d picked up what she thought was just a cold. Sure, physically she felt crappy. But the bad feeling, which she described as “itchy,” came from the news coming out of China. A career spent working with infectious diseases had given Head all the info she needed on what, exactly, the novel coronavirus might be capable of. And so, when her nose started running and her throat got scratchy, Head quarantined herself and her husband. Instead of watching trashy TV in bed to recover, she tucked into her quarantine cocoon of a home office—with tissues and tea at hand—and started hunting.…

Another way to assess a headlamp’s effectiveness is to measure its beam distance. After dark, we found the farthest point where each headlamp was bright enough for us to clearly identify a silhouette of a person, painted neutral gray, by moving the silhouette along a line of reflective traffic cones, each spaced 25 feet apart. The headlamps were on their brightest mode and set to their most focused spotlight beam shape. See reviews on the opposite page for the results of our top three performers. To find how long each headlamp lasts on a full charge or new set of batteries, we ran them on their highest setting until the bulbs faded, flickered, and died. Finally, we wore them while hiking, camping, on late-night runs, and around the house to…

Although we didn’t directly test battery types, it’s worth weighing your options. Models that use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are great for long-distance efforts, saving you from packing any replacement on top of the power bank or solar charger already in your kit. Those running on alkaline or lithium batteries cut out downtime that comes with charging and can be more affordable up front. We’re big fans of the dual-power models that continue to proliferate and offer the greatest flexibility.…

Electrical circuits need to be grounded in order to operate safely, so that any current that shorts out or has a fault is directed to the ground—the literal earth—and the electricity doesn’t have to go through you to reach it. And generators come with one of two types of grounding circuits. In a bonded neutral design, the neutral wire connects to the generator frame, which serves as the ground. With a floating neutral, the wire isn’t connected to the frame; there’s a terminal if you need to connect the wire to a grounding rod driven into the soil. If you’re powering appliances, tools, or other devices temporarily by plugging them directly into the standard outlets, get a generator with a bonded neutral. If you’re powering circuits in your home, floating…

FOR DECADES, GAS-ENGINE POWER equipment was the only choice for yardwork, followed by corded power tools at a distant second. Anything powered by a battery was either ineffective or an expensive novelty. The few successful versions of battery-powered outdoor equipment were limited to low-power applications, like grass shears. Of course, for every rule there’s an exception: We reported on the highly effective GE Elec-Trak battery-powered tractor and Black & Decker’s somewhat effective battery mowers in our April 1970 issue. In many respects, gas-engine equipment still rules the outdoors in terms of power and cost effectiveness–at least for people with serious work to do. But a revolution in outdoor power is occurring. For many people doing yardwork, cordless power tools are now the default choice. This has stood the status quo…

WHEN TESTING SAWS, WE LOOK FOR HOW WELL AND LONG they cut while mitigating vibration and stalling, taking into account any hesitancy and lack of trigger response. To gauge that performance and expose any of those potential weaknesses, we charged the saws’ batteries and ran them through a truckload of hardwood logs. This involved cutting as many test discs—or “cookies”—as we could on one charge. Also, if the saw had a low threshold for thermal cutoff to protect the battery and circuitry, that showed up because rapid repeat cuts through hardwood generate a lot of heat in the tool. TOOL-FREE CHAIN TIGHTENING DEWALT DCCS670X1 Price: $349 | Volts: 6| Number of discs cut: 43 DeWalt fans will not be disappointed with this saw. It’s a powerful cutter, and the cookie…

Watch the complete MADE HERE video series on YouTube. THIRTY YEARS AGO, THE “KEEP America Beautiful” campaign was in full swing. Curbside recycling had become widespread, and the need to transform mountains of plastic had grown. This included high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic. HDPE is a thermoplastic polymer recognized for its outstanding tensile strength, large strength-to-density ratio, and high impact resistance and melting point. My entrepreneurial partner, Mark Phillabaum, and I wanted to create the best possible product with this extremely durable, weather-resistant material. We landed on outdoor furniture—with a focus on the Adirondack chair—and Polywood plastic lumber was born. Today, we primarily source milk jugs, the most consistent supply of HDPE, from nationwide recycling centers and worldwide, ocean-bound hotbeds of plastic. Polywood plays a role in the sustainability aspect of…

Losing one sense can heighten others. It’s a phenomenon known as neural reuse or neural repurposing, in which the brain adapts and heightens remaining senses, and it has helped some people who are blind develop the ability to use two-dimensional echolocation by making clicking sounds with their mouths. Research shows that a portion of the brain—the primary visual cortex located in the occipital lobe—involved with visual processing can restructure itself to treat the echoes resulting from the clicks as visual stimuli. In essence, the brain can “see” the echoes as they bounce back and use the sound to help a person reconstruct the space and objects around them. This has given some echolocators the ability to draw a room and its contents by merely walking around it while making clicking…

A DECADES-LONG QUEST TO FIND quasicrystals—a crystal-like material with a seemingly impossible structure—has led researchers to an unlikely location: the site of the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb blast. When the U.S. military detonated a plutonium bomb over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, sand fused with copper cables that stretched to the top of the bomb’s detonation tower, forming a glassy mineral called red trinitite. From a sample of this mineral, Luca Bindi, Ph.D., a mineralogist at the University of Florence in Italy, and his colleagues were able to isolate a previously undiscovered quasicrystal. The discovery, announced earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could shed light on how these unusual grains form. It’s the oldest anthropogenic quasicrystal found yet. Quasicrystal…

HEADLAMPS ARE A VERSATILE, HANDS-FREE MEANS of illuminating the world around you. They’re great for attending to camp tasks after dark, racking up miles when the sun is nowhere in sight, stalking prey in the predawn hours, and even working on repairs and projects in your home’s light-starved nooks and crannies. A tool this indispensable needs to be reliable. So we developed a multistep test that pushed eight headlamps to their limits and revealed which hit the sweet spot of performance, ease of use, comfort, and price.…

Lumos Ultra MIPS Bike Helmet $200 Helmet safety technology is more affordable and arguably better than ever. But nothing’s going to keep you safer than avoiding a bad spill in the first place. When I’m riding on the road, that means lighting up my bike so cars know I’m there. The new Ultra does the same for my head. The MIPS-equipped commuter helmet is studded with 30 small LEDs on the front that shine up to 284 lumens. The 64 additional rear lights further increase your visibility. I’ve managed to make it more than a week without pulling out the charger, but battery life depends on your settings. Clicking the power button at the back cycles through two flashing and one solid preset modes. But after connecting to the Lumos…

TO TEST THESE MODELS, WE MEASURED SOUND LEVELS OF EACH FROM THREE FEET away while they were idling with no load and while running under load. And to observe the current sine wave, frequency, voltage, and THD of the AC current generated by these machines, we employed a Fluke 345 Power Quality Clamp Meter. To reach each generator’s maximum starting and running watts (how much they put out when powering up devices and over the course of use, respectively), we used a selection of tools and appliances, including a window air conditioner, a portable air conditioner, a space heater, a planer, and a portable table saw. The THD results we got will still help indicate whether these are safe to use on sensitive tech like laptops and phone chargers. We…

On the fence about whether you should buy a pair of chainsaw chaps? Consider that the most common wound chainsaws inflict is to the left leg (particularly the knee, below the knee, or the foot) and requires about 110 stitches to close. Chaps protect against such gruesome injury with a unique mechanism. Once the saw pierces the outer fabric, the chain tears into the synthetic fibers below, which so thoroughly entangle the chain and its sprocket that both are stopped dead in their tracks. Sure, the chaps are ruined, but your leg isn’t. I’ve never cut into mine, but one time I came so close that the chain splattered a stripe of oil on the chaps as it flew by. When I look at that greasy stripe, I think the…

IN MARCH 2019, BOTTLE LOGIC BREWING, A cult maker of imperial stouts based out of Anaheim, California, visited Interboro Spirits & Ale in Brooklyn, New York. The plan was to brew a collaboration beer, but the Californians took interest in the copper pot still lurking in one corner of the brewery. “They said, ‘Sure, let’s make a beer but, more importantly, let’s make a whiskey,’” says Jesse Ferguson, Interboro’s cofounder, brewer, and distiller. This wouldn’t require much extra work. To produce whiskey or beer, you start by mashing grains: taking barley, corn, and the like, combining it with water, and then heating the mixture. Then things typically diverge. For beer, you add hops and yeast; for traditional whiskey, you add yeast and, once fermented into distiller’s wash, you distill it.…

NERVA In 1961, NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission investigated the use of NTP with the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) program. Like DRACO, NERVA would generate thrust by using a nuclear reactor to heat and expel hydrogen. NASA envisioned using an NTP engine as the third and final stage of an otherwise chemical rocket. But NASA ultimately scrapped the promising program in 1973 due to lack of funding. PROJECT ORION In the early 1960s, Project Orion aimed to put a spacecraft into orbit and beyond by detonating a string of nuclear bombs underneath it—an idea made possible by shielding the spacecraft (and spacefarers) with a large graphite plate. The craft would ride the shockwave into the atmosphere on a pillar of successive nuclear explosions. However, the Partial…

IN LESS THAN TWO YEARS, YOU MIGHT BE able to buy a smartwatch—powered with a radioactive diamond battery—that will outlive you and your progeny for generations. The potentially game-changing battery comes from the San Francisco–based startup Nano Diamond Battery (NDB), which lauds its namesake “high-power diamond-based alpha, beta, and neutron voltaic battery” for its ability to give devices “life-long and green energy.” Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). Or it could provide the juice for a space rover, collecting Mars regolith samples for decades without any human assistance. Those are ambitious goals. So, could NDB’s bold claims actually become reality? First, let’s dissect the specs. To build its Nano Diamond Battery, NDB uses layers of…

A TEAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA is proposing a concept that just might save us from extinction: a 21st-century version of Noah’s Ark on the moon. This ark wouldn’t contain two of every animal, but rather a repository of cryogenically frozen reproductive cells from 6.7 million species on our planet. Consider it a global insurance policy, says Jekan Thanga, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and the project’s mastermind. “As a human civilization, we’re in a fragile state,” he says. And such a shelter could come to fruition in the next three decades, he adds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, an Earth-bound version of the lunar ark, opened in 2008 and currently contains more than 1 million crop…

Buying a headlamp based on its advertised lumens is tempting, but it won’t tell you the full story. Conventional headlamp design causes light output to decrease over time, often starting as soon as you press the power button. This is partly caused by the variable nature of electrical circuits, but it’s also a byproduct of manufacturers regulating power delivery to balance brightness, battery life, and heat management. Still, comparing the lumens of different headlamps gives you some idea of how they will suit your needs. So at the Pop Mech Test Lab, we measured the lumens of each while it was on its brightest setting by using an integrating sphere, a hollow instrument with a white reflective interior that scatters light evenly inside and a lux meter for measuring that…

When people first stopped felling trees with axes and turned to chainsaws, they kept using the same technique: basically, making a 45-degree notch on the side of the tree toward which they wanted it to fall, then making a level cut from the back of the tree. Called the back cut, this is an inch or two up from the point of the felling notch (see diagram). The wood that’s left between the 45-degree felling notch and where the back cut ends is called the hinge, and it helps guide the tree safely to the earth. But this method can still be dangerous, with the potential for the butt of the tree (the part closest to the ground) to launch up backwards, injuring or even killing an unwary tree feller.…