Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2023 i Popular Mechanics

RAFAEL O. QUEZADA, 72 General Contractor and Artist/Los Angeles, CA “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.”—William Hutchinson Murray FOOD FOR THOUGHT Humanity’s greatest deficiency is its basic nutrition. I’m the founder of The RootStock Foundation, which has worked with a local high school to develop Aquaponics and Spirulina greenhouses to impress on students the importance of nutrition. Knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy diets can help improve social inequities and facilitate learning. ART IN THE PARK My early conceptual art sought to inspire action to preserve Earth’s nature in the face of industrial exploitation. One of my first projects involved weaving massive planar forms in warehouses. They were like fishing nets, but with large spaces between the filaments. Once the woven elements were built, I…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2009, MORE THAN 4,000 VOLUNTEERS FLOCKED TO DORKING, ENGLAND, TO HELP FORMER TOP GEAR COHOST JAMES MAY REALIZE HIS CHILDHOOD DREAM OF BUILDING A REAL HOUSE OUT OF LEGO BRICKS. OVER ROUGHLY ONE MONTH, MORE THAN 3.5 MILLION PLASTIC BLOCKS WERE TRANSFORMED INTO A TWO-STORY HOME COMPLETE WITH LEGO FURNISHINGS. Guinness World Records dubbed May’s structure the largest “life-sized house made from interlocking bricks.” May’s house wasn’t alone as a life-sized Lego build. In 2016, Land Rover built a 5.8-million-brick model of London’s Tower Bridge sturdy enough to drive its SUVs across. And in 2018, an Australian team built a full-size Lego camping trailer. Such accomplishments beg the question: If we can build a Lego house or bridge or camper, why isn’t more of our world…

NOT ALL THAT LONG AGO, TRACK SAWS WERE made by only a handful of companies and were employed almost exclusively by professional tradesmen. Designed to make long, straight cuts in sheet material—like plywood—these saws are more accurate and easier to use than table saws. But their singular purpose and high price (some more than $1,000) made them hard to justify for folks who need one only occasionally. That has all changed, though, as many companies have recently added track saws to their lineups. We called in a range of saws to test how well they work and see what their differences are, in case you’re considering getting one yourself. HOW WE TESTED To evaluate these track saws, we used them to cut through dense, 2 x 4-foot, 9-ply, ¾-inch maple…

KEVIN FITZKE, 40 Wood Boat Builder and Designer/St. Paul, MN Sometimes you have to jump into the deep end to learn to swim. Current Passion Project I’ve started building my first boat design, called “Miss Moonshine.” It’s a torpedo-shaped boat that’s inspired by pre-war Grand Prix cars. My goal with Miss Moonshine is to redefine the Gentleman’s Racer boat. LEARNING TO BUILD I grew up in my dad’s woodshop building boat models and learning general woodworking. When I was a teenager, my dad bought me a boat design and building plans book that really opened the door to that world. For some reason, I’ve always been specifically fascinated with old wood boats. Top Tools With wooden boat building, so much is still done by hand, so investing in high-quality hand…

A COMMON PROBLEM THAT’S REALLY ANNOYING is hitting a big bump in the road that triggers a new rattle in your vehicle. Within an hour, it can sound like your car is about to fall apart. Before disassembling your interior and making the problem worse, try some of these fixes first. Location, Location, Location//Start by sitting in the front seat and pushing down on some of the nearby panels. Try to get them to squeak as they bend and deform. You can also give your dashboard a couple of light taps with your fist to try to find any loose areas. If they let out any noise at all, that’s probably a spot for a professional to take a look at. However, the best thing you can do is grab…

As a budding teenage carpenter, I was hit in the right eye by a flying finish nail. It was a miracle I didn’t lose my eye or even suffer much injury. It was enough of a lesson that I’ve worn safety glasses ever since. Still, when I tried Stoggles—protective eyewear that’s a hybrid between glasses and goggles, with side and top shields molded into the eyepiece—I liked their comfort most. I’ve been wearing them for several months in our shop—testing tools and building projects—and find them so comfortable, I often end up wearing them at my desk (their Rx matches my reading glasses). That’s thanks to their light weight and a fit that doesn’t chafe my ears or the bridge of my nose. This says a lot about these glasses,…

WHAT SHOULD THE WORLD KNOW MORE ABOUT? Pry open any PopMech editor’s brain and you’ll find an over-stuffed assortment of fun facts, practical tips, interesting bits of history, and other insightful discoveries. But because there are only so many pages in this magazine, staffers don’t always have the space to share their favorite, most underreported nuggets of knowledge. Until now. RACING’S LIFESAVING INNOVATIONS As PopMech’s autos editor, I wish more people were aware of the impact that racing has had on road vehicles. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss the sport as just rich playboys having fun behind the wheel, but it’s so much more than that. Automobiles are much safer today, thanks to breakthroughs that were born at the racetrack. Think of disc brakes. Nearly all modern cars have them…

OH, JUPITER. IF ONLY the gas giant shifted its orbit slightly, becoming more eccentric (meaning oval-shaped), it could transform the shape of Earth’s orbit, too, causing parts of the blue planet to move closer to the sun. That, in turn, would mean less unlivable ice-covered regions and the potential for more habitable zones. That was the focus of a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal. Modeling data from our solar system as we understand it today, University of California, Riverside (UCR) scientists created a theoretical system that slightly altered Jupiter’s orbit. “Many are convinced that Earth is the epitome of a habitable planet and that any change in Jupiter’s orbit, being the massive planet it is, could only be bad for Earth,” Pam Vervoort, a UCR Earth and planetary scientist…

ONCE DESCRIBED AS “SPOOKY ACTION at a distance” by the world’s most famous physicist, Albert Einstein, entanglement—the idea that two particles separated by vast distances could instantly influence each other—lies at the very heart of what makes quantum physics so strange and counterintuitive. In October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to three quantum physicists—Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger—whose work confirmed this troubling phenomenon. Ulf Danielsson, a professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, refers to the fact that this phenomenon of an instant quantum connection between particles across vast distances isn’t accounted for in classical physics of the everyday world. In other words, they proved Einstein wrong. A Threat…

1/The Problem Pick three points at random anywhere on the globe. What is the probability that all three of the points will be in the same hemisphere? 2/The Hint Don’t know where to start? Grab your smartphone or computer and play around on Google Earth a bit to come up with a hypothesis. 3/The Solution There are two answers to this question, depending on whether you think about the word “hemisphere” with a capital H. If you split Earth into its Northern and Southern Hemispheres, then we’re talking about simple probabilities. There is a 1-in-2 (or 50 percent) chance that a randomly chosen location will be in one of the two hemispheres. Given three random points, that’s a simple 1-in-8 (or 12.5 percent) chance. It’s the same when you compare…

BY THE EDITORS OF POPULAR MECHANICS ADDITIONAL WRITING AND REPORTING BY A.C. SHILTON AND STEF SCHRADER Tools make us human, but we are not the only ones who use tools. Some birds drop rocks to crack shells open, and certain apes use sticks to get food or groom themselves. What makes us different is the thought we put into tool-making, says Ian Tattersall, PhD, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Around 2.6 million years ago, our ancestors realized there was a superior type of rock for sharp-cutting edges (likely used to butcher animals). They chose these rocks, shaped them, and carried them for later use. “If our predecessors had never started making stone tools, we would not be the reasoning creatures that we are…

WHEN I FOUND out that Disston Tools was working on a faithful reproduction of its famous D-8 handsaw, I was shocked. In this era of power tools, the company was reviving a saw that went out of production in the 1950s. And it was using the original factory drawings to guide the process. When Disston introduced the D-8 in the 1880s, it was a new take on handsaws: light and small, easier to handle, and more suited to cutting framing lumber. But carpenters also loved the D-8 for its ability to follow a cut line. And the saw’s superior metallurgy made it nearly indestructible. Old Disston ads showed how you could bend the blade into a U and have it spring back into shape. I’m a hand-tool guy; I like…