House PoweR! Home tecH Spectacular
Ho w Y ou r w o r l d w o r k S sPecial RePoRt
How Safe IS Your Car? page 86
Plus The World SerieS page 13
CompoSTing! page 99
ASk roy page 60
SCienCe FiCTion For everyone page 92
hoW To Be hAppier page 22
FAll CAmping geAr guide page 37
This shop vacuum mounts on the wall!
ChAinSAWS! page 53
do you need A neW phone? page 108
America’s Magazine Since 1902
October 2014 PopularMechanics.com
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Contents 10.14
The Great American Home Upgrade everything you need to know and do to fully enjoy your home. including: kitchen retroftting tips from a professional chef, the smartest bathroom ever, energy savings in your living room, what to look for in a washing machine, and so much more. page 64
Photo graPh by Jason Madara
A Debacle in Seattle: When Bertha Got Stuck The world’s largest tunnel-boring machine, Bertha, is stuck 60 feet beneath the surface of Seattle. Now a billion-dollar infrastructure project meant to revitalize the city’s waterfront has become a rescue mission. By Christopher Solomon
page 78
A Beautiful Thing A handcrafted, anatomically correct glass trachea from Farlow’s Scientifc Glassblowing is the proving ground for the latest advances from medicaldevice makers. By Tim Hefernan
page 84
The State of Car Safety It’s amazing. Among the improvements in the steel, the advent of vehicle-tovehicle communication systems, advanced crash testing by automakers, and self-braking and -steering technology, driving has never been safer. Or more fun. By Ezra Dyer
page 86
Science Fiction for Everyone A defnitive list, in no particular order, of the science fction you need to read now—even if you think you don’t like science fction. page 92
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“I can’t get with any religion that advertises in Popular Mechanics.” Woody Allen, Annie Hall
A completely hollow handblown-glass model of the brain artery system from Farlow’s Scientifc Glassblowing, and a beautiful thing. page 84
Things you will know how to do after reading this issue of Popular Mechanics: • Get outftted for a weekend camping trip (page 37) • Save a few bucks on a brand-newish car (page 44) • Properly wield a chainsaw (page 53) • Carve a pumpkin that will disturb your neighbors (page 57) • Speak fuently about the challenges of tunnel digging in the Pacifc Northwest (page 78) • Compost (page 99)
When the World Series airs this month, more than 60 microphones will be rigged throughout the stadium and controlled from this panel, so you can hear every drop of tobacco spit. Page 13.
Contents
page 43
Cars: The Can-Do Edition Whether you are of-roading or towing 30,000 pounds or just want a great car and only have $20,000 to spend, we know just the thing. Also, the last of the gated gearshifters. page 53
Skills The new rules for chainsaw operation, navigating junkyards, and carving a pumpkin that will terrify your children. Plus, a nailgun showdown. page 60
Ask Roy Your questions about leaf stains, storm doors, sidewalk surfaces, and leaky roofs answered. page 99
Project A trommel rigged from bicycletire rims, chicken wire, and a small electrical motor takes away the backbreaking labor of composting and any of your excuses for not recycling those cofee grounds. page 108
The Back Page Do you need a new smartphone?
p
page 4
Preamble • An obituary for a pig • Our new automotive editor interviews his favorite person • Letter from the editor • Hardware mysteries, solved page 13
How Your World Works A Seinfeld writer teaches you how to buy a car, a virtual visit to the doctor, how you hear a ball spin at the World Series,
pork for whiskey lovers, the $400 billion warplane, and the best telescopes for backyard stargazing.
XX
page 32
Great Unknowns Toilets in skyscrapers, black boxes in cars, and shoes in the airport-security line.
page 25
Interview
page 37
Steven Johnson, the bestselling science and technology author with a new PBS series, explains the evolutionary impact of human innovation, including the connection between Gutenberg’s press and the telescope.
Your guide to the very best of the season, including: • Camping recommendations from a prodigy explorer • The boots you need for every preoccupation • Brand-new antique jackets
2 Oct ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
SPECIAL: Fall Gear
Cover Photo by Philip Friedman. Clothing by J. Crew. Cover story photographs by Russ and Reyn.
P h o t o g r a P h b y D av i D b o W m a n
Cutting live wires with nail clippers
Preamble
22%
Air-conditioner history
20%
The right way to drive a Corvette
WhaT You WroTe abouT A highly scientifc, fully comprehensive look at your response to our July/August issue, in helpful bar-graph form.
18%
“The New American Soldier”
15%
“Good Enough” not being good enough
15%
Syria’s chemical weapons
Weekend Woodworking to Envy
10%
We’d been asking you guys on Twitter to share with us your weekend projects, using the hashtag #PMDIY, over the course of the summer. Our favorite is a bit of repurposing from @sadhubob: “i had two Polynesian heads (i don’t know why) and a mess of scrap wood. so, a tiki bar for the patio.”
The Popular Mechanics Science-Fiction Literary Panel in assembling our list of the best sci-f books of all time (page 92) we consulted eight highly credentialed enthusiasts on what they felt must be included. We asked how they got into sci-f: James Gunn, founding director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, University of Kansas i’d met sam Merwin Jr., the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which bought my frst story, “Paradox,” in 1949 at a convention in anaheim, california.
Christopher McKitterick, director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, University of Kansas robert heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo got me started reading sci-f, and inspired my teenage eforts at building liquidfuel rockets. Charles de Lint, book reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and science Fiction i can’t remember the frst sci-f book i read, but it was probably by andre norton, whom i came to by way of her fantasy novel Huon of the Horn. Annalee Newitz, editor in chief, io9.com i used to teach an american studies course at uc berkeley, and would
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often begin the section on environmentalism in the ’70s by teaching the movie Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Ash Kalb, cofounder of sci-f bookstore Singularity & Co. William gibson’s Neuromancer is one of the books that put me on the path to becoming a recovering lawyer who runs a science-fction bookshop. Cici James, cofounder of sci-f bookstore Singularity & Co. My now-husband won me over by posting witty yet knowing comments on my then-nightly Star Trek: The Next
Generation Facebook updates. in our case, cupid’s arrow was more like a phaser beam. Hildy Silverman, publisher of space and time magazine i’ve been hooked ever since i read The Book of Three, by lloyd alexander, which was actually the frst book of his Chronicles of Prydain. Veronique Greenwood, science writer and sci-f fan i had a teacher in high school who encouraged me to aim high for colleges because he’d caught me reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr., under my desk.
In MeMorIaM: a PIg A Duroc pig passed away in July during the course of reporting this month’s food story (“How to Raise a Whiskey Pig,” page 20). The cause was dinner. The pig, 20 weeks old, was raised happily among 25 brothers, sisters, and cousins in a large open pen in Woodward, Iowa, where he enjoyed—we assume— rolling in mud and the fne taste of Templeton whiskey mash. Though he often kept to himself, he became known for his generosity toward others, serving himself up as the main course at Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard’s Little Goat Diner, in Chicago. He lives on in our hearts, and stomachs.
i l l u s t r at i O n by d i e g O Pat i ñ O
The non-habit forming sleep-aid from the makers of NyQuil.TM Sleep easily. Sleep soundly. And wake refreshed.
Preamble
LETTERS Welcome Back I just read the latest issue (July/August), and all I can say is wow! This took me back to when I was 10 years old and couldn’t wait for my dad’s next issue to arrive. As the years passed, I always said one day I’ll subscribe to that magazine again. And now that I’m in my 70s and a new subscriber, I’m enjoying it as much as I did 60 years ago. This issue, particularly, was excellent. Betsy Decker location Withheld
an even Better knot You provided your readers a great service by highlighting the trucker’s hitch knot (Skills, July/August). But I think it is much more useful if it is ended with a rolling hitch instead of the series of halfhitches. It allows for an easy and secure way of tightening or loosening the tension on the overall knot, useful since loads may shift once underway. tom maDDen Junior staff commodore, bahia corinthian yacht club corona Del Mar, ca
the trucker’s hitch, improved.
We Are Very Sorry Your font and background colors are quite artistic, but the contrast is too low, making the smaller font size difcult to read. Here are some examples: Virtually impossible to read. Marginally readable. DaviD mcclune scottsdale, aZ
What’s that line aBout Denial Being a river in egypt? I am somewhat dismayed by the article pertaining to the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons (“The Neutralizer,” July/August), which, it claims, “. . . the Syrian government used to kill its own people . . .” I have followed this situation fairly closely and have yet to come across information, other than what I interpret as rhetoric released by U.S. government ofcials, indicating the Syrian government is to blame for the attacks that spurred this disarmament. eric morton Vancouver, bc
Editor’s note: Reports from outside the U.S. indicated that government forces did carry out chemical attacks, even if they were without President Bashar al-Assad’s permission. And as recently as May chlorine attacks by the government were taking place. [continued on page 10]
The Instructables Gadget and Accessories Hack Winner in the spring we teamed up with instructables to hold a Gadget hacking and accessories contest. the grandprize winner was Doug urquhart, who, via some 3D printing, modifed his original time-lapse rig—an eMotimo tb3 motion controller and a Dynamic Perception stage One dolly—with lightweight carbon fber and nylon to make hauling his setup into the wilderness easier and to increase battery life. urquhart and his rig had just returned from six days in high sierra backcountry when he got word he was a fnalist. he ofered a brief and humble acceptance speech: “this was a good way to come back to civilization.”
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Four Questions for New Automotive editor ezra Dyer Interviewed by Ezra Dyer 1. how long have you been reading Popular Mechanics, you handsome devil? i dug through my back issues and found one from October 1987—the 1988 new cars issue. headline: “horsepower War heats up!” When i bought this issue, i was 9 years old. 2. and how hot was that horsepower war? the section on cadillac’s new V-8 mentions that with 155 hp, the new eldorado will do 0 to 60 in just over 10 seconds, which is “the kind of performance cadillac drivers have missed for more than a decade.” the ’80s were a good time to not be old enough to drive. 3. how many cars have you driven in the past 10 years? at least 600 in the course of writing for automobile magazine, men’s Journal, the new york times, and esquire. high points: camaro concept car, 1988 lamborghini countach, and the 2,700-hp cigarette racing team 46’ rider XP. Doing 100 mph in a boat is like doing 200 mph in a car. 4. Which new technology featured in that 1987 issue do you wish you had now? Probably “the intelligent typewriter—you Dictate, it types.” two things i have in common with my 9-year-old self: We love cars and don’t know how to type.
i l l u s t r at i O n by P e t e r O u M a n s K i
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Preamble
editor’s note
SINce 1902
Ryan d’agostino Editor In Chief
I lIve In an old house (have I told you about my old house?) that my wife and I are attempting to renovate and restore, room by room. It’s really fun and inspiring and satisfying and often a pain in the head. But we love it. I recently spent the better part of three days over two weekends sizing, painting, and hanging a wooden screen door. Nearly killed me—every angle of the frame was diferent, requiring endless hand planing and shimming. It wouldn’t close right, the paint wasn’t drying quickly enough, I stripped a screw, the kids kept asking when I was gonna be done. It looks great now, but in the end it’s . . . a screen door. Guests pretend to be impressed, but I admit it doesn’t look all that impressive. It’s a screen door. Nearly killed me, though. The door was one of those home improvements where you wonder if it’s worth the hours shaved of your life. Very diferent from the tremendous home improvements we’ve gathered in this issue. For the most part, you just buy them, put them in your home, and your life is immediately improved. We live in a golden age of home technology. Not necessarily the smart-home, Internet-of-things products—I’m not sure yet how to feel about those. (Do I need to be able to control my washing machine with my iPhone?) I’m talking about new dishwashers that recycle water, new vacuum cleaners that could turn vacuuming into a hobby, innovations in upholstery that let you pour mud on the couch, no problem. Mold-fghting wood foors, plasma-quality projection TVs, and toasters that can roast a chicken. Ways to improve rooms you didn’t know needed improving. For anyone who cares about the space they live in, it’s an irresistible 14 pages. With all the time you’ll save by not hanging screen doors, you’ll need something to read. So, you’ve got Chris Solomon’s magnifcent story about a giant machine constructed by heroic men that is stuck in the mud 60 feet beneath the city of Seattle, where it is being resurrected by other heroic men (“The Tunnel,” page 78). You’ve got a historic list of essential science-fction books—not the nerdy ones but the kind everyone should read, even people who don’t think they like science fction (“Science Fiction for Everyone,” page 92). You’ve got a groundbreaking report on car safety by our new automotive editor, Ezra Dyer, a story that will make you feel safer just knowing what new technology is showing up on American roads (“The State of Car Safety,” page 86). And you’ve got an exclusive look at how a network-TV crew wires a ballpark to capture the sounds of the World Series (“The Wired World Series,” page 13), which, as it turns out, is fascinating. (A shoutout to my brother-in-law, sound man Joe Carpenter, for all his help on that one.) And a lot of other stuf. So, enjoy the issue. And keep in touch—unless you’re replacing a door, in which case, God be with you.
RYAN D’AGOSTINO, eDiTOr in chieF
unRelaTed: ReadeR TIP of The MonTh I used a car jack with a book on top to hoist a garbage disposal up to the bottom of the sink. It made tightening the large nut an easy, one-person job. JIM FREEMAN, Peachtree City, GA
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Design Director Rob Hewitt Executive Editor David Howard Deputy Editor Peter Martin Managing Editor Michael S. Cain Editorial Director David Granger editorial Special Projects Director Joe Bargmann Senior Editors Roy Berendsohn, Andrew Del-Colle, Jacqueline Detwiler Automotive Editor Ezra Dyer Senior Associate Editor Davey Alba Associate Editors David Agrell, Matt Goulet Copy Chief Robin Tribble Research Director David Cohen Assistant to the Editor In Chief Theresa Breen Editorial Interns Kevin Dupzyk, Niko Vercelletto art Associate Art Director Kristie Bailey Interactive Designer/Animator Anthony Verducci Designer Jack Dylan Contributing editor Wylie Dufresne Photography Director of Photography Allyson Torrisi Associate Photo Editor Devon Baverman editorial Board of advisers Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11 astronaut) Shawn Carlson (LabRats) David E. Cole (Center for Automotive Research) Saul Griffith (Otherlab) Thomas D. Jones (NASA astronaut) Dr. Ken Kamler (microsurgeon) Gavin A. Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) Amy B. Smith (MIT) Daniel H. Wilson (roboticist) Wm. A. Wulf (National Academy of Engineering) Imaging Digital Imaging Specialist Steve Fusco PopularMechanics.com Online Editor Andrew Moseman Online Producer Carl Davis Online Associate Darren Orf Popular Mechanics Interactive Producer Jeff Zinn Published by hearst Communications, Inc. Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Oficer William R. Hearst III Chairman Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman hearst Magazines division David Carey President Michael Clinton President, Marketing & Publishing Director John P. Loughlin Executive Vice President & General Manager Editorial Director Ellen Levine Publishing Consultant Gilbert C. Maurer Publishing Consultant Mark F. Miller
PhOTOgraPh by russ anD reyn
Kraft Foods is not affiliated with Keurig, Inc. KEURIG and K-CUP are registered trademarks of Keurig, Inc.
Preamble
Since 1902
Cameron Connors Publisher; Chief Revenue Oficer
Who We Follow
[continued from page 6]
JOHN, ROy, AND tHE MyStERy Of tHE Butt GAuGE I bought this tool at a yard sale but don’t know what it is. Do you?
Four like-minded accounts worth adding to your Instagram feed. Plus, our own: @popmechmag. (Clockwise from top right.)
John Ruckman Yreka, ca
the butt gauge doesn’t do what you think it does.
Your yard-sale discovery stirred up a bit of nostalgia for longtime home editor Roy Berendsohn. What you picked up is the famous Stanley butt gauge.
Here’s Roy: Butt hinges are used for architectural woodwork and doors. The No. 95 butt gauge was widely used in its day to scribe hinge thickness and width. The carpenter would then carefully chisel out the hinge mortise along the scribed lines left by the gauge. The gauge is from a diferent era of carpentry, when men sawed and planed their lumber by hand. Any American carpenter who practiced his craft between 1920 and 1950 would have been familiar with it. As a teenager I remember these carpenters in New England. People looked on these men as somewhat quaint anachronisms. But their carpentry was good and has stood the test of time.
POPulAR MeCHAniCS, FOR KiDS I know dry ice is carbon dioxide in a solid state and I know it changes directly to a gas, skipping the liquid form. But is there any way at all to make liquid carbon dioxide? Landon James B., age 14 lynden, Wa
• NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, @nasagoddard: space! solar fares! rockets! • The Hudson Company, @thehudsoncompany: Wood. Beautiful, old wood. • Cedar Point, @cedarpoint: roller coasters. Beautiful old and new roller coasters. • Adam Senatori, @adamsenatori: a pilot–photographer posting loads of fantastic aerial shots.
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sure. You just need a whole lot of pressure and antarctic temperatures. according to Jefrey reimer, chair of university of california, Berkeley’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, if you put dry ice in a pressurized container at minus 68 F, and pump the air pressure up to 100 psi— about the same as inside a skinny bike tire—you’ll see solid
1 0 Oc t ob er 2 014_ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
cO2 melt into a liquid. not exactly something you can do in the kitchen. at normal temperatures and at 75 times the earth’s atmospheric pressure, carbon dioxide enters a state where it behaves as both a liquid and a gas. scientists like reimer are actually working on ways to separate cO2 from powerplant emissions, pressurize it to that in-between state, and then pump the cO2 into depleted oil wells.
National Director, Integrated Sales Estee Cross Executive Director, Group Marketing Lisa Boyars Advertising Sales Offices New York Integrated Account Manager Joe Dunn 212/649-2902 Integrated Account Manager Alex Gleitman 212/649-2876 Assistant Jennifer Zuckerman 212/649-2875 Los Angeles Integrated California Sales Manager Anne Rethmeyer 310/664-2921 Integrated Account Manager Amy Suprenant 949/610-0458 Integration Associate Michelle Nelson 310/664-2922 Chicago Integrated Midwest Director Spencer J. Huffman 312/984-5191 Assistant Yvonne Villareal 312/984-5196 Detroit Integrated Regional Director Mara Filo 248/614-6055 Integrated Sales Director Mark Fikany Assistant Toni Starrs 248/614-6011 Hearst Magazines Sales, LLC Dallas Patty Rudolph 972/533-8665 PR 4.0 Media Direct Response Advertising Sales Manager Brad Gettelfinger 212/649-4204 Account Manager John Stankewitz 212/649-4201 Marketing Solutions Art Director George Garrastegui, Jr. Marketing Director Jason Graham Associate Marketing Director Bonnie Harris Senior Marketing Manager Amanda Luginbill Integrated Marketing Manager Rob Gearity Integrated Marketing Coordinator Holly Mascaro Administration Advertising Services Director Regina Wall Advertising Services Coordinator Aiden Lee Executive Assistant to the Publisher Ilona Bilevych Production Group Production Director Karen Otto Group Production Manager Lynn Onoyeyan Scaglione Associate Production Manager Karen Nazario Circulation Consumer Marketing Director William Carter Hearst Men’s Group Senior Vice President & Publishing Director Jack Essig Associate Publisher & Group Marketing Director Jill Meenaghan General Manager Samantha Irwin Executive Director, Group Strategy & Development Dawn Sheggeby Digital Marketing Director Kelley Gudahl Executive Director, Digital Advertising Bill McGarry East Coast Digital Account Manager Cameron Albergo East Coast Digital Account Manager Drew Osinski Digital Account Manager Amanda Marandola Digital Account Manager Kameron McCullough Digital Marketing Manager Anthony Fairall
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how your world works WARPLANES
SHIPWRECKS
VIRTUAL DOCTORS
The Wired World Series how the sounds of the year’s biggest games get from the batter’s box to your living room. By Paul John Scott
P h O t O g r a P h by b e n g O l d s t e i n
FALL GEAR
MLB on Fox crews attach microphones (inset) to all bases used in the Fall Classic.
O c t o b er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M ec h a n i c s 1 3
How Your world works
sports
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D
During the 2013 WorlD SerieS, Red Sox slugger David Ortiz crushed a pitch for what looked like a certain grand slam. But Cardinals outfelder Carlos Beltrán sprinted back, stuck his glove over the right-feld wall, and made a catch that was all the more memorable for the sound of the player plowing into the fence like a hay bale thudding into a wagon. Watch this year’s Series and, while you may not see Ortiz, you’re sure to hear similar on-feld reverberations, thanks to an elaborate, multiday microphone-rigging campaign by the audio production team at MLB on Fox. The crew has transformed our expectations about watching live sports. It’s helmed by a soft-spoken, 44-year-old New York native, Joe Carpenter. The Super Bowl, March Madness, Nascar— Carpenter and his team have wired all of them, delivering a signature hybrid of background noise and sounds you would never hear even if you were the person making them. Over the past 15 years Carpenter’s crew has taken home seven Emmys for live baseball on Fox. In an exclusive tour, the network gave Popular 1. AudiovisuAl Mechanics access to their input terminAls work during the July 15 AllNewer parks are outftStar Game at Target Field in ted with terminals for three-pin XLR cables Minneapolis, which serves that snake to broadcast as a test run for the World trucks in rainbows Series. We watched as of color-coded, rubberencased fber. they installed hardware for 60 streams of sound and as 2. Wireless Carpenter mixed the game— routing stAtion Radio-frequency listena hyperkinetic process of ing stations—clusters active listening and controlof antennas that collect room manipulation. Follow signals from eight wireless microphones along and you’ll never situated in hard-to-wire listen to a slide into third places around the park— the same way again. are placed near both dugouts. Sennheiser 5000 black globes and steel antenna plates are
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Fun sounds picked up by the home-plAte microphones: DEREK
3. hoMe PlaTe Three parabolic microphones are positioned in padded boxes camoufaged to look like
part of the stadium. “If a batter has pine tar on the handle,” Carpenter says, “you can hear his gloves going thlop, thlop, thlop.” 4. bases Custom-designed bags contain batterypowered wireless microphones and transmitter systems. To keep base runners from kicking the receivers,
9
the heads are aimed at the outfeld. 5. bullPens To grab the sounds of a pitcher warming up in the bullpen, an 8-inch shotgun microphone is attached along the railing. 6. croWd noise This is captured by pairs of microphones on the frst deck aimed at frst and third base, above the left- and right-feld foul poles, in center (for hometheater rear-surround content), and near the broadcast booth. 7. dugouT Small plates holding mics are placed atop
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R SAyS, “yOU CAN ACTUALLy HEAR THE BALL SPINNING IN THE AIR.” • THE HIT TER KNOCKING DIRT OUT Of HIS SPIKES WITH A BAT • I L L U S T R AT I O N By F r a n c e s c o M u z z i
secured on railings to scoop up sounds and send them via fber cable to a broadcast truck, where another device digitizes the signal before it’s sent up to the broadcast booth.
dugouts to capture player conversation. This chatter can be broadcast in replays after MLB oficials approve it. 8. Warning Track Microphones ring the base of the outfeld wall at 15- to 20-foot intervals in dozens of locations. They capture everything from outfelders’ footsteps to players hitting walls. 9. Manned Parabolic Mics In the stands behind frst base and third, two techs carry “manned parabs,” or parabolic dishes, ready to catch the sound of foul balls and pick-of throws. 10. Foul Poles “We always want one on the foul poles,” says feld technician Anthony “Rug” LoMastro. “If that ball hits, we want to hear the pole going boing.” 11. Wired Players Three or four players per game may opt to wear a wireless microphone—but again, for replay only, after an MLB review.
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conversaTions We Wish We could have heard:
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JOSÉ CANSECO AND MARK McGWIRE, 1992
DAVID ORTIZ AND MANNy RAMIREZ, 2005
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REGGIE JACKSON AND BILLy MARTIN, 1977
E
JETER BLOWING IN HIS CUPPED HAND • THE PITCHER GRUNTING WHEN RELEASING A PITCH • “If IT’S A HUMID DAy,” CARPEN T
How Your world works
military
The Inevitable F-35 It’s easy to pile on when it comes to history’s most star-crossed military project. But this one might just be worth the aggravation. By Joe Pappalardo The F-35 pictured above received a robotic spray of radarbafling coating along the leading edge of its wing and air intake.
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THIS MONTH IN WEAPONS PROLIFERATION: ANTIAIRcRAFT MISSILES The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 made a lot of people wonder just how many surface-to-air missiles of that magnitude are lying around. But the weaponry used in that tragedy rarely leaks beyond oficial militaries. “I know of no other case where a nonstate group has successfully used this system,” says Matt Schroeder, a weapons-proliferation expert with the Federation of American Scientists. A bigger concern: simple-to-use shoulder-fred missiles that can target planes at up to 11,000 feet; they have multiplied during the conficts in Syria and Ukraine.
I
f we can all agree that war is hell, then how might we think of life at the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, Texas, where people toil to build the world’s most expensive war machine? You might reasonably picture it as a kind of purgatory. The F-35 stealth warplane is without precedent in military history—maybe any kind of history. The Pentagon frst sought bidders for it 18 years ago; development began when Bill Clinton was still saddled with the presidency. Cost overruns and failed tests and delays accrued steadily, until the plane became a $400 billion piñata. That cost is nearly twice initial estimates, and full production might not ramp up until 2019, which is six years late. But if you stood on the factory foor with some aircraft engineers, as I did recently on a company tour, you would not sense any existential torment. You would see, instead, the workers studying part of a door that opens when an F-35B swivels an exhaust nozzle toward the ground
to hover. The part was structurally sound, but they had noted a little too much material in places—just enough to generate returns from millimeter-wave radar. They pivoted to a screen displaying a freshly made 3D scan captured by a four-lensed white-light imager. The image is essentially a topographical map of the part and can distinguish diferences of a thousandth of an inch, the same scale on which eye surgeons operate. One of the engineers would later touch the part with a sander. “It’s like sanding a Goodyear tire,” says Rick Luepke, a technical fellow and applications engineer. Up and down the production line, applications engineers use 3D scanners to inspect parts, and workers in white suits apply tape between spray jobs by robots to ensure that the tapering of the coating is microscopically smooth. Once all the tinkering is dialed in and tested, the plant will deliver almost a plane a day; now it takes 10 days. By 2037, 3,000 F-35s may be fying worldwide. If all this comes to pass, every branch of the U.S. armed services and several key allies will have an aircraft capable of processing data from on- and of-board sensors that allow pilots to see, shoot, and evade almost anything in the air or on the ground. All the new technology is designed to save time and money in full production. The cost overruns won’t be recouped, but the price per plane is on track to eventually shrink from $100 million to $80 million. And the tools and tricks developed for the F-35 will migrate to other Air Force programs, including a planned bomber and unmanned aircraft. Here in purgatory, Luepke and his colleagues know innovation is often stop-and-go and nonlinear. But the battle for the right to exist has been won. For them, every day the improvements come in thousandth-of-an-inch increments. But those increments add up.
COMFORT NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD T H E
N E W
L E E
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DESIGNED D ES TO MOVE WITH YOU
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S E R I E S
2014
The La Belle, now dry, is reassembled for the last time at the museum.
A Ship in a Box
The ship is disassembled and placed in polyethylene glycol.
2011
Freeze-dryi n g
b egins.
SHIPWRECKS
How Your world works
A rendering of the La Belle as she looked when she set sail. The blue portion is all that remains today.
Three centuries after it sank of the Gulf Coast, a French supply vessel is being resurrected. At least it comes with instructions. By Jacqueline Detwiler
The La Belle wrecks in Matagorda Bay. 1995
The Texas Historical Commi ss
1997
1 8 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
2002
The La Belle is reassembled for the frst time, in water.
1686
io n confrms the fnd.
out the sodden pieces, the team soaked them in polyethylene glycol, a waxy derivative of petro‑ leum that slowly displaces water. When gas prices shot up in 2008, driving up the cost of the chemical, they bought an 8 x 40–foot vacuum– freeze dryer—the same kind used in making Lucky Charms—to remove the rest. Throughout the process, the timbers could have warped or shrunk, making reassembly impossible. It took a long time. The fnal reconstruction will be completed in November 2015, nearly 20 years after the La Belle was found. “Fortu‑ nately, you’re not dealing with something like the Mona Lisa,” Fix says. “You’re dealing with something that’s a little bit hardier, and you set about to aesthetically repair it as best as possible.” In this case that means using state‑ of‑the‑art tools, the most important of which has been in use since the frst time the La Belle was built: a hammer.
2001
arts from France for the New World.
I
n a WIntER StoRm In 1686 a 54‑foot French frigate carrying a skeleton crew on an exploratory mission of the Texas coast sank in Matagorda Bay, halfway between Galveston and Corpus Christi. For more than 300 years it sat and decomposed, but portions of its keel and hull were mummifed in 6 feet of mud. When those diminished but very important remains were raised in 1996, preservationists had an aston‑ ishing piece of good luck almost unheard of in the world of shipwreck rescue: Every important plank of wood had been marked with a Roman numeral, like a model in a box. Jim Bruseth, one of the research archaeologists leading the $17 million efort to recover and rebuild the frig‑ ate’s remains—which are currently in some 600 pieces—calls it a ship kit. Starting this month Bruseth, along with Peter Fix, assistant director at the Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation at Texas A&M University, will reassemble what’s left of the La Belle at the Bullock Texas State His‑ tory Museum, in Austin. They’ll ft the ship’s remaining timbers around a carbon‑fber endo‑ skeleton, using dowels in places to shore up the original joints. They’ll work outward from the keel the same way the French shipbuilders would have, determining what goes where using historical drawings as well as sketches and photographs of the original fnd. They’ll also use those Roman numerals, instructions from the French designers who planned to have the ship carried to the New World in a storage bay. Even with that guidance this is no fea‑market cofee‑table restoration, but at least it will be less risky than what they had to do frst. To dry
boratory at Texas A&M University.
The La Belle dep
La
1684
Portions of the hull and more than 1 million artifacts are sent to the Conservation Researc h
i l l u s t r at i O n by b r O w n b i r d d e s i g n
Idle to Redline. Change for the better. Switch and you could save with GEICO.
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How Your world works
eating & drinking
How to Raise a Whiskey Pig
It was only a matter of time. By Rachel Z. Arndt
O
ne day last year, while sitting at a bar with coworkers, Scott Bush, founder of Templeton Rye, a superior spirit aged in the Iowa cornfields, had an epiphany: He should raise a batch of pigs on spent rye mash, the leftover grains from the whiskey-making process. That way, the rich favor of the mash—and, by extension, of Templeton Rye—might fnd its way into the hogs’ fesh. And then the pork—and the bacon!—would take on the favor of whiskey. Maybe it was the booze, but it sounded like genius at the time. Scientifcally, Bush’s idea made sense, sort of. Just as the ham from black Iberian pigs gets its unique favor from the acorns they eat, these pigs would get their own favor from the mash, which in Templeton’s case is made up of 90 percent rye and 10 percent barley. To create the pigs’ diet, Bush recruited Mark Bertram, who holds a doctorate in the extremely specifc feld of swine nutrition from Iowa State University. “The process is pretty straightforward from a biological standpoint,” Bertram says. “The pig is breaking down the nutrients and rebuilding them into muscle.” It’s the diferent fatty acids in the food source—here, the mash—that can change the taste. Breed matters, too, so Bush and Bertram chose Duroc pigs, a heritage breed known for its tender, flavorful meat. This past February, 25 piglets began eating their carefully crafted diets as little 50-pound 9-week-olds. A friend of Bush’s raised the reddish-brown, foppy-eared swine on a small family farm in Woodward, Iowa, feeding them 20 percent mash—the upper limit Bertram calculated they could safely consume—combined with corn and soybean meal. The hogs grew fast, doubling in weight every three to fve weeks, until they were 20 weeks old and 210 pounds each. On the last day of their lives, in early July, a heavy rain pattered on the metal roof of the pig barn, located at the end of a remote gravel road. The open pens smelled as expected, but faintly mixed in with the scent of swine and manure was the sweet, molasses-like hint of mash. “It smells wonderful,” Bush says. “They seem to really enjoy it.” Bertram agrees, though in slightly more scien-
20 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
tifc terms: “They’re very adaptable creatures.” The pigs, available for preorder, had all been spoken for, with about half going to restaurants. The verdict: The pork didn’t get you drunk or scream whiskey, but it was fantastic. “There’s no way for anyone to take a bite of the pork and taste that it has 20 percent Templeton mash in the feed,” says Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard, who cooked one of the pigs for a themed dinner at her Little Goat Diner, in Chicago. Still, Izard thought the pork favorful and the fattiness perfect. “If we had made bacon, it would have been beautiful,” she says. One attendee said this after Izard’s dinner: “It was hands down the best-tasting pig I’ve ever eaten.” Considering its inaugural success, Bush doesn’t discount another whiskey-pig program next year. “We’re whiskey makers, not pig farmers,” he says. “But it’s something we’d like to continue.” He’s also considering two pig crops a year, one in summer and one in fall. And though there are no solid plans yet, he’s even talked of expanding to chickens, turkeys, and cows. If so, the menu line writes itself: Whiskey-raised flet mignon wrapped in whiskey bacon. People would order that.
P h O t O g r a P h by a d a M v O O r h e s
did yOu like this stOry? NO
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How Your world works
tv
How to Buy a Car By Spike Feresten On his new show, Car Matchmaker (Tuesday nights at 9 pm Eastern, starting Oct. 14 on the Esquire Network), car buf and comedy writer Spike Feresten (Seinfeld, Letterman, SNL) fnds men in desperate need of new vehicles and gets them into something more appropriate. It’s fun. Like House Hunters for people who can grow a full beard. We asked him for some advice, whether you are buying your next car or just want to assess what you already have.
To improve your life, a car needs to function in it, otherwise you’ll reach that awful moment when you
Fig. 1
bookS
Consumed, by dav i d C ro n e n b e rg
CulturE
have to take your family to the airport and you can’t ft grandma. Never buy the paint. When it comes to vintage or preowned, buy the car frst, not the color. If you can, rent the car you want to buy and live with it for three days. On the third day it either clicks or you get it out of your garage. Instead of traditional carreview websites, go to YouTube. It’s flled with people in their driveways talking about their car: unfltered, unprofessional, and generally awesome. Never buy a beautiful car for a wife who doesn’t care about cars. You’ll be in pain as you watch her destroy it. [Fig. 1] If your kids can take care of a car, reward them. If not, used Pontiac Azteks. Avoid the dealership at all
Fig. 2
costs. Find a consultant and let him do the work for you. People don’t know these guys exist. You call him and tell him what you want. He fnds the car, deals for it, and delivers it to your driveway. You never set foot in the dealership, and the price is usually better. If you do go to a dealership, no pity. Allow yourself 20 minutes to make this transaction. [Fig. 2] Announce it: “Here’s the car I want and the price I want to pay. You have 20 minutes to make that deal or I’m walking away.” Otherwise, they will walk all over you. It happens constantly. That feeling bleeds into the life of the car. You’ll remember that. If it’s a valuable old car, overpay for the best-possible original, low-mileage one out there. You’ll rarely go wrong. You’ll know you’ve done it right if you enjoy being in trafic. [Fig. 3] That’s really it.
Fig. 3
If you’re a fan of director David Cronenberg’s flms (Scanners, The Fly) then you’ll relish his frst novel, Consumed. At the heart of the story are Naomi Seberg and Nathan Math, freelance Web journalists investigating the gruesome death of Célestine Arosteguy and the disappearance of her husband/ potential murderer, Aristide. Add in ample doses of violence, virtual voyeurism, a few dashes of experimental surgery and geopolitical philosophizing, and more than a hint of cannibalism and you’ll get a good sense of the disconnected world that the author has rendered. Admittedly, the various disconnections and indulgences in the novel are often glaring and distracting, but this also seems to be Cronenberg’s point: We’re a society, a world, that fetishizes the latest and most powerful technology, and our unchecked desire for more speed, access, and pixels is isolating us, eating us, consuming our very fesh. — BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON
22 oc t ob er 2 014 _ p o p u l a r m e c h a n i c S
movieS
The Science of Happiness And what that might have to do with Simon Pegg.
I
n the new movie Hector and the Search for Happiness (out Sept. 19), Simon Pegg plays a therapist who goes of in search of his own happiness. If you can get through the early parts, when Hector has the frantic visual structure of a music video, it’s a good movie—funny, thanks to Pegg, with legitimate insights. Like: “Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness.” And: “Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.” Christopher Plummer even shows up dressed like Steve Zissou to tie everything up neatly in the end. In case your troubles can’t be solved with a movie, we asked Elizabeth Dunn, head of the Social Cognition & Emotion Lab at the University of British Columbia, for a few other ways to brighten your mood. Spend money on other people. In an experiment Dunn found that people were “signifcantly happier” after spending unexpected money on someone other than themselves. delay conSumption. Say you’re going on a trip. The larger the gap between when you pay and when you go, the less you feel the stress of having paid for it. Plus, anticipation is an important source of pleasure that’s often overlooked. talk to StrangerS. When you’re around new people, you subconsciously strive to be your best self. Your happier self. have a kid. It may be the comfort of family life and not specifcally the kid, but either way, it’s good for you. Stop worrying about being happy.
Genes determine peak disposition. So if you’re trying everything and still not as happy as you want to be, realize that not everything is under your control, and be grateful for the joy you do have. maybe try the kid thing again.
What could go wrong?
i l l u s t r at i O n s b y pa u l j O h n s O n ( b O O K s, M O V i E s ) , V i C K u l i h i n
The right team can take your business to the next level. The skills and experience veterans gain in the military make them ideal employees in the civilian workforce. The PERSONAL BRANDING RESUME ENGINE translates military experience, skills, training, and honors into relatable job qualiďŹ cations and allows recruiters to search for candidates at no cost. Veterans can use this one-of-a-kind, free online tool to create and share a strong resume with employers nationwide. Take the next step in your search today. Visit
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How Your world works
HEAltH
The Doctor Is Online Now
Telemedicine—visiting your doctor via phone or video chat—has been around for years. But Obamacare may make it a lot more common. Ready? By Joshua A. Krisch
Y
OU WAKE UP one morning with some strange malady and fgure you’d better see your doctor to determine whether it’s something or nothing. But the next open appointment is weeks away, and the thought of going to the ER flls you with dread—the nimbus clouds of germs, the waiting. There may be a third option—one that involves an app, describing your symptoms to a physician, and getting a prescription, all without visiting a doctor’s ofce. That option is known as telemedicine, a term encompassing any remote technology that replaces a doctor’s visit. Could be a videoconferencing diagnosis of a case of shingles. Could be a big-city surgeon talking a small-town doctor through an operation. Or sensors worn by elderly patients that can be monitored from
24 oc t ob er 2 014 _ p o p U l a r m e C h a N I C s
thINgs We WoN’ t mIss aboUt the doCtor’s oFFICe 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
WaItINg-room reVelatIoN that Judge Judy Is stIll oN tV. hearINg the NUrse loUdly aNNoUNCe oUr WeIght. Fear that CoUghINg gUy WIll traNsmIt the FlU. sIt tINg oN CrINkly paper. “does It hUrt WheN I do thIs?” the same paperWork, eVery tIme.
afar. And the trend is growing. In June the American Medical Association released guiding principles on the provision of telemedicine services, including seemingly obvious ideas like having practitioners abide by the same standard of care as in-person services. A recent study by IMS Research estimated that the industry could be worth $6 billion by 2020. And last year three of the nation’s Web-based healthcare companies— Teladoc, MDLive, and American Well—processed over 400,000 interactions online, more than double the amount in 2011. With 32 million Americans becoming insured under Obamacare, telemedicine could help avert a doctor shortage. Telemedicine actually began in the 1960s in tandem with human spacefight. In that era NASA developed monitoring systems to remotely record biometric data, which was beamed to scientists via a telemetric link. Today all you need is a camera on a computer, says Dr. Peter Yellowlees, director of health informatics at the University of California, Davis, who provides remote care to Native American reservation communities. “It’s not technology that’s the barrier,” he says. Not all physicians are on board yet. “It’s really a personal choice that the doctor makes, and for many, it’s an economic issue,” Yellowlees says. Unlike specialists, who do revenue-generating procedures, primary-care physicians get paid by the visit, so some membership providers, like Kaiser Permanente, pay in-network physicians to use their message services. Other doctors choose to practice concierge medicine, which lets consumers add remote services for a fee. But plenty of apps and Web-based companies let you access remote healthcare, with more joining in. Teladoc, MDLive, American Well, and Doctor on Demand are available in most states. Here’s how they work: Determine whether your condition is appropriate for an e-visit—say, the fu, allergies, or sports injuries but not breathing problems or broken bones. (Most websites list what they will and won’t treat online, and whether they’ll accept your insurance.) You’ll upload your medical history. Then you can consult with a doctor licensed in your state, who might prescribe an antihistamine but not an antidepressant. It costs $30 to $50 for minor illnesses and $250 to $350 to see a specialist. And as long as both physicians and patients can recognize when an in-person visit is best, telemedicine is a good thing. As anyone in a long-distance relationship will tell you, the invention of video chat was groundbreaking.
p h o t o g r a p h by a d a m V o o r h e s
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“We’re rigorous about not telling stories people have heard before.”
The King of Cause and Efect Author Steven Johnson on birds and bees, the origin of eyeglasses, and how air conditioning changed politics forever. Interviewed by Joe Bargmann POPULAR MECHANICS: Your new book and PBS show, How We Got to Now, are about the history of various technologies, and the unintended way that one invention can spawn another—and even lead to social change—because of what you call the hummingbird efect. What is that, exactly? STEVEN JOHNSON: I live in a part of California where there are a lot of hummingbirds. I saw them flying around, and I started thinking. Bees and plants co-evolve: Bees go into fowers to get the nectar they need to survive, and they transfer pollen that helps the fowers reproduce. Then this bird shows up and goes through an incredibly elaborate set of evolutionary adaptations to learn how to hover next to a fower, to
i l l u s t r at i O n b y a lva r O ta P i a h i d a l g O
INTERVIEw
How Your world works
extract the nectar. So here you have North to places like Southern Califora relationship between insects and nia, Houston, Phoenix, and Florida. plants, and it ends up transforming I joke that it’s the frst mass migrathe physical structure and function- tion of human beings triggered by a ing of the bird. Something similar home appliance. And then there is happens in the history of tech and a realignment of American politics. ideas. Someone comes up with a Before 1952 only one presidential new technology to solve a problem, and two vice presidential candibut the solution also has an efect on dates hailed from the Sun Belt. From 1952 until Obama, every single winseemingly unrelated felds. PM: One example you cite is the link ning ticket had someone from a Sun between early printing technology Belt state on it. You cannot tell that political story without mentioning and the summer blockbuster. SJ: Right. At the start of the 20th cen- air conditioning. tury, in Brooklyn, a printer was doing PM: Gutenberg’s printing press and full-color magazines. In the sum- the telescope—what’s the link? mer the ink didn’t set up properly. SJ: In a word, glass. In the 15th cenThe printer hired a young engi- tury a glassmaker discovered how to neer, Willis Carrier, to make clear glass. Clerics devise a way to bring who were reading scholthe huMMingbird effect down the temperaarly manuscripts started 3 ture and humidity in using convex pieces of Number of candidates from the room. He built this clear glass to magnify the the Sun Belt for U.S. president and vice president combined, contraption that made text. Gutenberg invents 1900 to 1952. the printing possible. the printing press and all T h e n t h e wo rke r s of a sudden more people were like, “I’m gonna are trying to read and fnd Starting in the early 1950s, a have my lunch in the out they’re farsighted. million air conditioners per year room with the conThe market developed for were bought in the U.S. traption—it’s cool in spectacles and lens makPopulation explodes in the there.” Carrier says, ers cropped up all over Sun Belt, thanks to home air conditioning. “Hmm, that’s interEurope. Before long they esting.” He sets up the think, “What else can I Carrier Corporation, do with these lenses?” which air- conditions They line up two of them 14 movie theaters, pavand discover, “Hey, I see Number of consecutive winning ing the way for the things that are very small, U.S. presidential tickets with a Sun Belt candidate, 1952 to 2008. summer blockbuster. and they seem a lot bigBefore air conditionger.” And then, by aligning ing, a crowded theater was the last the lenses diferently, “Now I can see place you wanted to go. After a/c, things in space!” The telescope and summer movies become part of the the microscope are invented within cultural landscape. 20 years of each other—in the same PM: Air conditioning and politics village in the Netherlands. Amazing. are also related by the hummingbird The story about the printing press is a great example of the hummingbird efect. How? SJ: After World War II air condition- efect: People must wear spectacles ers shrink to window-unit size, and to read, and lenses are used to create central air is developed. This enables the microscope and the telescope. a massive population shift from the These discoveries changed humanity.
O c t o b er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M ec h a n i c s 25
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How Your world works
tech
Fig. 1
Orion Nebula
The Smartest Telescope Wi-Fi-enabled stargazing takes a lot of the work out of astronomy. Which is good. But also not so good. By Peter Martin Astronomy hAs one bIg Problem:
using a telescope is hard. Move it a quarter-inch and suddenly you’re halfway across the sky. you might as well be looking for an ant with 80x binoculars. But the celestron nexstar evolution 8 (above, right), at $1,600, makes things much easier—by doing the searching for you. it has a built-in Wi-Fi network you can connect to through your phone or tablet. All you do is touch the star you want to see on the app and the nexstar takes you there. this is only if you can get it set up, though. to orient the scope, the app
asks you to fnd three bright stars in the viewfnder. problem is, when you maneuver the telescope toward a star, the display changes, so by the time you have the scope oriented correctly the app thinks you’re looking at something diferent. the secret, buried in an instruction book that takes monk-like patience and a ph.d. to understand, is to ignore what you see on your screen during this process. then the nexstar takes over and things fnally get easy. you’ll fnd clusters and nebulae you didn’t even know to look for, and you won’t have to work that hard to do it.
the automatic navigation takes the uncertainty out of stargazing, but it can easily turn you into a spectator. the next logical step would be to wirelessly transfer the image from the scope to your tablet. But then you might as well not be using the telescope in the frst place. you might as well be on google. on the couch. With the telescope in the closet. or not looking at stars (or star images) at all. part of the appeal of stargazing is gaining a respect for the vastness of space by attempting to navigate through it. even if that involves getting lost.
tWo other smArt oPtIons FOR PhOTOGRAPhERS
the sky-Watcher esprit ed 100mm Apo (below, left), at $2,499, uses a feld corrector to fatten the image and has a three-piece lens design that prevents false color. All of which is very important when you’re taking advantage of the scope’s main selling point: it can be hooked up to your dslr, like a 150x zoom lens. your slide shows just got so much better.
FOR DEDICATED BEGINNERS
At $580, the orion starseeker iii 127mm (below, right) costs more than many beginner scopes, but it has the capacity to grow with you. this fully computerized telescope has a 49,000-object database that is searchable by type. the best feature is the touring mode, which takes into account the date, time, and location to show you the best stars. All you do is push a button.
Where Do I PoInt thIs thIng?
A hAndy guide to telescope tArgets: there are plenty of stars to look at, but they’re not all worth the time it takes an amateur stargazer to fnd them. Astronomer tyler nordgren at the university of redlands, in california, suggests starting with the celestial body right in front of your face. go out on a night when there is a half or crescent moon, and point your scope at the line between the dark and light sides. the striking contrast will show of craters like the Kepler (looks like a cup), the eratosthenes (looks like a cup with terraced sides), and the copernicus (looks like a cup with terraced sides and rays coming out of it). When you’re ready for something more dificult, locate orion’s Belt and move south toward where his sword would be. here you’ll fnd the orion nebula (Fig. 1), a rainbow-colored cloud of gas and dust that sits about 1,600 light-years from earth. it can be seen with the naked eye but glows pink and yellow-green through even a low-powered telescope. Mastered that? download a star chart. — NIKO VERCELLETTO
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p h o t o g r a p h s by D av i D L a w r e n c e
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How Your world works
greAT uNkNowNS
Do you have unusual questions about the world and how it works and why stuf 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.
Skyscraper Toilets, Black Boxes, and Airport Feet Q
I’ve heard that if all the toilets in a high-rise like the Sears Tower were fushed at once, it could destroy the building. True?
Couple of things: First, there is no Sears Tower anymore. The iconic 110-story building on Chicago’s Wacker Drive, for a time the world’s tallest, is now known as Willis Tower—an enduring and richly deserved monument to the character portrayed by actor Todd Bridges on Dif’rent Strokes. As to the rest of it: No, a building-wide fush would not harm the structure. Believe it or not, engineers actually consider things like the probability of contemporaneous toilet use. The industry rule of thumb holds that there is a 1 percent chance that a freak simul-fush will occur once over the life of a tall building, though in truth the odds are probably more like zero. Even so, skyscrapers are built to withstand such potential “infrastructural events,” and the design of their plumbing would spread the stress among multiple self-contained zones.
3 2 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
A building like the Willis Tower doesn’t rely on a single plumbing system. If it did, there’d be no water pressure at the top. Instead, a high-rise might employ, say, four individual plumbing systems, each serving a certain portion of the building, and each with its own dedicated water tank kept at optimal pressure to serve the foors within its zone. If every toilet in the building were fushed at once—due, presumably, to some apocalyptic gastrointestinal circumstance best left unimagined (or perhaps related somehow to the play of the Cubs)—each of the four tanks would be stressed, likely resulting in weak fushes, but the building as a whole would be unharmed. The same may not be said of its occupants.
Now that cars have black boxes, do car companies know where we go? Am I being followed? A black box, formally known as an event data recorder (EDR), and informally known as a narc-in-thebox, logs a variety of data regarding the operation of the vehicle in which it’s installed. The good news is that EDRs do not (yet) track your location, nor do they beam realtime information to feds, cops, carmakers, or mothers-in-law. That’s what your smartphone is for. EDRs, standard these days in 96 percent of new cars, do, however, take note of how fast you’re going and whether you’re wearing your seat belt, along with details like the status of your car’s throttle and brakes at any given moment. This is the sort of data most likely to have legal implications, particularly in the event of an accident. Police and lawyers can indeed subpoena the data from your car’s EDR and use it against you. The
info can also make its way into the hands of your insurance company, which might join authorities in taking a dim view of the fact that you thought to apply the brakes only after you’d sailed of the end of the pier toward that passing barge hauling kittens and dynamite.
Are we ever going to be allowed to keep our shoes on through airport security again? Two reasons we’re still shedding our shoes 13 years after scraggly would-be evildoer Richard Reid tried to set of a device in one of his high-tops: For one, intelligence suggests terrorists remain interested in smuggling explosives in shoes. The second is more political than practical: Once instituted, security measures are notoriously difcult to revoke. Who, after all, wants to take responsibility for declaring that shoe bombs are no longer a threat? It’s like promising someone ol’ man Charlie Manson won’t hurt them. Still, there’s hope for the barefoot masses. The Transportation Security Administration is investigating foor-mounted explosives detectors that passengers could walk on completely shod. And authorities are beginning to shift toward what’s known as riskbased security, in which passengers deemed trustworthy would undergo abbreviated screening. (Kids, for instance, have been able to keep their Buster Browns on since 2011.) So hang in there. Now for the real question: Is there ever gonna be a law requiring the guy in the seat behind you to keep his footwear on for the duration of the fight? Talk about a shoe bomb! Thank you very much, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.
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Fall Gear Special IncludIng:
The season’s best camping equipment, our authoritative boot buyer’s guide, and one great-looking jacket.
Parker Liautaud made it to the South Pole last year in a record 18 days, pulling his gear on a sled behind him the whole way.
How to Camp Like a Polar Explorer Last year, at 19, Parker Liautaud became the youngest man ever to ski to the South Pole. In case that didn’t give him enough to talk about at parties, he also owns the speed record in walking the 314 miles from the Ross Ice Shelf (the edge of Antarctica) to the South Pole, completely unaided, with his teammate, Doug Stoup: 18 days. It’s all part of his campaign to raise climate-change awareness—and inadvertently make you feel bad about what you accomplished last weekend. • Over two months we inundated Liautaud with the latest packs, sleeping bags, jackets, and gear—over 100 items—and asked him to pick the best. If it meets the standards of a South Pole explorer, there’s a pretty good chance it’ll get you through a weekend in the Rockies. A box of matches weighs almost nothing. So far, it’s the most reliable item I’ve used.
i l l u s t r at i o n s b y j o e m c k e n d r y
o c t o b er 2 014 _ P o P u l a r m ec h a n i c s 37
Fall Gear Special
water filter Instead of a pump, the Platypus GravityWorks Water Filter System Reservoir 2-Liter Kit ($109) uses gravity to filter water. Hang it up and let it work. parker’s take:
We didn’t use a filter often. We’d just boil snow. But this works really fast, and it only has a few parts, which makes it very light.
tent At 3½ pounds, MSR’s two-person Hubba Hubba NX ($390) packs as easily into a backpack as it does a trunk. And the clip-on system connecting the poles to the tent makes for simple setup. parker’s take:
There are relatively few parts. I could live with this if I was dropped in the wild with it. sleeping bag (hybrid) Eddie Bauer’s Airbender 20 ($799) is the first sleeping bag to seamlessly incorporate a sleeping pad. parker’s take:
pillow The inflatable Sea to Summit Aeros Ultralight Pillow ($35) is made from fibers weighing about the same as a strand of hair and packs down into a tiny stuff sack.
The pad grounds the direction of the sleeping bag so it doesn’t end up twisted around you a few hours after you’ve gotten into it. Plus, having the bag and pad built together saves on space and weight.
parker’s take:
knife Morakniv’s Bushcraft SRT knife ($60) has a half-serrated steel blade and a spine that conveniently works with a fire starter. parker’s take:
This is beyond what I would usually use— more for a rugged explorer with a scraggly beard who hunts deer with his bare hands. But it is such a cool piece of equipment. 38 Oc t ob er 2 0 14 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
camp stove With 10,000 Btu, the Jetboil Joule ($199) boils a liter of water in less than 3 minutes, even when it’s 10 below, forever revolutionizing when and where you can eat chili. parker’s take:
Boiling water so quickly is a big deal, especially when you’re in extreme conditions.
flask The Stanley eCycle ($20) has a seemingly simple innovation: It opens up across the width of the flask for easy cleaning. parker’s take:
This would be good if I wanted to save a little bit of a fancy whiskey for the end of a South Pole expedition. Not that I could. The South Pole is run by the U.S., and I’m still 20. PhOtO graPhs by eric helgas
gut ter credit tk
Normally even tags add weight, but there’s no downside to this. It’s the size of a baby mouse.
Fall Gear Special
gloves SealSkinz Ultra Grip Gloves ($50) are waterproof and lightweight for mild, wet weather—without sacrificing any dexterity. Parker’s take:
If I were headed anywhere other than the South Pole, I’d go for these. It’s nice to have something against your skin that’s not synthetic but still waterproof.
sleePing bag (classic) Sea to Summit Spark SP II ($359) claims to be the world’s smallest down sleeping bag. Parker’s take:
In the South Pole, we folded our sleeping bags on top of our sleds because they were a pain to pack up. This bag is remarkable. It stuffs into a sack the length of my hand. soft shell Mountain Hardwear’s Super Chockstone Jacket ($135) repels water and is extra durable—made not to be bothered by sharp branches off the trail or a scrape through close rocks on a scramble. Parker’s take:
It seems like a minor reason, but the Chockstone has a big, easy-to-use zipper. That’s important. They’re often too small. down jacket Columbia’s new material, TurboDown, combines down and synthetic, capturing the best properties of both. It’s lightweight and warm, like down, but dries out after getting wet, like synthetic. And the Diamond 890 ($325) weighs only 13 ounces. Parker’s take:
It’s a very lightweight jacket for how warm it is. More than that, I really like the way it looks. backPack The First Ascent Sorcerer ($499) pack is made out of a lightweight military-grade fiber that’s said to be as strong as Kevlar. Parker’s take:
Unlike most packs, this one has plenty of pockets. And bigger buckles, which, from my experience, are always easier to manage.
A Few Suggestions for the Future What a South Pole explorer would like to see in gear. By Parker Liautaud
headlamP You don’t need the same amount of light at dusk as you do at midnight. The Petzl Tikka RXP ($85) reads light conditions with a sensor and dims or brightens on its own. Parker’s take:
The reactive lighting really helps save power. It’s worth spending the few extra bucks.
I can’t stand backpacks that have straps laid across the main zipper. You can’t unzip all around the pack without stopping and pulling the zipper underneath a strap. When your backpack is your home, that gets really irritating.
Most zippers, especially on sleeping bags, need tags to make pulling them closed easier. For all my stuf for the South Pole, I looped a string on every zipper.
People want to be able to travel with their tech. Backpacks really need to start having a waterproof pocket made specifcally for a tablet or smartphone.
Little things add up fast. Strike igniters, compasses, knives, watches. Maybe you want a titanium spoon instead of the plastic one. Don’t spend 30 extra dollars for a feature on a $5 tool. You won’t miss it if you don’t have it.
Fall Gear Special
Popular Mechanics Boot Selector The best new boots of the season (and a couple of classics) for every man.
You Are: A MountAineer You won’t feel complete until you’ve hiked all of Colorado’s 14ers. You see no problem with going to sleep at 8 pm, and can usually fnd all of the ingredients for campfre tostadas in your backpack. All of your cofee cups are made of metal. Your boots: ( 1 ) Vasque Eriksson GTX Backpacking Boots; $220 The struggle with most
4 3
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hiking boots is fnding a balance between support and comfort. A boot that will get you and a heavy pack up a rocky slope isn’t going to feel good. And a boot that feels good isn’t going to get you up anything tougher than a groomed path. But thanks to a higher leather cuf and increased padding on the chassis in the sole, the Eriksson is one of the frst rigid shoes that wears like a sneaker. You get all the support you need with none of the ankle pain and blood.
Your boots: ( 3 ) Red Wing 875 Moc Toe; $260 At 6 inches high, the 875s are 2 inches shorter than Red Wing’s classic 877s. Which means you have nearly the same protection but can get in and out of them with less work. They break in quickly, they’re comfortable enough to wear all day, and the minimal tread reduces the amount of mud you can track into the house. Plus, your grandfather wore them.
You Are: A tinkerer You celebrated retiling the kitchen by drinking a home-brewed beer on the porch that you built yourself. You may not always know exactly what you’re doing, but you know that you are not going to pay some guy to redo the bathroom. Your boots: ( 2 ) Wolverine Renton EPX; $175 Waterproof, insulated, abrasion-resistant, and tough enough to withstand any predicament you may get yourself into. The dual-layer foam sole swaddles your foot in a surprising amount of comfort for something not called a slipper and has a springiness that claims to return energy to you with every step. You’ll notice.
You Are: An outlAW (in spirit, At leAst) You’re up for any road trip as long as you’re the one driving. Your lifelong goal is to visit all the state parks. Your drink is a beer and a shot. You have unironically used the word hog to describe a motorcycle. Your favorite color is leather. Your boots: ( 4 ) Norton Rise; $230 Two British heritage brands—Norton and Clarks—collaborated to make a pair of boots that look and feel as good on a motorcycle as they do at the ofice. (Seriously, try them with a gray suit.) They even added a reinforced panel over the spot where your toes hit the gearshift. Also works great on bar-stool rungs.
You Are: A WoodsMAn You prefer to eat animals you’ve killed yourself— accompanied by a nice cabernet, if possible. You know the diference between a duck feed call and a duck comeback call and can perform either on command. You’re thinking of doing something about that woodpile before an animal moves in.
p h o t o g r a p h by d o n p e n n y
History You Can Wear The master of heritage clothes gets his hands on your—and your dad’s—favorite jacket.
The C.C. Filson ColleCTion Including the Work Cape Jacket ($685)
F
ilson, the 117-year-old Seattle company that started out as the outftter for Washington’s timber loggers and has since become the standby for just about everyone who goes outside, is taking a great leap forward this fall—by looking back. The storied American label has partnered with British designer and historian Nigel Cabourn, who’s known among the luxury-fashion crowd for his own brand of meticulously researched World War I– and World War II– style outerwear. (For his collection, inspired by Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1912 South Pole expedition, Cabourn pored over photos from the trek, sourced archival jackets, tracked down original materials, P h O t O g r a P h by c h a r l i e s h u c k
and resurrected pieces that hadn’t existed for 100 years.) Together they’ve created the C.C. Filson Collection, a special, historically minded line of fall jackets inspired by the Filson archive. Our favorite from the collection, the Work Cape Jacket, is based on a 1930s Filson Cruiser that Cabourn and Filson CEO Alan Kirk tracked down in a vintage shop in Japan. The new coat, like the original, has mismatched pocketing and is layered with water-repellent waxed-cotton fabric. Cabourn added his own twist, replacing buttons on the upper half with World War II–era clip closures that you’d typically fnd on a freman’s jacket, making it easier to open and close the jacket with gloves on.
He switched out the original cotton-canvas base and lining with extra-warm wool from Pendleton, the Oregon-based mill that has been churning out classic American blankets longer than Filson’s been making jackets. As a fnal touch, the label inside each jacket is a replica of the one stitched on the company’s frst coats 100 years ago, and signed by Cabourn himself. The collection is still very much a part of the Filson brand your grandpa swore by. The jackets are manufactured by the same workers in the same Seattle facility. And they can take a beating as well as anything else Filson makes. Because there’s no point in wearing something with so much history if you can’t imbue it with a little of your own. O c t o b er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M ec h a n i c s 4 1
carS UP AHEAD: 44
48 50
BY EZRA DYER
Luxury performance for a bargain price. How the Ram 3500 can tow 30,000 pounds. The best car you can buy for $20,000.
AEV JEEP WRANGLER
The Toughest Jeep That rock? Don’t worry about that rock. North Carolina’s Uwharrie National Forest is laced with of-road-vehicle trails, the most notorious of which, Daniel, is rated extremely difcult. Daniel’s vehicle-mangling brutality is such that the park plans to fll in some of the more treacherous ledges, smoothing out the boulder-strewn ascent to render the terrain more accessible. Lucky for me, they haven’t done that yet, because I’m here with the American Expedition Vehicles JK350. And it doesn’t need any help.
P h o t o g r a P h b y N at h a N I E L W E L C h
o c t o b er 2 0 1 4 _ p o p u l a r m ec h a n i c s 4 3
carS AEV is best known for building six-fgure dream trucks, turning Jeeps into Hemi-powered monsters such as the Brute Double Cab. But the company also builds more modest machines like the JK350, a thoroughly modifed Jeep Wrangler Rubicon that doesn’t tread on Aston Martin fnancial territory. The package starts at $14,897 and brings a 3.5-inch suspension lift, front and rear bumpers, a Warn winch, new wheels, and 35-inch BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain tires. There are also plenty of AEV badges so your friends know you didn’t just bolt on a cheap lift kit from Slappy’s Jack’R’Up. Matt Feldermann, AEV’s marketing coordinator, delivered the JK350 to North Carolina by driving it roughly 700 miles from the company’s Detroit headquarters. Which brings me to the frst revelation about the AEV-modifed Rubicon: Despite its upgraded of-road gear, it’s designed to mind its manners on pavement too. The suspension kit includes components that correct the steering geometry to lower the vehicle’s roll center, minimizing the lateral head snap that can afict people in tall vehicles. When Feldermann hands over the keys for the hour-long drive to the trail, he says, “Don’t be afraid to throw it into some corners.” This might be the frst time anyone’s ever said that about a Wrangler. And in fact, the JK350 is admirably composed on back roads—stable and precise. The real action, though, comes when we reach the frst ledge at the bottom of Daniel. It’s a nearly The AEV JK350 excels on- and of-road. vertical slab of rock, maybe 4 feet high and scarred with rubber. In the silt at the base, we see tire tracks from where somebody else simply turned around. But I’m going up and over. That’s the plan, anyway. On the frst few tries I get the front tires up over the ledge but can’t fnd enough traction to maintain momentum. Eventually I gain the confdence to stay on the throttle and the big Jeep claws its way over the obstacle. The rest of the ascent ofers up occasional challenges for the JK350—and more or less constant ones for the stock Wrangler Rubicon we brought for comparison. Out here the stock Wrangler can tag along with the AEV, but let’s just say that the driver will be doing a lot more wincing. Yes, $60,000 is a lot for a Wrangler. But at that price, how many vehicles can comfortably handle a 1,400-mile round trip interspersed with expert-level rock crawling? Just one, the best Jeep that Jeep doesn’t build.
4 4 O c t ob er 2 0 1 4 _ p O p u l a r m e c h a n i c s
CADILLAC CTS-V/LEXUS IS F
THE CASE FOR HOLDING OUT how to get a performance model at a discount.
T
he cadillac cTs and lexus is sedans were all new for 2014, with two major exceptions: the highest horsepower models, the cTs-V and is F. By keeping the previous-generation performance fagships alive for another year, cadillac and lexus buy time to develop their next hypersedans while moving a few more old ones. porsche plays the same game when it introduces a new 911—the Turbos always come later—and BmW has followed this routine with its m cars. The lure for buyers is that these cars are still cool, still top-of-the-foodchain machines. and they’re a great deal too. The V-8-powered 2014 cTs-V sedan starts at $67,125, which means that it actually costs less than a V-6 cTs Vsport premium ($69,995). it might not have the lean athleticism of the new models, but it has an extra honda’s worth of power: 556 hp to the Vsport’s 420. in the case of the lexus, the redesigned is tops out with a V-6. The carryover is F, though, packs a thunderous 5.0-liter V-8, along with 19-inch forged-alloy wheels and skunkworks cred as lexus’s only real factory tuner car. They don’t make ’em like they used to? actually, they do. For one more year.
For dreamers who do.
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carS RAM 3500 RAM 3500
Anatomy of a 30,000-Pound Tow Rating The ram 3500 can tow as much as 30,000 pounds, meaning you’d need a commercial driver’s license to legally use its full capability. Towing several elephants requires plenty of power—the ram’s 6.7-liter cummins inline six pumps out 850 lb-ft of torque. But a big diesel is just one piece of the package. From the lug nuts to the cooling system, a 30,000-pound tow rating requires bumperto-bumper upgrades.
RAM 1500
ENGINE COOLING A 26-inch mechanically driven fan can move as much as 10,000 cubic feet of air per minute (CFM). The 1500 uses a 19-inch electric fan that fows only 3,905 CFM.
TRANSMISSION The Aisin AS69RC transmission is unique to the High-Output Cummins models. Its gear ratios are extra wide, because with 850 lb-ft of torque you can get away with less frequent shifting.
RAM 3500
DRIVESHAFT The 3500’s driveshaft weighs 78 pounds, which is more than three times as heavy as a Ram 1500’s. The driveshaft’s rear U-joints are designed to survive more than 5,000 lb-ft of torque.
REAR DIFFERENTIAL The 11.8-inch rear diferential includes cooling fns to help it shed heat under heavy loads.
REAR SUSPENSION While the Ram 2500 uses coil springs, the 3500 sticks with old-school leaf springs to support payload ratings that top 7,000 pounds. Airbags automatically level the suspension to prevent bottoming out.
4 8 O c t ob er 2 0 1 4 _ p O p u l a r m e c h a n i c s
RAM 1500
BRAKE ROTORS The Ram’s 14.2-inch front rotors dwarf the 1500’s and are even bigger than those on a 640-hp Dodge Viper. Brakes are important when you’re slowing down a load that’s about half the weight of a fully loaded 18-wheeler.
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carS FUTURE TRIVIA QUESTION What was the last car ever to be equipped with a gated shifter? Gated shifters, their gear patterns defned by narrow channels, traditionally signifed a challenging (and probably Italian) machine. The Audi R8 debuted in 2007 with a gated shifter, a nod to the car’s Italian genealogy—an R8 is essentially a Lamborghini Gallardo. And, like the latest Italian supercars, the R8 will soon forgo its gates. Blame the rise of the dual-clutch automated-manual gearbox, which changes gears incredibly fast and smoothly. Of course, the 2015 Audi R8 V-8 is also available with an objectively superior seven-speed dual-clutch transmission. But for now, it still ofers the option to punctuate each downshift with a glorious clack-CLACK!—the metalon-metal echo of an era when exotic cars didn’t try to appeal to everyone.
VOLKSWAGEN GOLF TSI
The Best Car You Can Buy for $20,000
V
olkswagen has sufered an identity crisis over the past few years. Within a single showroom, you have beautifully wrought overachievers like the CC and Eos parked beside shoddier Jettas, Passats, and Golfs, their prices slashed along with amenities in search of a wider audience. But lately VW has tiptoed back toward its old upscale aspirations, and the 2015 Golf indicates that the experiment is over. The new Golf is the best car you can buy for $20,000. A Golf S will run you $19,815, with a fve-speed manual. That modest outlay scores you a capacitive dash touchscreen, four-wheel disc brakes, and alloy wheels. The most important piece, though, is under the hood, where VW’s EA888 1.8-liter TSI four cylinder is standard equipment. This turbocharged and directinjected powerhouse is the same motor that, in 2.0-liter form, is stout enough for luxury cars such as the Audi A6. Its 170 hp matches the output of the old 2.5-liter fve cylinder, but its 200 lb-ft of torque at 1,600 rpm makes the turbo four cylinder feel much stronger. The
5 0 O c t ob er 2 0 1 4 _ p O p u l a r m e c h a n i c s
Golf throws you 2015 Volkswagen back in the seat golf TsI without trying, aVaIlable: now the turbocharger PrIce: spooling up $19,815/$20,915 quickly and emitMPg (cITy/hwy): ting a soft whoosh 26/37 Manual; as it dumps boost. And, over a 2-hour 23/30 auToMaTIc drive, we averaged 38.5 mpg, which is nipping awfully close to the compact segment’s dedicated fuel misers. The Golf ’s chassis is also modifed for better performance. The now standard Cross Diferential System (XDS), once reserved for the GTI, uses the brakes to send power to the outside wheel in a corner. The car’s rear suspension is now a multilink design, and a new platform shaves as much as 79 pounds compared with the old model. The previous base Golf seemed almost unrelated to the slick GTI and diesel iterations, never mind the more expensive cars in the VW lineup. Now even the lowliest Golf drives like an Audi in disguise. Which, actually, is exactly what it is.
I l l u s T r aT I o n b y h a I s a M h u s s e I n
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SCRAPYARD’S FUTURE
CARVING PUMPKINS
CORDLESS NAILERS
L E A F STA I N S
The Chainsaw Rules
p h o T o g R a p h by g R e g g D e l m a n
O CTO BER 2 014 _ P O P u l a R M EC h a n i C s 5 3
esseNtial gear
Skills
c h a i n s aw r u l e s
Because you’ll not only look the part but be safe too.
Three cuts every Man should Know
cut
cut
1
2
cut
3
Notch aNd fold
offset cut aNd sNap
spriNg-pole release
A felled tree will usually have saw-pinching areas where the top of the log is under compression and the bottom is under tension. If you have access to the top and bottom of the log, you can handle this one of two ways. Make a cut directly down from the top and then fnish by cutting up from the bottom. The problem is that sometimes the saw gets pinched in the down cut. Another way to handle this is to make an angled cut down to about a third of the log’s diameter. Make a second angled cut that intersects the frst. Remove the wedge. Make a third cut up from the bottom that intersects the point of the wedge.
Limbing a tree can leave a mass of brush underfoot that can trip you up. You’ll have more control over the cleanup if you can limb the tree without branches falling everywhere. A great way to handle relatively small branches, up to 3 inches in diameter, say, is to cut them in a way that allows you to snap them of cleanly by hand and toss them to the side. Make two ofset cuts, one on each side of the branch. Each cut goes slightly past the branch’s center. Do a bunch of limbs that way, put the saw down, snap each one of, and toss it into a pile, away from where you’re working.
A falling tree will often bend a sapling or a branch under it, leaving you with what’s called a spring pole. Catapult would be a better name. The bent branch or sapling contains a tremendous amount of stored energy. If you crosscut its wood fbers, you release that energy with the deadly force of releasing the rope on a catapult. To deal with this safely, make a series of parallel cuts on the inside (compression side) of the spring pole, shaving down its wood. Then make a small vertical cut on top, but don’t sever the branch completely. In most cases, the pole will release slowly on its own.
When the bottom of a chainsaw bar makes contact with a log, it pulls you toward the log. When the top of a bar makes contact, it pushes you away. If you’re not prepared for either, you can get knocked onto your butt. So use the boxer’s stance. For a right-handed person, that means standing with your left foot forward and your right foot back. Bend your knees as you pivot the saw through the log, and think about where the saw will exit. You don’t want to swing out of the cut, across the toe of your boot and into your leg.
Tall logging boots provide ankle support and traction when the going gets tough. You can cut safely only if you can stand frmly (see “The Stance”).
Chainsaw chaps are a must. If you cut into your leg, their chain-stopping fabric snarls the saw’s clutch before the chain can do real damage.
A forestry helmet protects your eyes, ears, and head. It feels confning at frst, but you’ll be glad you have it on when you get swatted in the face by a falling branch.
Cold-weather logging gloves with chain-stopping fabric are important for the same reason that chaps are.
the staNce
5 4 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
A cant hook is a timehonored tool for turning and positioning logs. Your back will thank you.
i l l u s t r at i O n s b y b r O w n b i r d d e s i g n
YOU’RE NOT PARANOID.
9781588168580
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.
T
oday, our every activity can be quietly monitored, from who our friends are to all of our financial transactions. And with medical records in the “cloud” and imminent gene sequencing, even our bodies are up for grabs. What can we do? From phone hacking to identity and credit theft, Who’s Spying On You? tells the stories of real people whose privacy has been violated, describes the technologies used to intrude, and reveals how we can protect ourselves in a world filled with spies.
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK OR AS AN EBOOK WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
S C R A PYA R D
The State of the American Scrapyard Fixing your ride with some other guy’s trash isn’t what it used to be. Thankfully, fnding treasures is easier than ever before. By John Pearley huffman
Scrapyards have always chased the cheapest real estate. As cities grow larger and more expensive, boneyards move farther out of town—and farther out of reach.
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Take cheap tools. That’s what Jim Losee told me on my frst trip to the Pick Your Part junkyard in Sun Valley, California, back in 1990. He was the experienced editor and I was the new guy at Car Craft magazine. “You’re going to lose some, so they may as well be crappy.” It’s a car guy’s rite of passage: scrounging through metal hulks sinking into brown weeds on the outskirts of town, determined to fnd that one part that will have your hot rod roaring—or your beater lasting another month. Maybe it’s a short-nose water pump
to get a big-block V-8 into your Nova. Or an Acura Integra’s B18 twin-cam engine that’s a perfect ft for your Honda CRX. When you fnd it, for that brilliant moment, you are lord of all salvage. Don’t get used to the feeling. “That was the old way to do it,” says Dino Behler, owner of Dino’s Corvette Salvage in Picayune, Mississippi. Change has come to the scrapyard business, and more is on the way. There just isn’t as much of a market for car parts these days. People aren’t fxing their 1992 Dodge Shadows or 1997 Chevy Cavaliers—those go straight to the shredder. Their parts are more valuable as scrap metal. Not that junkyards are completely disappearing. It’s still big business: In the United States alone about 12.6 million cars are recycled a year, according to an industry trade group. There are active markets for vehicles such as Hondas, Toyotas, and pickup trucks, which are stripped before heading to the shredder. But the hottest salvage markets are with boutique yards like Behler’s, which specializes in Corvettes. The U.S. salvage business is worth $22 billion a year, spread out over more than 8,200 companies. Like I said, still big. But diferent. Environmental regulations and more efcient land-use practices push junkyards out of town. And computerization and the Internet are altering how we search for parts. Pick Your Part is still around, but there are more efcient ways to fnd parts now— ways that don’t end in as many tetanus shots or lost tools. In salvage, the more cars you process, the more money you make. It used to be that to make more money, you purchased more land. Now, with the development
P h O t O g r a P h s by D a n i e l s h e a
Skills
Tip
never pick up the pumpkin by its stem. it’s like an umbilical cord, feeding the gourd with nutrients. if you break it, the pumpkin won’t last long.
of rack systems that use giant steel arms to stack cars on top of one another, that’s not the case. “When you buy property, you buy all the way to the sky,” Behler says. Complete cars (or parts of cars) can be stacked up to fve high. They’re plucked of the racks when it’s time to pull parts of of them. Small yards can hold more cars than ever before, and they don’t have to buy a neighbor’s lot to expand their business. But you can’t let amateurs scramble over these car tow-
How To Carve a PumPkin inTo SomeTHing HorrifiC
B o n U S!
ill
Hall
Sk
ee ow n
ers, pulling out alternators and a/c compressors and the like. So yards use computerized inventory systems and then connect them to websites, smartphone apps such as Get Used Parts or Car-Part Pro, or tablets in the yards themselves. They no longer rely on buyers stumbling across what they need. There’s less civilian knuckle busting involved. For specialty-parts businesses for cars such as Corvettes and Porsches, a computerized inventory, when it’s available on the Internet, also makes it possible to attract a critical mass of buyers. Convenient, sure, but much less fun than swap meets. “The Internet takes all those little itty-bitty pieces of the market and brings them together,” Behler says. “Every part of a Corvette has value. Every screw. Every bolt. Everything.” Behler says that before this market opened to him, he would have had to have taken other
Surprising but also not surprising: There is a company in America that carves pumpkins for money. But not happy-face jacko’-lanterns. Marc Evan and Chris Soria of Brooklyn’s Maniac Pumpkin Carvers treat pumpkins as if they were lumps of clay, sculpting them into beautiful, repulsive threedimensional props worthy of a Tobe Hooper movie. We asked them to spill all their secrets. They gave us a few. CHooSE A PuMPkin The best are fresh and have a consistent texture. Generally, the thicker the stem, the thicker the fesh, so you can carve deeper for dramatic efect. And
P h o t o g r a P h by W e s t o n W e l l s
sorts of work—maintenance and repairs—to make ends meet. “I just shipped out two engines to China and another whole huge order to Malaysia,” he says. “I never would have had that international exposure before the Internet.” While technology makes things easier on junkyards, it does provide a new challenge: keeping up. Soon junkyards will need to handle things like lithium-ion batteries and carbon-fber parts. Next year Ford’s F-150 pickup truck will feature an aluminum body. In a few years salvage yards will need to be ready to recycle them. For me, there will always be a romance in the search—in disassembling old cars to feed your own. But even I’ll admit that romance doesn’t stand a chance against the efciency and convenience of a third-of-a-second search on your smartphone. If nothing else, at least I won’t have to worry about losing tools.
don’t gut it. The gooey stuf cavity—before adding inside helps keep the shape. details such as wrinkles and teeth. if the pumpkin dries BuY GEAr out and gets tough, mist the use clay-sculpting tools, fesh with a 1:1 mixture of such as wire-end ribbon lemon juice and water. tools, which you can buy in various shapes and sizes FiniSH uP at any arts and crafts store. The devil, or the undead, or Scalpels, wood-carving whatever, is in the details. gouges, and kitchen knives As you get deeper into the are perfect for adding fesh, you’ll notice the grain details. Set up an overhead becomes more pronounced. light that casts shadows if the fesh starts to pull, cut on the sculpture and in the opposite direction, accentuates the modeling. just as in woodworking. Your sculpture will last rouGH ouT longer if you dip it in an ice Cut away the skin with a bath with a cup of bleach. ribbon tool, which works But don’t get too attached. like a potato peeler. rough ultimately it’ll rot away, get out the entire underlying eaten by squirrels, or structure—cheekbones, eye be smashed to pieces by an sockets, nose, and mouth ornery trick-or-treater.
P o P u l a r M ec h a n i c s _ o c t o b er 2014 5 7
to o l t e s t Skills
seNco F-15 FN65Da raTing:
$350 Weight: 6.6 lb 638 BAttery: Li-ion, 18-v/1.5-Ahr NAiLs (15-gA.): 11 to 21 in.
Price:
NAiLs (2-iN.) Per chArge:
Likes: A rapid rate of fre and consistent nail-driving performance, in any material, is what helped the senco take frst place. it sank every nail to the correct depth and never misfred. it’s also the lightest tool and has the slimmest handle.
best overall
DisLikes: it’s easy to turn the depth-adjustment dial, but the icon that indicates whether you’re going deeper or shallower is dificult to read.
Nail Guns for everyone By Roy Berendsohn
o
nce, only contractors and woodworkers owned nail guns. They were expensive and required an air compressor, hose, and fttings. Then manufacturers had a brilliant idea: They could power a fnish nailer with the same cordless-tool batteries found in drill drivers. now anybody can use one to quickly and neatly install crown molding or fasten trim. We gathered seven and tested them by driving thousands of nails into pressure-treated lumber, oak, pine, and a sandwich of these materials. Overall, we found that consistency was more important than the number of nails that could be driven on a single charge. What good is using a nail gun if you have to fnish your work with a hammer?
5 8 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
P h O T O g r a P h s by g r e g g d e l M a n
A BRieF guide to usiNg FiNish NAileRs
RyoBi P325
Bosch FNh180K-16
Ridgid R250AF18
raTing:
raTing:
raTing:
price:
$260 Weight: 7.6 lb 885 Battery: Li-ion, 18-v/4-ahr NaiLs (16-ga.): 3 to 21 in.
price:
$420 Weight: 7.6 lb 713 Battery: Li-ion, 18-v/2.6-ahr NaiLs (16-ga.): 11 to 21 in.
price:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
Likes: It’s powerful and drives an extremely wide range of fasteners. Features like a large depth-adjustment dial and plentiful rubber overmold make it easy to handle.
Likes: From its easy, dialadjusted depth setting to a lockout that prevents the tool from being fred before it’s loaded with nails, the Bosch is worthy of the pros. It’s also extremely consistent in hard materials like red oak.
Likes: Speed, power, and comfortable handling come together in this one. On those rare occasions when it jams, clear a stuck nail from it in seconds by unlatching the nose cover. Controls for nail depth and bump-fre sequence are easy to set.
DisLikes: Could use an LED worklight and a battery gauge. It also lacks a bump-fre setting.
DisLikes: Its gigantic battery gives it a bit too much longevity. We overheated the tool after fring about 1,000 nails.
DisLikes: Part of its drive mechanism is housed behind the magazine; this distributes its weight in a way that makes it slightly more dificult to pivot than the Bosch and the DeWalt.
$260 Weight: 7.4 lb 1,186 Battery: Li-ion, 18-v/4-ahr NaiLs (15-ga.): 11 to 21 in.
Best vAlue
deWAlt dc616K
RyoBi P320
cRAFtsmAN 43474
raTing:
raTing:
raTing:
$360 Weight: 8.2 lb 677 Battery: Nicd, 18-v/2.4-ahr NaiLs (16-ga.): 11 to 21 in. price:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
The DeWalt is powerful and fast, with a high rate of fre in the sequential setting and an even faster bump fring. It’s also a reasonably consistent driver in hard materials—almost as good as the Senco. Likes:
DisLikes: The next generation of this tool needs to be equipped with a dry-fre lockout. Designers also should take another crack at a better LED position.
price:
$190 Weight: 6.8 lb 1,619 Battery: Li-ion, 18-v/4-ahr NaiLs (18-ga.): 5 to 2 in.
price:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
NaiLs (2-iN.) per charge:
$220 Weight: 6.2 lb 360 Battery: Li-ion, 19.2-v/1.25-ahr NaiLs (18-ga.): 5 to 2 in.
Likes: This is one of the most
Likes: Very similar to the
cost-efective power tools we’ve used recently. If you’ve got a big trim project ahead, especially if it’s pine or poplar, get the Ryobi and save your elbow. Its large battery gives it incredible run time, and it’s equipped with a dry-fre lockout.
18-gauge Ryobi, Craftsman’s tool is compact and easy to work with, from loading its nail magazine to adjusting its nail depth. We also liked that it fres a wide range of nails, especially short ones. That’s particularly helpful with small trim.
DisLikes: It outdrove the others but wasn’t the most consistent in tough materials.
DisLikes: Needs a batterycharge indicator. Doesn’t fre the last fve nails in its strip.
people don’t get excited about fnish nailers the way they do about loud, dangerous circular saws. But consider that one of these things can fasten a thick oak molding with one pull of a trigger. they can be a gigantic work saver— or catastrophically split the corner you just ft so precisely. here, a few instructions: aLigN the NaiL as you near the end of a piece of molding, turn the nailer so its body is parallel to the wood’s grain. this fres the nail so it wedges itself in across the grain rather than splitting it. set the Depth Use the depth-adjustment wheel to set how far into the wood your tool will drive the nail. you want a cavity just deep enough to hold a tiny glop of wood fller. too deep and the fller won’t fll the hole; too shallow and the fller won’t stay put. Fire some nails into a test block to try it frst.
tip Gluing wood in place before nailing can vastly improve your nail-gun experience, but only if you use glue specifed as quick-tack. (Most carpenter’s and wood glues will fll the bill.) If you use a white glue instead, you’ll end up with trim that slides around— and possibly a nail in your fnger.
O c t o b er 2 014 _ P O P u l a r M ec h a n i c s 5 9
a s k r oy
Skills
Leaf stains, Leaks, storm Doors, and Busted Concrete Popular Mechanics’ senior home editor can fx pretty much anything. Even that. By Roy BeRendsohn
How can we get rid of the leaf stains on our new deck? Those stains are caused by tannins leached out of the leaves by rainwater. If the deck is sealed or fnished, they’ll fade on their own, usually within a couple of weeks. But if the wood is unfnished, you may want to hasten the process with a cleaning. If your deck is built with comjoy ExPEriEncEd
adult
child rocks
lEavEs (rakEd by you)
lEavEs MonEy (rakEd by soMEonE ElsE)
PilE lEaPt into
6 0 Oc t ob er 2 014 _ p O p u l a r m e c h a n i c s
posite lumber, follow the manufacturer’s maintenance instructions to avoid surface damage (and voiding your warranty). For example, Trex decking recommends using a cleaner containing oxalic or phosphoric acid. For pressure-treated decking, any jug of cleaner that’s rated for decks or fences will work. Next spring do yourself a favor and pressure-wash the deck and apply a stain or sealer. You won’t have to deal with this again.
Last winter the entire surface came of part of our concrete sidewalk. Can it be repaired, or will that part of the sidewalk need to be replaced? The condition you describe is known as scaling. When water freezes inside the concrete’s top surface, the ice crystals can exert a pressure so great that it breaks the surface away. If the damaged area is an oval, that indicates a puddle formed there. In the trades, this low area is known as a birdbath, and it’s a sign of improper concrete fnishing. Usually, though, scaling occurs because the concrete was incorrectly formulated at the plant or too much water was added when it was delivered. It’s also possible that the concrete’s fnal smoothing occurred in standing water. As concrete is placed and smoothed, its water works up to the surface. If a mason doesn’t skim of this moisture or allow it to evaporate, it will work itself into the uppermost layer, creating an improper ratio of cement to water, and a weak top. There is one more option: It could be your fault. You might have laid on too heavy a layer of
deicer, which weakens the cement paste. Sometimes concrete can be topped with a self-leveling repair material like Quikrete Commercial Grade Concrete Resurfacer. But if the scaling is severe, you’re better of replacing the sidewalk. My storm door was ripped open by the wind, damaging the doorjamb. How do I fx it, and how do I prevent this from happening again? Storm doors blow open when their closers are worn out or were not properly installed, so in the course of the repair, you’ll want to put in new ones. Maybe even a heavy-duty model with more pulling force. The toughest fx is the doorjamb itself. If it’s badly cracked, you’ll have to either replace the entire thing or saw away the damaged section using an oscillating multitool. The replacement pieces need to be planed to thickness and ripped to width. Each piece should be crosscut to make a tight ft, then fastened with exterior-grade wood screws. Finally, sand the entire jamb, prime, and paint it. Install a safety chain. It may look ugly, but it reduces the likelihood of damage should the door be ripped open by another gust. Can I fx a roof leak by caulking from inside the attic? No. You’ll divert the water to another entry point or trap it between the caulk and the bottom of the shingles. Eventually the plywood roof deck will rot. The only solution is to replace the ofending shingles or fashing. That usually leads to fnding more problems. Brace yourself for a big job.
p h O t O g r a p h by m a u r i c i O a l e j O
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AMERICAN SUCCESS CHRYSLER IS PROUD TO CELEBRATE INDIVIDUALS WHO EMBODY THE NEW SPIRIT OF AMERICAN SUCCESS Scott Wilson was a very big product designer for some very big brands. Until he decided to go rogue in 2007. en he blew the lid off crowd-funding in 2010, and changed the entrepreneurial game for good.
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GOING HIS OWN WAY: Wilson had a great track record of creating innovative product designs for some of the world’s largest companies. In 2007, he returned to his hometown of Chicago for an opportunity that didn’t turn out as he expected, and he decided to strike out on his own. He founded MINIMAL, a multidisciplinary firm focused on creating iconic, disruptive, and solution-oriented products and experiences with impact.
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“Entrepreneurs should be curious, courageous, and believe that something can be better; and be willing to connect the dots to make it happen. Anyone who thinks it is easy is in for a shock.”
SCOTT WILSON
FOUNDER / CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER
MINIMAL AND LUNATIK
MAKING IT BIG TIME: In 2010, Wilson developed a concept for a conversion kit to transform the iPod Nano into a premium multi-touch watch. Corporations weren’t biting, but he didn’t give up. He posted the idea for his TikTok and Lunatik watch kits on the then-obscure Kickstarter site, with the words, “We believe in the emerging power of community and the individual to bring ideas to life and we hope that this is just the beginning.” irty days later, he had surpassed his goal of $15,000 in seed money, to the tune of $942,578, pledged by 13,512 backers. At that point in time, it was the highest-funded project in Kickstarter history, a title it held for 441 days. THE BALANCING ACT: Working through MINIMAL, which includes consulting, partnerships with startups, and in-house brand incubation, Wilson evaluates each new project based on more than potential monetary reward. “ ere are principles and values we look for. It’s pretty broad, but at the end of the day, we want to add value. We want to make a meaningful contribution that will impact people’s lives.”
Visit PopularMechanics.com/Chrysler200 or scan this page with the LAYAR app to see a video of Wilson and explore more inspirational stories.
We wanted to build a car that would change perceptions of what an American sedan could be. So we
gave the All-New Chrysler 200 a class-exclusive 9-speed transmission1 and a Rotary E-shift.
A move that pushed gas mileage to an impressive
36 MPG HWY2 without sacrificing performance.
200S model shown.
THE AVERAGE SEDAN HAS SIX SPEEDS. WE DON’T MAKE AVERAGE.
CHRYSL ER.COM/20 0 1) Based on latest available competitive information and the Chrysler Group LLC standard midsize sedan segment. 2) EPA-est. 23 city/36 hwy on 4-cylinder models. AWD V6 model shown with EPA-est. 18 city/29 hwy. Results may vary. Chrysler is a registered trademark of Chrysler Group LLC.
the popular mechanics guide to a home 48
new gadgets and products—and some hard-earned wisdom—to make every room smarter, more functional, and more fun to live in. Photographs by Russ and Reyn
Ro o m s Bedroom _ 66 Kitchen _ 68 Bathroom/Laundry/Ofice _ 70 Living room _ 72 Security _ 75 Garage/Yard _ 76 Index _ 77
The Home Upgrade:
A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE By David Owen
My wife and I spent roughly 15 years getting our house exactly the way we wanted it, yet as soon as the paint was dry we both thought, hey, let’s move! Home renovation can induce a form of temporary mental illness similar to what happens to people on roller coasters: You think you’re going to die, but the moment the ride is over you want to go again. Luckily, by the time we had fnished the house we were too broke to do anything drastic, and in a couple of months we’d both calmed down. regarding your mower In case you weren’t paying attention, Now another 15 years have in 2007 the federal government started adding ethanol to our gasoline, passed and we’re still here. which, on its own, can reduce the life Finishing all the big projects of your mower. So the next time you buy fuel, be sure not to use anything hasn’t meant giving up on with an ethanol percentage higher than E10. It isn’t suited for small home improvement, however. engines and can void the warranty. I haven’t touched my reciproAnd always add a stabilizer to prevent chemical degradation—especially cating saw since the turn of in a two-stroke engine. Or just the millennium, but in recent dispense with gas altogether and try this EGO Power+ model, which has a years I’ve become a practitio56-volt lithium-ion battery. ner of what I now think of as For more on the EGO, turn to page 76. microrenovation: Approaching “fnished” rooms with dispassionate objectivity and
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fnding small ways to make them better. Humans have an extraordinary ability to become inured to minor annoyances, especially if the annoyances accumulate gradually. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it’s the basis of successful marriages—but it can cause people to ignore inconveniences they could easily correct. My wife and I have diferent ideas about organization. She makes random, teetering piles, while I store papers by category and year in three-ring binders on long shelves. By her way of thinking, it makes sense to keep hats and aspirin in the same place because they’re both for the head; in my view, possessions should be organized strictly taxonomically and stored near the place where their use either begins or ends. Thus, plates and glasses should go within reach of either the dining table or the dishwasher, not both (or neither), and you wouldn’t waste scarce shelf space on items used only in other rooms. Recently my focus has been on our kitchen, a room in which I have no executive responsibilities. My wife is a terrifc cook—she has written four cookbooks and is at work on a ffth—but she stores ingredients, implements, and appliances so idiosyncratically that even she loses track of what she has. Because my constantly making comments like “You know, we already had two unopened jars of tamarind paste” is not considered sexy, I’ve tried to make the storage of everyday items more intuitive. Last month I consolidated almost all of my wife’s extensive collection of spices in a single large drawer, with the help of some inexpensive but well-designed inserts from Ikea. I also used Excel to create a searchable shelf list of her inventory of seasonings, oils, extracts, syrups, vinegars, sweeteners, rubs, salts, peppers, and other easily forgotten essentials. She may never consult it, and she almost certainly won’t keep it up to date, but creating it made me feel better, and now I can move on to the garage. Tank you, Mr. Owen, author of the classic home-renovation book Te Walls Around Us. And now, a room-by-room march through the whole house in which we show you the best home technology. Enjoy.
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bedroom
smarter bedding
TEMPERATURECONTROL SHEETS Using technology developed for NASA, Outlast sheets (from $150) contain tiny capsules that absorb heat when you get hot and release it when you get cold. Te Army uses it in combat clothing. You can use it to get through those nights when you forget to close the window. Just as important.
g-rated breakthroughs
T h e Ef fe cts of C olor
Blue
Calming
Red
Raises body temperature
White With Blue toneS
Increases mental activity, they say Remote-ContRol lights With the Wink Hub ($50), you can program your lights to turn on and of, or control them from your smartphone. Or use Philips Hue lights ($200 for a kit with three bulbs), above, to light your room in any color you want.
If We May . . . Whatever alarm clock you choose—the iHome iDL95 ($120) for its unique ability to turn of the display for absolute darkness; the classic and beautiful Tivoli Model Three ($300, pictured); or your phone— get two: one for you and one for the person who shares your bed. Otherwise, one of you gets complacent. At bedtime the person closer to the clock will set the alarm. One time for work, one time for gym, one time for weekends—whatever it is, only one of you knows. The other rolls over and falls asleep. And so it continues, until one day the clock operator has a business trip, and the question comes, meekly, from the home front: What time do I wake up? It’s nice to be needed, but don’t make the person you love ask that question. Buy her her own clock.
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kitchen
GadGets, Gear, and advice
Lessons From a Kitchen Makeover
I
By Wylie Dufresne
ProjeCT! SOFT-CLOSING DRAWERS AND CABINETS
Want an easy way to instantly make your kitchen better? Install soft-closing hinges and slides. Instead of removing and replacing old hardware, buy Rockler’s Roller Runners ($6) for your drawers and
Blumotion Compact Hinge Adapters ($5) for your cabinets. They’re a simple
retroft. An hour instead of an afternoon. You’ll fnd yourself slamming cupboard doors just for the pleasure of not hearing them.
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I try not to bring my work home with me, but when I renovated my own kitchen recently, I couldn’t help myself. I wanted the space to function as eficiently as the restaurant kitchens I’d been cooking in for the past two decades. Picking the right stuf was easy. Convincing my wife to go along with the plan was the hard part. StainleSS-Steel countertopS
You can’t damage stainless steel. And I’ve tried—with knives, hot pots, blowtorches. Stainless-steel counters are also incredibly easy to clean (I use a squeegee, always fun), and they’re seamless, so gunk can’t get stuck in the corners. The materials turned out to be about the same cost as traditional counter surfaces, and you’d be surprised how good they look in a home setting. Not cold and industrial, just supercool. an absurdly large sink
Get the biggest sink that will ft. Go as deep and as wide as you can. And forget about those two-sided sinks—you just need one giant tub. You will not miss the space underneath, and you won’t miss whatever counter space you give up. But you’ll be incredibly happy when you can
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put a giant pasta pot right in the sink and still ft a few other dirty pans along with it. Foot-pedal SinkS
We have hospitals to thank for this one. When you cook, you need to wash your hands constantly (ground beef, cookie dough, raw eggs), and with foot pedals, you never have to touch anything. Yes, there are other options, like faucets with hands-free sensors, and ones you tap with your arm, but none of those are as reliable as a simple mechanical pedal operated from below.
A superior home brew For cofee I like Nespresso’s Pixie machine (from $179), particularly for smaller kitchens. Te company has a new cofeemaker called the VertuoLine, which looks nice but takes a diferent-shaped capsule—a first for Nespresso and kind of annoying. But all of their machines make some of the best cups of cofee for the home. — W.D.
top and bottom reFrigerator/Freezer
Your freezer should be on the bottom. It’s safe to assume that you open your refrigerator 10 times more often than you open your freezer. Who wants to bend down that often? If you’re considering a sideby-side fridge/freezer, don’t. The square footage is distributed top to bottom, so although there’s room for yogurt and juice and the rest of your groceries, there’s never enough room for mixing bowls, baking sheets, or other big items. And that’s no fun at a party. under-counter microwave
Microwaves are usually in the wrong place—at eye level or higher, so you’re invariably moving foods that are ridiculously hot directly toward your face. Solution: the microwave drawer. It’s easy and safe to get foods in and out of, and you can put the machine in your island so you don’t have to look at it. But the best reason to get one is that when friends are hanging out in the kitchen during a party and they see you open and close the drawer with the press of a button, they’ll think you are from the future.
A toAster thAt does everything If you don’t want to track down a commercial model, the Cuisinart CSO-300 ($299) is a steam oven, convection oven, and toaster all in one. So, on the days you don’t feel like toast, you can cook an entire chicken.
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The PerfecT ToasT (and ToasTer) By Josey Baker, artisanal toast maker, coproprietor of San Francisco’s Te Mill Great toast is about a mix of textures—a crispy outside and a sof and warm center. And great toast requires heat. Lots of it. At Te Mill that heat comes from the Hatco TPT-120 commercial toaster ($200), which reaches 750 degrees. Alternative: Melt some butter in a skillet over medium-high heat, let it get really hot, throw on a piece of bread, and cover. Te butter will cook directly into the bread for favor and crispiness, and the lid will keep the moisture in.
a minimalist cup
The canadIano It doesn’t take a complicated machine to make good cofee. Te Canadiano (from $46) is a simple block of wood—a one-cup pour-over cofee system made of cherry, white oak, walnut, or Canadian birch. Since the oils from the beans work their way into the wood and intensify favor, the more you use the Canadiano, the better your cofee gets.
The dIshwasher ThaT gIves back KitchenAid’s Architect Series II dishwasher with AquaSense ($1,749) saves some of the water from the previous cycle and uses it as a prerinse on your dishes. What does that mean for you? Well, you use up to 33 percent less water, for one thing. Plus, you get a 67 percent increase in self-satisfaction, which hasn’t happened since you started composting before the neighbors did.
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bathroom
troubleshooting Slow Hot water
If your water takes a while to heat up, instead of turning on the TV, install the Evolve Ladybug adapter with ShowerStart technology ($30), which goes in behind the showerhead and automatically pauses the water fow when the temperature reaches 95 degrees.
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three exciting LavatoriaL innovations
Bathroom Tile That Could Save Your Life. Slowly.
TOTO’s Hydrotect ceramic tiles ($2.40 per square foot) have a titanium-dioxide coating that dissolves pollutants. They also use antimicrobial metals to kill bacteria that would otherwise mildew and stain—a feature that’s a little easier to appreciate right away.
2 3
EnduroShield Protective Coating
Spray EnduroShield (from $20) on nearly anything—glass, tile, the front of your stove— and it seals up the microscopic cracks with a hydrophobic layer that blocks soap scum, oil, and dirt. You’ll never wash the shower door again. Not that you ever did before.
A Better Toilet
With every use, a typical low-fush toilet dumps 1.6 gallons of water down the drain. That’s a half-gallon more water than it takes to grow an almond. But the Niagara Stealth Dual Flush ($308) uses only 0.8 gallons per fush. The Stealth is a vacuum-assist toilet, meaning it uses air, rather than that almost full extra gallon, to force water into the bowl. In the past similar technology caused a loud sucking noise as water exited, but Niagara’s system takes advantage of the vacuum created as the trapway depressurizes, silently emptying the bowl.
Laundry room In Defense of the Commercial Washer Our washing machine had given out. Cause of death: a family of fve. One of us loaded the appliance so mercilessly you’d swear it had been packed with a ramrod. And that was among the nicer things we’d put it through. We needed something that would stand up to sneakers, foor mats, insulated coveralls, and canvas work pants. We needed heavy-duty. The salesman said he knew just the right thing—a hardy commercial washer with precisely three knobs. The Speed Queen. All metal, no plastic, just like what you’d see in a Laundromat. It’s not pretty and it’s not small. And compared with modern washers, it certainly isn’t quiet. But that machine does exactly what we need it to: It works. Always. — Roy Berendsohn
What to Look for in a Washing Machine According to Chris Hall at repairclinic.com, your next washer should be a direct-drive. (We like the Maytag Bravos XL, from $670.) It’s much simpler than most appliances of its kind, with only three main parts: Te motor’s stator is mounted directly to the bottom of the washer drum, with the rotor behind it. Tis avoids using a transmission, which is ofen the biggest source of trouble in a washing machine. Plus, it gives you an almost infinite number of drive speeds, making for much more efcient energy use—and a cycle that won’t tear up delicate clothes.
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seriously. it’s important.
home office
more home, less office
troubleshooting you have a messy desk
Try the MOS Magnetic Organization System ($23 to $39), a pretty magnet that mounts to the wall or sits on your desk, holding charging cables neatly and within reach—instead of all over your desk or tangled on the foor behind it.
Turn Your A/C Wireless
A Laser in Your Cellphone
Tado Cooling ($149) mounts to your wall and sends infrared signals to your existing a/c, using your phone as a remote control. The system also supports geofencing, so you can set it up to turn on when you walk into the house and of when you walk out.
The LG G3 ($100 to $600) is the frst phone to use a laser. And while it doesn’t cut through metal or even help you give a presentation, it does assist in providing the fastest autofocus time of any cellphone camera: 276 milliseconds.
Three Better Outlets
1. LivingPlug Inlet ($25) It’s a little bulky, but Inlet fits over a standard duplex outlet, distributing power to three child-friendly (read: hidden), downward-facing outlets and a high-output USB port. If you’re concerned about things like vampire energy loss, Inlet also has a button you can hit to cut all power.
2.
3.
Belkin WeMo Switch + Motion Leviton USB Charger/TamperSensor ($80) Plug it into an Resistant Duplex Receptacle outlet and WeMo lets you use ($35) Two dedicated USB your phone to control anyports mean no bulky charthing you plug into it—from a gers hogging outlets. And lamp to a fan to a dialysis maunlike other options, the chine. You can also set it up to Leviton USB outlet is rated turn a connected device on or for 3.6 amps—nearly twice of whenever it senses motion the rating of other brands, within 10 feet. Note: probably so you can charge your tablet not the best idea if said device or phone (or both) in a is a dialysis machine. couple of hours.
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Living Room
because it’s wheRe you Live
T
Your Next TV
project!
HIDE YOUR TV CABLES BEHIND THE DRYWALL 1. Buy two Quest Technology
wall plates for $6. They have reversible hoods that can project into or out of the wall, depending on your clearance.
2. Remove a small rectangle
of drywall for each with a utility knife and a drywall saw—one behind the TV and the other a few feet below, behind your cable box—and install the plates. 3. If there’s nothing behind your
drywall to get in the way, drop the cables through the upper plate and fsh them out through the lower one with a fnger or the bent end of a hanger. Otherwise, you’ll need fsh tape—which can be forced up or down the wall, avoiding obstacles like insulation—and a little patience.
the best tVs were plasmas. they had the best black levels, little motion blur, and a nearly 180-degree viewing angle. But we didn’t buy enough of them, and so manufacturers killed them of.
4. Plug everything back in.
Watch TV.
A More Agile Vacuum
the Oreck Magnesium ($399) sucks dirt straight up and into the bag, which doesn’t sound that special until you see the winding path of many other vacuums. But what you’ll really notice are the wheels. they’re huge, at least by vacuum standards, and they make the Magnesium easier to push and turn, no matter how thick the carpet. It’s a simple solution, a smart one, and it’s catching on—even if it does look a little silly.
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Luckily, something better is taking over: OLED. Organic light-emitting diodes are selfilluminating, so they can be the thickness of a few sheets of paper. They are brighter than anything out there, and with the ability to control each pixel individually, they have basically infnite contrast ratio (the diference between light and dark). “With OLED, we’re looking at the future of television and the future of the industry,” says Gary Merson, editor in chief of the TV-enthusiast site hdguru.com. The unit Merson is most excited about is the 77-inch LG 77EC9800—a curved OLED screen with four times the resolution of HD screens. It’s beautiful, and it’s going to cost you—probably more than you paid for your last used car. But you’re not going to buy one. Not now. What you’ll do is wait. The most accessible OLED LG makes, the 55-inch 55EC9300, is currently $4,000. But production will stabilize. Material costs will come down. The price will come down. And then you’ll own the best kind of TV there is.
The Case for a Projector If you’re pressed for space, or if you just don’t want a TV to be the focal point of your living room, get a projector. Even midrange options can now produce a 100- to 150-inch image without losing quality, turning everything you watch into an event. And while Morning Joe at 100 inches may take some getting used to, Sunday Night Football and Homeland will become the cinematic experiences they deserve to be. Don’t worry about having the right screen. Or even a white wall. You lose so little picture quality without them that it’s not worth redecorating. As for what to buy, go wireless. The Epson Home Cinema 5030UBe ($2,500) has only one wire from the projector: a power cord. So you can mount it to your ceiling and forget about running wires back to your cable box or Blu-ray. It has a bright and coloraccurate 1080p image—in 3D, if that kind of thing does it for you—and supports picture-in-picture, which is nice, since at that size the preview screen is bigger than an average TV.
The State of Lightbulbs Even the cheap LED options, like the excellent Philips SlimStyle ($5, on average, with government rebate), now cast a soft yellow light. It’s practically natural. High-wattage and dimmable models can be found for as little as $7 to $12. And since they consume 20 to 25 percent of the energy of traditional bulbs, they’ll pay for themselves in as little as a year. If you really can’t make the adjustment to LED, a loophole in the new law allows more durable bulbs, called rough-service incandescents, to remain available for as little as 80 cents each. But that’s no example to set for the kids.
upgrade your roomba When your kid’s done playing with it on the carpet, the Infinuvo Hovo 510 ($229) really excels on hardwood foors, and has an onboard UV light to kill bacteria as it cleans.
Hardwood Floors That Care About You
According to the EPA, we spend approximately 90 percent of our day indoors. And while that’s a boon for the sweatpants industry, it’s not great news for us. Especially when you consider that indoor air can be fve times more polluted than outdoor. Lauzon Pure Genius hardwood fooring ($6 to $13 per square foot) has a photocatalytic titanium-dioxide coating that works kind of like a plant, breaking down volatile organic compounds, bacteria, viruses, and molds. Lauzon says 1,300 square feet of it does the work of three trees. And you don’t have to water it.
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Tis is a Jibo, a friendly home robot. Coming soon to an issue of Popular Mechanics.
Living room
A
My Dad’s Roku
As my dad’s cancer grew, his world shrunk. Back when it was just mysterious and persistent pain in his legs, he could still spend plenty of time on the basketball court. But soon that was over. He walked with a cane. Couldn’t get as many places as he used to. And then—when
things fnally went seriously wrong— he ended up at home, bedridden. When a bed ceases to be the place where you sleep and becomes your permanent home, it is the ultimate jail cell. The hospice bed even had bars on the sides. There were essentially two things my dad could do: read or watch TV. He wasn’t much of a reader—the Good Book, investment advice—and the problem with watching TV when you’re stuck in bed is that you’re at the mercy of whatever is on or whatever happens to be in the DVD player. We had always been a moviewatching family, but suddenly it felt unfair to talk about movies I’d seen. If my father wanted to see a movie in theaters, I’d have to do the sad math, adding up the months before it came out on video. On the upside, we got back into a habit of watching movies together—my parents, my brother, and me—which is something we hadn’t done in a long time. At Christmas we hit on the idea of
getting dad a Roku streaming player. Like anyone a few generations behind the latest technology, he took a while to understand what the thing did. But my dad fgured it out, and soon enough his world started growing again. For the frst time in ages he would recommend movies to me. That’s a small thing, but in the midst of having to be cared for night and day, it let him feel like he was hosting me, instead of the other way around. My father lay in bed for six more months. His bed looked out over the backyard, which was full of my mother’s bird feeders. He loved to watch the birds fit around. The way he watched, I think they showed him something hidden from most people. Maybe this: The world spins on in spite of us. That’s not a sad thing, necessarily. But when you’re terminal, you don’t always want to think about it. For those times there is a whole other world, one that only gets bigger. These days you can stream it on demand. — Kevin Dupzyk
the truly stainproof couch Unlike Scotchgard and other stain repellents, Crypton coats every fiber of its fabric, not just the surface. Tis makes the protection more durable—and your couch virtually spill-proof. And thanks to a recent update, the fabric is actually comfortable. Couch by Calico, $1,999.
Spill-Proof Everything
The superhydrophobic powers of the frst batch of Rust-Oleum NeverWet were impressive, but we never fgured out what to do with the stuf. Then Rust-Oleum reformulated it into a one-step application especially for fabric ($15). Spray it on outdoor furniture—or anything, really—and water will bead right of.
Security
I
four optionS for buttoning down the place
100 Pounds of Security
hall of fame
The honeywell T-86 ThermosTaT Sixty-one years. Tat’s how long it’s been since the Honeywell T-86 thermostat was introduced. In that time it’s become known simply as the Round, to distinguish itself from its predecessors, which looked more like small, wall-mounted caskets. Seventy million units later, it still remains the perfect option. If you have $40, a screwdriver, and the inclination, you could set one up this weekend. Tere are newer thermostats, sure. And they’re nice: Te Nest learns your habits, and the Honeywell Lyric (top) reacts when you enter or leave the home. Both optimize your home temperature with minimal input from you. Minimal input, you say? Like turning a knob one way when you’re hot, the other when you’re cold? Something that can be operated by an adult or a child? Sounds familiar. — R.B.
I used to be the sort who obsessively checked every door and window before leaving the house or going to sleep. And then I checked them all again. Now, though, when it occurs to me that I might have left the garage door open, I don’t go straight home or roll out of bed to make sure it’s shut. Not if Percy’s around. Percy is a large German shepherd—100 pounds, mostly muscle, a thunderous bark, teeth like an alligator’s, and an absolute sweetheart—of uncertain age. Every day, after his breakfast and a walk, he stations himself in front of the large picture window in our living room, front paws and chin resting on the back of the couch. If some sound or scent requires his attention, he’ll release a rumbling growl and race toward the danger. If there is a UPS truck in the driveway, a squirrel on the deck, or even, as happened once, a bear at the garbage can, he’ll bark loudly and aggressively, no doubt to alert me. But by the time I get around to investigating, Percy’s usually solved the problem all by himself. In terms of security, he’s all I need: a big, loud dog who loves me almost as much as I love him. — David Rosaler
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Do-It-Yourself Security If you don’t want to go through the expense—or the wiring—of a professional home-security system, the iSmartAlarm (from $199) is a series of motion sensors, cameras, and alarms that you install yourself, anywhere you want, and monitor through your phone. It’ll even alert you via text if someone’s broken in. From there it’s on you to decide what to do about it.
Glass That Keeps Out Thieves Window makers across the country, including big companies like Pella, are making products that meet the hurricane standards of Miami-Dade County, Florida. They cost 45 to 60 percent more than traditional windows, but you get glass built to withstand a 2 x 4 fying end to end at 34 mph—more than enough to keep out a bad guy with a crowbar. Plus, they increase energy eficiency and noise resistance, which is also comforting, but in a diferent way.
Never Lose Your KeYs As long as you have your smartphone (or a special key fob) in your pocket, all it takes to open a Kwikset Kevo deadbolt ($219) is your finger. You can even send temporary access to houseguests or the cable guy. Now all you have to worry about losing is your phone.
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GaraGe / yard
help your utility and outdoor spaces help you
A Very Brief Quiz Do you want your garage-door opener to communicate with your heating system? 1. Do you open the garage door only when
leaving your home or coming back, never just to go outside and shovel snow? A. Yes (5) troubleshooting
you could be a better Griller
According to Lou Lambert of Lamberts Downtown Barbecue, in Austin, Texas, the most important thing in grilling is the grate. You want cast iron. Nothing else. “A heavier grate holds the heat better and makes better grill marks,” he says. “That’s where your favor comes from: the grill marks.”
A Better Deck UltraShield Composite Deck Board (from $5 per square foot) is the lowestmaintenance option you can fnd for decking. The board, made of wood fber and resin from recycled milk jugs and plastic bottles, is wrapped in a plastic layer that protects it from water and UV damage—the downfall of most decks. It’s much tougher than wood and, just as important, not much uglier.
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B. No (0)
Answer Key 5 points – You want your garage-door opener to communicate with your heating system. You should take a look at the new LiftMaster opener with MyQ (retrofts are priced from $100), which lets you use your phone to open and close the garage door from anywhere you have Internet service, and can connect to your Nest, adjusting the temperature in your home whenever you leave or return to the garage. 0 points – You are happy with your current garage-door opener.
Three Things You Can Do to Improve Your Garage Right Now 1. Cover your
foor with an acrylic sealer from Quikrete or Okon (about $23 a gallon). They’re simple to put down, and you can add abrasive particles to increase traction.
2. Quiet your garage-door opener. Kits like the Garage Door Silencer ($30) from acoustical surfaces.com put rubber between the opener mount and the ceiling, allowing the person whose bedroom is above the garage to sleep through late-night arrivals.
The Case for Cordless I’m a gas-engine guy and I make no apologies for it. For the past two years, however, I’ve been testing equipment powered by a motor and a battery. And I’ve been amazed, or at least pleasantly surprised. These machines are light, tough, and, most impressively, do a decent amount of work on one charge. Take Stihl’s MSA 160 C, a 36-volt chainsaw ($350). I’ve made 60 to 90 cuts with one before it ran out of juice. Or the EGO Power+ 56-volt mower ($499). It’s got enough power to fll its bag to bulging and runs so quietly you won’t even know it’s on. I’m not saying you should switch all of your equipment to electric, but next time at least poke around the aisle. Great strides have been made. – R.B.
3. Put a GelPro
mat (from $60) in front of your workbench. It works just as well here as it does in the kitchen.
Wall-mount your vac It frees up foor space. Heavy-duty models like the American-made VacuMaid GV50 ($259) have hoses that stretch up to 50 feet. You could practically make it to the end of the driveway.
index of products Bedroom
Why It’s Still So Hard to Build a Smart Home
t
We are slowly edging toward a house you can control with your phone, from anywhere. But for now, expect headaches.
The smart home, when it works perfectly, is supposed to act like an invisible-yet-all-knowing butler: When you wake up, your blinds open autonomously and your cofee starts brewing. The thermostat adjusts the temperature on its own, keeping the house comfortable while conserving energy and money. Your front door automatically locks when you leave. That’s how we all want smart homes to work. Unfortunately, the industry hasn’t quite caught up to this idyllic vision. The product category is fraught right now with fragmentation, varying protocols and standards, and competing interests. To put it in the simplest terms: You can buy cool stuf, but it doesn’t all work together yet. Small startup types dominate, but that could change: Apple and other giants are quickly catching up.
A sprinkler sysTeM ThAT AdApTs To weATher Instead of using preset timers, the Rachio Iro Smart Sprinkler Controller (from $249) pairs with your smartphone and uses the location data to track local rain, wind, and humidity, creating a system made just for you. You can even designate zones in your yard so that your cactus garden gets less water than your petunias.
What makes it all so complicated? Each smart-home gadget has specifc requirements for communicating on your home network. Manufacturers must decide whether their devices will send data back and forth via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, or one of the other wireless technologies—and new options are still being added. In July Samsung joined Nest (maker of smart thermostats), software company ARM Holdings, and four other companies in launching Thread, a new, wireless meshnetwork protocol designed for smart-home use. Gadgets typically come with a separate portal for controlling them—and makers must choose: iOS, Android, or the Web? Invest in one platform or all? Most smaller companies are building support for everything, but some bigger players try to lock their competitors out. Don’t be surprised if, in the future, you can’t use all the functionality of your Google Nest thermostat should you end up buying into Apple’s ecosystem. In June Apple announced HomeKit, a development environment that lets device makers connect to iOS. The software framework may produce a centralized smart-home control panel on your iPhone or iPad. If you’re a pioneer type, start with a hub, and know which wireless technologies it supports—the more the better. Wink and Home Depot’s new Wink smart-home collection and hub launched in July; it stands out by giving you fve wireless options (Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and Lutron’s Clear Connect) for having your appliances communicate. Staples’ new $80 D-Link hub supports four of those protocols. SmartThings, Revolv, and Staples Connect also ofer multiple options. Then, when you’re getting a new speaker system or lightbulbs, check that each one works with those wireless technologies. Yes, you have to do it every time. As an early adopter, that’s the rutted path you chose. Of course, you could wait until the behemoths sweep in and force large swaths of the population in one direction or another: Do you want an iOS or Android home? With Apple making its frst move, Siri could eventually become like that all-knowing butler. But we respectfully submit that you need not worry about such eventualities. Yes, that new OS might disable your refrigerator, and it’ll be annoying to have to get your things talking again. But when the mainstream moment arrives for smart-home technology, the futzing around you do now will serve you well later. — Davey Alba
A Mower ThAT Folds in hAlF Te Toro Recycler with SmartStow ($369) helps maximize every inch of valuable garage-foor space. It features a forwardfolding handle and an engine that won’t be damaged by being turned and stored sideways, so you can stand it on its end.
Oc t o b e r 2 0 1 4 PO Pul ar M echanics
• Outlast sheets • Wink Hub • Philips Hue lighting system • iHome iDL95 clock • Tivoli Model Tree clock • kitchen • Nespresso Pixie cofeemaker • Canadiano cofeemaker • KitchenAid Architect Series II dishwasher • Hatco TPT-120 toaster • Cuisinart CSO-300 oven • Bathroom • TOTO ceramic tiles • Evolve Ladybug showerhead adapter • EnduroShield coating • Niagara Stealth dual-fush toilet • laundry room • Speed Queen washer • Maytag Bravos XL washer • office • Tado Cooling system • LG G3 smartphone • MOS Magnetic Organization System • LivingPlug Inlet outlet • Belkin WeMo Switch • Leviton USB charger outlet • living room • Oreck Magnesium vacuum • LG 55EC9300 55-inch TV • Epson Home Cinema 5030UBe wireless projector • Philips SlimStyle lightbulb • Lauzon Pure Genius hardwood fooring • Infinuvo Hovo 510 cleaner • Crypton stainrepellent fabric • Rust-Oleum NeverWet fabric protector • Roku streaming player • Honeywell T-86 thermostat • security • iSmartAlarm security system • Pella windows • Kwikset Kevo deadbolt • garage/yard
• UltraShield Composite Deck Board • LifMaster MyQ garage-door system • Quikrete and Okon acrylic sealers • Garage Door Silencer • GelPro mat • Stihl MSA 160 C chainsaw • EGO Power+ mower • VacuMaid GV50 vacuum • Rachio Iro sprinkler controller • Toro Recycler mower
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tially, stuck in the mud? Bertha is 60 feet under the earth, and you’re on the surface watching a squirmy public swap rumors of cost and delay on the $1.35 billion tunnel component of an even larger transportation project, and the naysayers are howling: Just you watch, Bertha will be abandoned like an overheated mole, boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Because, don’t forget, when you’re boring the world’s largest tunnel, everything is bigger—not just the machine and the hole and the outsize hopes but the worries too. The cynicism. What do you do? Here’s what you do: You try to tune out the media. You shrug of the peanut gallery’s spitballs. You put of the fnger-pointing and the lawsuits for now; that’s what the lawyers are paid for afterward. You do the only thing you can do. You put your head down and you think big, one more time. You fgure out how to reach Bertha and get her moving again. This is a rescue story.
a S e a t t l e i t e why he likes it here and he’ll invoke the things we Seattleites always say: good fsh. Better cofee. White sails on the blue water of Puget Sound. Never high on anybody’s list is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. For 61 years the elevated doubledecker freeway that slices along the waterfront has been the city’s grim, gray mule, carrying roughly one-third of Seattle’s north–south trafc while efectively divorcing the city from its waterfront, as so many other highways have done around the nation—from New York City’s FDR Drive to Boston’s Interstate 93 before the Big Dig buried it. In 2001 a magnitude 6.8 earthquake rattled Seattle, cracking the aging viaduct. As years passed and the road deteriorated, the city argued about what to do. Finally, in 2009 local and state leaders decided: the viaduct would fall. In its place a waterfront renaissance would bloom as 26 blocks along Elliott Bay rejoined the city. James Corner Field Operations, visionary of the acclaimed High Line project in Manhattan, was hired to imagine a string of walkways, parks, public piers, bike paths, beaches—even a swimming pool on a barge—that would knit the city’s core and its shoreline together and transform the place into an urban waterfront to rival those of Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver. The costliest and most complicated puzzle piece—the one that would make all of this possible—would also be one of the least visible. A 2-mile tunnel would replace the hulking viaduct. The tunnel would whisk traffc underground from the Seattle Seahawks’ stadium, just south of downtown’s high-rises, north to the Space Needle and South Lake Union. Seattle’s tunnel wouldn’t be very long—just 1.7 miles of it bored through the earth—but it couldn’t be just any tunnel. It needed to be big enough to hold four lanes of trafc across two decks, with cars traveling at highway speeds. It would have to dive deep, more than 200 feet below downtown’s heart, to avoid disturbing the city’s skyscrapers and old buildings. The machine would have to be wily enough to dig through Seattle’s funky soils, everything from glacial till to pudding, the latter a legacy of early city fathers, who fattened the lumpy pioneer town into the salt marshes to create the modern city by the sound. The requirements emerged: Bertha’s cutterhead—her face—would be 57½ feet across, as tall as the viaduct she was replacing. She would have hundreds of teeth to chew with. She’d digest the muck she chewed and then ask
What do you do
if you’re operating the world’s biggest tunneling machine and something goes wrong? You’re digging along, everything fne, the machine’s fve-story maw about to chew beneath the skyscrapers of one of the great American cities. Then suddenly one day things are not so fne. Bertha— that’s her name, in honor of Seattle’s frst woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes—hits something. A few days later her temperature starts rising. Not good. Then her cutting head stops spinning. Now what? What do you do when the world’s largest tunneling machine is, essen-
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The Rescue
3
A look at what it will take to snatch Bertha from the depths. This summer Seattle Tunnel Partners sank 73 concrete pillars in a huge ring in front of Bertha’s face. Workers then excavated the hole until it was deep enough to swallow an 11-story building. 1
Though she’s running hot, Bertha can still move. Soon she will chew through the front of the protective wall until her head rests on a concrete cradle in the rescue pit. 2
1
2
Finally, a custom crane called a modular lift tower will raise Bertha’s 2,000-ton face, tilt it, and set it down. Workers will replace Bertha’s bearing assembly and add 86 more tons of steel ribs and plates. 3
cuT Terhead modular liF T ToWer comPleTed Tunnel
BerTha
Lake Union
Seattle
build the tunnel behind her as she worked, so she would be 326 feet long, as long as a home run over the right-feld fence at nearby Safeco Field. She would weigh as much as the Eifel Tower and would use enough power to light a town of 30,000 people. She’d be able to generate so much thrust—44,000 tons— she could send 13 space shuttles into orbit. And, of course, she’d be burly, because by the time she burrowed through the subterranean darkness and emerged on the other side she would have shed 9 tons of solid steel. Bertha would be all of these things. She would be the biggest tunnel-boring machine ever built.
y e T , f o R a l l her complex engineering, here she sits, a thorn in the side of the Washington State Department of Transportation. A huge accomplishment turned even huger headache. The biggest tunnel-boring machine ever to get stuck under Seattle. and
i l l u s t r at i o n by b r ya n c h r i s t i e d e s i g n
More than six months after Bertha had Elliott stopped her daily tunneling, I headed down Bay to Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood to see her sulking in her hole; I wanted to see the plans that were afoot to get her moving again. Just to the west nodded the dromedary cranes of Seattle’s port. Nearly above me loomed the viaduct, its concrete The completed (orange) and projected (blue) path of the the stained color of the city’s November viaduct’s replacement tunnel. skies. Rusting rebar showed through it like bones. Bertha had stopped tunneling just short of the viaduct’s frst pillars, with Seattle’s frst buildings just a few feet beyond that. It was Friday afternoon, and the viaduct throbbed with the trafc of people sneaking of to early weekends. You had to shout. Beneath the viaduct I met the tunnel’s project manager, Chris Dixon. Dixon is 61 and gray-haired, with a tucked upper lip that suggests a man accustomed to keeping his words and his temper close. He wore the uniform of job-site managers everywhere—steel-toed boots, pressed khaki work shirt, blue jeans a shade darker than his eyes. A white hard hat said seattle tunnel partners, the moniker for the team of large-construction frm Tutor Perini and tunneling specialist Dragados that together won the contract to build the tunnel. A vice president of operations at Tutor Perini, Dixon is a lifelong major-project guy. I asked him where home is.
P o P u l a r M ec h a n i c s _ o c t o b er 2014 81
“Wherever we are at the time,” he said. “We have no roots anywhere. My wife’s Australian. My frst job was as a 16-year-old tunnel laborer on a tunnel job in Australia.” He rattled of some of the places he’s worked. Albania. The Sultanate of Oman. California, for L.A.’s Metro Red Line Subway Project, and the BART extension to San Jose. We walked onto a bridge spanning a broad scoop in the earth. The scoop sloped into a yawning, fve-story hole, like the entrance to a burrow of some animal you weren’t sure you wanted to see up close. There were stacks of shovels and, beneath the thrum of the viaduct, the sound of trickling water. This, Dixon explained, was Bertha’s launch pit, where the whole thing started. Bertha was built by heavy-machine-maker Hitachi Zosen of Japan, which had constructed more than 1,300 tunneling machines before her. Once she steamed into Seattle in 41 pieces in April 2013, her fve-story, Sonics-green cutterhead became recognized around town, a local celebrity. She had her own Twitter feed, sending out cheeky messages about her progress: “The specialized truck that’s moving me has 96 axles and nearly 800 tires. It has won exactly zero races,” she tweeted as she was unloaded. A divided city leaned in, grew more excited. A kid dressed as Bertha for Halloween. A woman made a giant meatloaf shaped like her, with workers fashioned out of Lit’l Smokies sausages. Once Bertha was assembled and positioned in the launch pit, 5,000 people came out to wish her well. The governor spoke. He and former governor Christine Gregoire cracked a bottle of wine against her steel, and a bottle of sake. “I should say something profound, something Neil Armstrong-ish,” Bertha tweeted. “Fortunately, I’m out of characters. Let’s dig.” On July 30, 2013, she got to work.
Bertha had some 8,000 feet to go, and every foot she drilled was another foot farther f r o m h e l p.
understand how
a tunnel-boring machine works, think of an earthworm. The worm eats. It pushes forward. It expels. This is Bertha in a nutshell. As her 886-ton cutterhead revolves at about one rotation per minute, 260 spinning and stationary teeth chew the soil before her. Nozzles on her cutterhead spray saliva-like conditioners that transform the soil into the consistency of toothpaste. The soil is pushed through the large, mouthlike holes in her face. Then this chewed-up earth—it’s ofcially called tunnel muck by engineers— enters a chamber where it’s stirred and conditioned still more. Next comes digestion: High pressure deep in a tunnel forces the muck up Bertha’s gullet, a massive ribbon screw that works like an Archimedes’ screw, but whose shape (“It’s like a Slinky,” Dixon said) allows it to swallow boulders up to 3 feet wide. The screw carries the muck farther back into Bertha, until it’s deposited in her “intestines”: a giant conveyor belt that reaches out of the tunnel and dumps its waste onto a barge on Puget Sound. The conveyor belt will grow as Bertha digs until it eventually stretches some 9,000 feet to the tunnel’s end. Without this system the project would need an average of 200 dump trucks per day rumbling through downtown to carry away all the muck that Bertha digests. Dixon climbed down a ladder made of 2 x 4s and stood in the tunnel’s to
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mouth. It soared—a fve-story-tall tube bending slightly into the earth. Lining the tube were the precast concrete pieces—18 tons apiece—that Bertha lifts into place, forming consecutive rings to build the tunnel behind her. Dixon pointed high above us, where initial work on the upper-deck roadway was about to begin despite Bertha’s pause. “The only thing that’s stopped on the job is the actual tunnel boring itself,” he said. “Everything else is going ahead full speed.” Nearby, for instance, work had been reshufed to begin on the tunnel’s “brain,” a multistory subterranean building that will house the controls for signals, airfow, sprinklers, and the like. We walked nearly a quarter-mile down the already-fnished tunnel and climbed into Bertha herself. There the scene was pure industrial gothic. It was close and dim. There were steel catwalks and steel railings, and steel pipes going to and from unknown places. The air smelled of earth and grease and hard work. Even at rest the machine felt busy. We climbed higher and Dixon pointed out two man-locks: Down in a tunnel, soil and water team up to increase the air pressure at the front of the machine, just as a diver experiences increasing pressure as he descends. Whenever work has to be done at the very front of the tunnel-boring machine, workmen can’t stay long, and they must decompress afterward. Finally we halted at the operator’s cabin— the control room. The operator sat before a large console. It was spare and beige with analog gauges and big, green LED readouts, like something borrowed from a Cold War missile silo. On the control panel before us he pointed out several monitors, including ones that keep tabs on the tunnel-boring machine’s temperature. It seemed a great place to ask about Bertha’s recent woes.
Project manager Chris Dixon stands in the portion of the tunnel Bertha has completed. Opposite: The machine, partially assembled before tunneling began.
bearing on the axle of your car, only much, much larger. As in a car bearing, the working parts are sealed to keep lubricants inside while keeping out contaminants that can cause friction. It’s particularly crucial that this system work fawlessly in a tunnel-boring machine, which is surrounded by intense pressure that can force grit into the bits that need to spin freely. When workers investigated, they found that the seals protecting the main bearing had been damaged. Contaminants had gotten deep inside. This was not good. Bertha had dug only 1,023 feet. She had some 8,000 feet to go. Every foot she drilled was another foot deeper under the city, another foot farther from easy aid. All was not lost, though. She was still near home. “To be honest, if Bertha was going to break down anywhere, that’s about the best possible place it could have happened on the job—they’ll get her fxed,” Amanda Foley, North American editor of Tunnelling Journal, told me in an email. Yes, repairing her would be a world-class pain in the ass. But it was better than getting stranded under Pike Place Market.
Dec. 3
of last year Bertha hit something. It was a pipe, an 8-inch steel well casing sunk to monitor movement of groundwater. Huh, the tunnel folks thought. They noted it and kept tunneling. Three days later Bertha’s temperature rose. Then she started requiring more thrust to advance, more torque to turn the cutterhead, as if something was in the way. There’s disagreement over whether the pipe incident ultimately mattered or whether it was just coincidence; workers plucked a piece of the casing from her maw like a shard of toothpick. But what was obstructing her, the tunnelers soon realized, might be dirt itself: While Bertha can gnaw through concrete, earth of the wrong consistency can interfere with her ability to spin. By sending workers into the high-pressure environment in front of Bertha’s face, using those manlocks, they cleared her mouth. But when they got her moving in late January, she ran hot again. “What we didn’t realize at that time,” Dixon said as we stood closer to her cutterhead, “was the amount of damage that the bearing seals had sufered.” In Bertha’s neck is a bearing similar to the on
anD I emergeD
squinting into daylight and walked north. A halfyear had passed since daily tunneling had ceased. Around town people were wondering what was going on. Some fretted. Others gloated. The week of my visit, the alt-weekly The Stranger, which had long hated the notion of the pricey project, even suggested that “our money-sucking tunnel” might be abandoned and was soliciting ideas for its second life (mystery dinner theater! giant sushi conveyor belt!). For her part, Bertha no longer seemed herself. Her tweets had lost their playfulness; they were curt, businesslike, even a smidge defensive. “There’s still a lot of tunnel-related work happening,” she insisted, despite her predicament. Dixon and I walked until we were past the tunnel. The viaduct loomed just ahead. While the launch pit had been almost sleepy, here was total noise: Cement trucks spun. Workers banged sledgehammers. Welders drizzled sparks. This was ground zero of the repair efort. Dixon explained what we were witnessing. In the open ground in front of Bertha workers were creating a ring of 73 enormous, connected concrete pillars. Once fnished, he explained, the crew would spend the rest of the summer excavating that ring to create a shaft wide and deep enough to swallow an 11-story building—a vertical rescue tunnel. True to form, even this efort is Brobdingnagian in scale. In October Bertha will fre up her engines again and chew through the front of that protective wall until her head rests on a concrete cradle that workers have molded on the pit’s foor. There workers will gradually decapitate her. Next comes a bit of heavyweight ballet: A Texas-based company named Mammoet, which specializes in moving the massive—salvaging ferries from the seafoor, lifting power-plant reactors into place—will trundle a modular lift tower (a sort of custom crane) over the pit. The machine will hoist Bertha’s entire cutterhead assembly—all 2,000 tons— Continued on page 104 dixon
P o P u l a r M ec h a n i c s _ o c t o b er 2014 83
A B EAU T I F U L T HI N G Glass Trachea COMPANY:
Farlow’s scientifc Glassblowing CRAFTSMAN:
Wade Martindale LOCATION:
Grass Valley, California
Photograph by jason Madara
The objecT here is a Trachea and its twin bronchial tree—the superstructure of the human lungs. it was sculpted out of borosilicate glass by Wade Martin dale, the senior craftsman at Farlow’s scientifc Glassblowing. it is anatomically correct. Glassblowing is, in part, the art of breath control, but it rarely results in art that looks as though it could breathe on its own. Martindale was born to the trade: his uncle, Gary Farlow, a former truck driver, founded Farlow’s scientifc in 1989 in his garage in the bay area, mak ing dies and molds for medical devices like catheters. Martindale started apprenticing there when he was 13 and joined fulltime in 1994. The frst fullscale organ model came that same year when the makers of those medical devices wanted to demonstrate how their inventions work. Martindale spent two days with a medical engineer building a glass heart. he now fashions stomachs, brains, and whole torsos. and lungs. it’s an extraordinarily skilled art. For the tra
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chea, Martindale mounts thinwalled glass tubes in lathes, softens them with a blowtorch, and stretches them to precise lengths. Meanwhile, he adjusts the air pressure inside the tubes with his own breath through a hose, keeping the nearly liquid tubes from collapsing onto themselves. Details count. The ripples along the model simulate the cartilage that encircles the trachea in your chest; each band is indi vidually applied using molten ribbons of glass. once Martindale has constructed all the sub components—the lung model has nearly 40—he moves to a bench to do the delicate work of fusing them together into a fnal form. he keeps the piece at annealing temperature—1,049 F—when the glass is just soft enough to meld but not liquefy. The models are works of art, but they’re also tools of science. Medicaldevice makers study blood fow within the glass organs and test cuttingedge implants like artifcial heart valves. They lead lives of their own, in service of ours. — Tim Heffernan
50 handblownglass models Farlow’s sells in an average year.
140 hours that go into Farlow’s most complex, fulltorso model.
01 estimated number of burns a glassblower receives per project.
Fifty years from now, we’ll look back at this moment as a pivotal time in the history of vehicle safety. In the past decade, engineers have invented whole new technologies that make driving safer than ever—and their ideas keep getting better. A report from the front lines of the crusade to get you home safely. 8 6 Mon t h T K 2 0 14 _ P o P u l a r M e c h a n i c s
By ezra Dyer
Illustration by IstvĂĄn Szugyiczky
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crash testing it’s called time zero: the moment an accident begins. When we think about vehicle safety, we tend to think about what happens after time zero. crumple zones engage. seat belts cinch tight. airbags erupt. and after the violence ends, ideally the passenger cell remains intact, the humans inside unharmed. Those fractions of a second at the onset of an impact are crucial. But so are the ones that come before it. and the quest for safer cars runs in two directions—not just surviving a crash but trying to stop the clock before it ever gets to time zero. ¶ last year 32,850 people in the u.s. died in motor-vehicle accidents, according to a preliminary estimate by the national highway Traffic safety administration. For all the gains made in safety—the toll has dropped significantly from the 43,510 fatalities recorded in 2005—getting into your car is still likely the most dangerous thing you’ll do on any given day. But around the world car companies and governments are making advances in vehicle safety at an unprecedented pace. ¶ in the past year i’ve visited the front lines of safety innovation, walking the floor of a crash-test facility in ohio, talking to engineers across the globe, and trying out new electronic safety systems on the latest vehicles. From progress in active crash avoidance to huge improvements in materials, the achievements we’ve made in vehicle safety are staggering. We may never completely eliminate accidents or deaths, but we’re getting closer. I
it starts With the steel Considering all of the rapid developments we’ve seen with electronic safety systems in recent years, it’s perhaps counterintuitive that some of the biggest safety improvements in the past decade have come from good old-fashioned steel. “Over the past 10 to 15 years, steels have been getting stronger,” says Chuck Thomas, chief engineer at Honda R&D Americas, in Raymond, Ohio. “We probably had 500 megapascals of tensile strength in the early 2000s. Now hot-pressed or hot-stamped steel is around 1,500 megapascals.” At that strength you can hang 200,000 pounds on an inchwide strip without tearing it in two. The high-strength steel is stamped hot and then quickly cooled, allowing for complex shapes and a wide variability in yield strength, which helps determine how a car deforms in an accident.
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David Leone, executive chief engineer for Cadillac, says that the use of high-strength steel isn’t about turning passenger cars into invincible tanks but controlling crash energy and minimizing weight. “Heavy does not mean safe,” Leone says. “Heavy means heavy. Go back to the ’50s and ’60s. The cars were heavy. They were stiff. But if you ran into the wall, you bounced off the wall and all the deceleration went through your body. Heavy and stiff is not where you want to be.” These advances in steel—along with strategic use of other materials such as aluminum, magnesium, and carbon fiber—allow engineers to design structures that can dissipate and redirect crash forces. For example, the new Cadillac CTS uses lightweight aluminum “crush cans” up front to soak up a lot of energy before an impact reaches the passengers. Even the CTS’s seat-belt spools unwind slightly during a crash to help minimize forces on your body. The effective mix of stronger materials and crush zones is evident in a slow-motion video of the 2014 Acura MDX undergoing an offset-frontal crash test. As the car slams into the barrier at 40 mph, the front end deforms alarmingly until the shock wave reaches the firewall, where it meets high-strength steel stamped at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead of continuing its collapse, the car pivots away from the barrier, absorbing the remaining energy. From the front door forward, the car is annihilated. From the door back, it’s completely intact. II
We still need to smash stuff “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” says a white-coated engineer as he prepares to fire the crash sled at Honda R&D Americas. The sled is fitted with a mockup of an Odyssey minivan dashboard, which is propelled backward by a 45,000-hp hydraulic piston. The dummy at the wheel will take a trip from zero to 35 mph in 100 milliseconds—distance-wise, about 5 feet. The sled doesn’t actually crash into anything. The brute acceleration creates punishing g-forces that replicate those that occur in a front-end collision. At the appointed moment the sled leaps backward and airbags deploy with a bang. The dummy tattoos the bag with paint dabbed on its head, the resultant smear telling a story of how a human might’ve fared in this hypothetical accident. This is one way Honda continues to improve its seat belts, airbags, seats, dash materials—items that don’t require the destruction of a whole car. Of course, as with all other carmakers, Honda still runs full-scale tests in a cavernous clean room where actual cars are flung into various barriers under blinding lights, the impact recorded and dissected in super slo-mo. This is how carmakers test rollovers, side impacts, and small-overlap front-end collisions, which
Built to crash Carmakers use a variety of materials and steel strengths in a car’s frame to redistribute crash forces and protect passengers. In this 2015 Volvo XC90 there are fve diferent grades of steel and lightweight aluminum. By using softer metals on the exterior parts and gradually using stronger steel through the crush zone and as part of the passenger cell, the violent energy from the impact can be controlled, keeping the humans inside safe. the XC90’s seven massive airbags will also help.
Car safe t y Key
aluminum
Green
Mild steel
Gray
High-strength steel
Blue
Very-high-strength steel
yellow
extra-high-strength steel
oranGe
Ultra-high-strength steel
red
focus on the car’s right- and left-front corners. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety began running small-overlap tests in 2012 in response to statistics that roughly one-quarter of front-end collisions involving serious or fatal injury fit this criteria—a car drifting into the oncoming lane catches the fender of an oncoming vehicle or goes off the road and clips a signpost. These are particularly nasty impacts because they don’t engage the full crash structure of the front end. Instead, they tear through the vulnerable corners, sometimes forcing the front-left wheel into the driver’s footwell. When the IIHS began evaluating smalloverlap performance, the Volkswagen CC became the first car ever to have its driver-side door sheared completely off during a test. “If you don’t strike the columns on either side of the engine, that crash energy goes into the cabin,” Honda’s Thomas says. “We’ve done a lot of work to adapt to these kinds of crashes.” In yet another room at Honda’s testing facility, mechanical arms launch plastic dummy heads into the interiors of two Acura RDXs. Every piece of the cabin is optimized to deform and cushion a blow, from the headliner to the plastic coat hangers above the windows. The R&D staff, who regularly witness the violence of car crashes, seem passively disdainful of people who don’t wear seat belts, the simplest and most effective way to prevent serious injuries in an accident. On the three test noggins are the names given to each dummy: Larry, Moe, and Curly. A full-size dummy named Polar II stands in for people during pedestrian-impact tests. He helped Honda develop a better design for its windshield wipers. “If you look at your wipers, there’s probably a
big bolt on the axis,” Thomas says. “Well, it turns out that’s a spot your head might hit and basically land on a big spike. The answer is a breakaway wiper system.” Which Hondas now use, thanks to Polar. III
Vehicles are Getting amazingly smart While crash performance is still critically important, much of today’s safety research concerns the relatively new field of active accident avoidance. “We know that collisions will still occur, so you have to work with the protection of the occupants,” Thomas Broberg, senior technical advisor for safety at the Volvo Cars Safety Centre, says. “That’s an evolution. The revolution, which has already started, is with collision avoidance— auto braking, steering, and autonomous driving.” Volvo was one of the first carmakers to market with autonomous emergency braking, which applies the brakes in certain situations if the driver does not. According to a study by the IIHS, Volvo XC60s equipped with the system were involved in 20 percent fewer collisions than comparable SUVs without auto braking. Self-steering cars are the next frontier. The past two years saw the introduction of self-steering in the Lincoln MKZ, Infiniti Q50, and Mercedes-Benz S-Class, each of which can make steering corrections at highway speeds to help maintain the car’s position in a lane. Currently these systems demand involvement from the driver; when the S-Class determines that the driver hasn’t made a steering input in 16 seconds, the car shuts down its lane-keeping assistance. Lane keeping works to prevent
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inattentive drivers from drifting over the centerline or into the flank of an adjacent 18-wheeler, but that basic, limited functionality could soon be capable of taking over for long stretches of highway driving. Vehicles that can brake on their own or steer themselves aren’t equipped with any one magic technology. Even small degrees of autonomy rely on a network of multiple sensors that are already used for the various active safety systems in a car, such as blind-spot or forward-collision alerts. Because each of these electronic systems relies on different technologies with different strengths, tying them together is the key to making a car semiautonomous and, maybe even one day, fully autonomous or driverless. “Cameras can distinguish shapes but have difficulty judging distance and speed,” says Thomas. “Radar is good for distance and speed but not shapes. By using both together we get an accurate picture of the obstacles and what they are.” Nissan claims it will offer an autonomous car by 2020. Audi’s piloted driving system, which can handle highway driving, is on track for release in three to five years. And in 2017, 100 drivers in Gothenburg, Sweden, will begin conducting their daily commutes in autonomous Volvos, part of a real-world research project that furthers Volvo’s stated goal of zero fatalities or major injuries in its cars by 2020. And, of course, Google continues to work on its driverless cars, which have covered so many miles without a major accident that states are scrambling to create laws to address this new category of vehicle.
While there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about how soon a production driverless car could hit public roads—legal and insurance issues being just two—automotive experts remain optimistic. “We’re going to look back in 15 or 20 years and say, that’s what used to be in cars? Remember when I had to steer on the freeways?” says John Capp, director of global vehicle safety for Cadillac. Capp led research and development on Cadillac’s upcoming Super Cruise system. Super Cruise takes over steering and pedal operations in certain highway conditions by using lane-keeping assistance paired with active cruise control, which together help a car maintain a set distance behind another vehicle without the driver having to apply the gas or brakes. These advanced systems blur the line between safety and luxury—when the car takes a share of stress away from the driver, safety moves to the foreground of your daily experience. “It’s not a lot of fun to try out your airbags, but using your active cruise control is,” Capp says. IV
our cars are learning to Talk As automakers bring smarter cars to market, the government has been testing out technology that allows for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Greg Winfree is the assistant secretary for research and innovative technology with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced plans in February
on the road right now
2015 AcurA TLX
— road Departure Mitigation — the next step beyond lane-keeping steering, this acura system combines a camera and radar to recognize when you’re about to run of a curve—and applies steering to try to keep you on the pavement.
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2015 HyundAi Genesis
— stop/start cruise control — the Genesis will brake all the way down to a stop and then inch forward to keep moving with congested trafic. Paired with the lane keep assist system, which steers to keep you in your lane, the Genesis shoulders a lot of the driving burden during the worst part of your commute.
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2015 Ford edGe
2015 Audi A3
— active Glovebox Knee airbag — the Edge’s glovebox door is hollow and contains a plastic bladder. in an impact that bladder infates and the glovebox’s outer door panel pops out to cushion the passenger’s legs. What’s next, infatable airbag seat belts? it has those, too, in back.
— secondary-collision Brake assist — if you actually got in an accident, you’d probably want the car to stop afterward, right? the a3 does that, with its secondary-collision assist braking the car to a halt—ideally before you crash into anything else.
2015 MercedesBenz cLs
2015 cAdiLLAc escALAde
— camera-controlled leD headlights — swiveling headlights are nothing new. but the Cls takes them to the next level by connecting its 24 lEDs to a camera that can see what’s out there beyond the lights, signaling the car to proactively point the beams into a curve before you even turn the wheel.
— rear automatic Braking — if your are backing up and about to run over something —or simply ram the bumper into a nearby car or tree—the Escalade will hit its brakes and stop automatically. Caveat: it only works if you’re not stepping on the brake pedal already; if you are, the car assumes you want to run over your mailbox.
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the Newest Crash test: the smalloverlap crash test focuses on the car’s front corners, which are the weakest areas of a car’s nose.
to pursue getting the technology it’s been testing into production cars. “We’re working with car companies as we develop connected-vehicle technology,” Winfree says. “They recognize the safety potential, and they are as enthusiastic about it as we are.” If cars can relay speed, braking, and position information to each other, then they’ll be able to register potentially hazardous situations almost instantaneously, warning the driver visually, audibly, or with the rumble of the seat or steering wheel. And if cars are equipped to brake and steer on their own, predictive accident avoidance becomes possible: Your car could take action to avoid an unfolding situation that you can’t yet see. “Because this is a connected system, all the vehicles must speak the same language,” Winfree says. This intercar chat will happen on the 5.9-GHz band of the radio spectrum, which the DOT and other international organizations have designated for transportation safety. This band allows communications between vehicles up to 10 times per second—a boon when cars on two-lane roads can approach each other at 55 mph. Eventually there is the potential for vehicles to talk to infrastructure such as stoplights. This could help traffic flow by coordinating the lights according to the situation. As for the obvious privacy question, fears that the government or nefarious individuals could use your car’s connectivity to track you, Winfree acknowledges that it’s a legitimate concern: “We recognize that Americans value their privacy, and we have to get this right.” To that end, these signals don’t transmit personal information, and the point of the program isn’t to collect data. Besides, if someone wanted to data-mine you, there’d be easier ways to do it than by hacking a stoplight. V
People are the Problem As our cars take on more driving tasks, there are suddenly entirely new engineering and design challenges
for carmakers. “What is important as we go down this road, from the safety perspective, is how the car should interact with the driver,” Volvo’s Broberg says. “How do you let the car take over? How does the car tell you that you need to take over? We need to understand driver behavior.” The biggest hurdle is preventing drivers from over-relying on systems that aren’t intended to fully replace an alert human at the wheel. Subaru’s EyeSight auto-braking system will shut itself down after three consecutive near collisions, requiring the driver to restart the car before it resumes functioning. Audi’s piloted-driving hardware includes two cameras pointed back at drivers to determine if their eyes are closed for more than 10 seconds. Volvo is working on a similar concept that also scans the driver’s face with infrared lights to ascertain head position, making sure the driver isn’t nodding off. Right now driver monitoring is used to determine the threshold of intervention for systems like lane keeping and auto braking. It is also used for basic yet helpful driver aids. In many Mercedes models a small indicator light in the shape of a coffee cup appears in the dash if the car determines the driver is getting tired. Eventually, with systems such as GM’s Super Cruise, this technology could tell the vehicle when to hand control back to the driver—or if a drowsy driver should even be allowed to activate the system in the first place. “It’s going to take awhile before you can climb into the back seat and let the car take you to work,” Cadillac’s Capp says. “But we don’t have to wait for everything to be perfected before we take some steps in that direction.” GM’s haptic seat, which vibrates to alert the driver of lane departure—and impending collisions—underscores the human-psychology role in safety. Studies revealed an unexpected benefit of the seat’s silent alert: Drivers were more likely to use an electronic warning system if they could avoid the potential embarrassment of passengers knowing their mistakes. Sometimes pride goes before the fender bender. As car technology continues to evolve, the only constant is the unpredictability of the people behind the wheel. Spotty seat-belt use, drinking and driving, texting—these are problems that the best engineers can’t vanquish. The good news is that behavior and social mores can change just as fast as technology. Thirty years ago kids roamed free in the back of station wagons that lacked airbags, antilock brakes, or stability control. Now, not only are the cars themselves infinitely safer but an unbuckled child is an aberration rather than the norm. The world strives toward perfect machines and technologies that will minimize the dangers of a simple trip to work, school, or the grocery store, but the biggest variable in automotive safety is the same now as it was a hundred years ago. The final challenge, as always, is us. ■
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Car safe t y
Great safety Technology We can’t have audi’s new Matrix LeD headlights each use 25 diodes that work separately, allowing a car to illuminate the lane ahead with high beams without blinding oncoming trafic. they can also illuminate pedestrians and aim the beams around corners. the system is smart, fully automatic—and totally unavailable in america. the reason: NHtsa standard 108, “Lamps, refective Devices, and associated equipment.” essentially our lighting regulations are tightly defned and completely out of date, excluding the U.s. from having the latest equipment, which also includes laser headlights and brake lights that strobe during panic braking.
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cover illustration by rodrigo corral
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Here on earth, there are consequences to testing ideas. Sometimes they turn out to be good. Sometimes they kill you. Scientists could decide tomorrow to gene-splice monkeys onto rosebushes. Think of the gardens! But in a few years, when people are being strangled in the streets by sentient kudzu vines, we might want to reverse course. That’s the thing about ideas. You never know where they will lead you. ¶ This is what science fction does for us. The best writers in the genre are architects who create safe spaces for us to think about dangerous ideas. Sometimes, yes, that means things like 80-foot robot monsters that have spider legs and can breathe fre. But in the sci-f stories that appeal to a broader audience than 13-year-old boys with spaceship posters above their beds (God bless them) that means things like love and loss and friendship and power and the terrible acts that humans are capable of. Stories like A Clockwork Orange and Brave New World and “The Lottery” and The Stand are as important to our understanding of the human condition as anything by Philip Roth or Mark Twain or Raymond Carver. ¶ This list, which is incomplete and unordered and absolutely authoritative, collects the best of these spaces. They are simply great stories, for any bookshelf.
science fiction for everyone
burNiNg chrome, by william gibson (1982) by smith henderson, author of the n o v e l f o u r t h o f j u ly c r e e k
i d o n ’ t c a r e t h at w i l l i a m g i b s o n predicted the Internet and reality television in his pages, or that he invented cyberpunk, or even that he has time and again captured the spiritual near-dystopia of our hyperconnected, accelerating moment. These are signal achievements, to be sure. But the power of Gibson’s work resides in his sentences* —lush and grievous, wearied and compassionate—and the sheer humaneness they convey. By my lights, we vastly underrate his collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. This is probably because of the large shadow cast by his novels. But these stories are miracles of invention and devastation, each one a fresh hell made of a tried-for utopia, always richly, deeply peopled. Gibson always goes further than the conceit. Much further. In lesser hands, “Hinterlands” would be a thoroughly engrossing short story about space madness. Gibson turns it into a meditation on the agony of compassion. “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” sifts through the ruins of civilization and a single human heart. And “The Belonging Kind” is as profound a rumination on loneliness as anything in all of literature. Gibson’s gift to us isn’t foresight. It’s timelessness. * Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he’d sit all night in the Gentleman Loser, waiting for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card.
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NiNeteeN eightyFour, by George Orwell (1949) Because politicians on both sides are still applying the term Orwellian to every policy we ever argue about. Read it again. hyperioN, by Dan Simmons (1989) The Canterbury Tales, with black holes, backward aging, and cyborgs. And instead of traveling to lunch, the storytellers are on their way to being impaled by an infamous monster. Flowers For AlgerNoN, by Daniel Keyes (1959) It’s about the ethics of medical experimentation, sure, but it’s also about how love works and why we bully those
welc ome to t he monkey house, by kurt vonnegut jr. (1968) by tom chiarella
Whose name was inspired by scif author Theodore Sturgeon, whose novel More than Human is also worth checking out.
i l l u s t r at i O n s by z O h a r l a z a r
in 1973, when i was 12 years old, I stole a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions from my aunt Betsy’s mantle and read it in a day and a half. It was the frst book I ever really chose, frst book I really read with a greed for the ideas inside it. Notably, I think, I also liked the cover—bright orange with the title bent like a locomotive, and a stamp that read a novel. Best cover ever, as far as I’m concerned. I’d know that book from a thousand paces. I stole it from my aunt after seeing it from across the room. This was before Wikipedia, of course, but even then we had a need to know. A week later I went to the Monroe Avenue branch of the Rochester, New York, public library and looked up Vonnegut. The librarian gave me two copies of The Saturday Evening Post that included stories by the man himself; a hardback copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; and the single most dog-eared book I have ever come across in all my years of reading: Welcome to the Monkey House, the 1968 collection of Vonnegut’s short stories. It was in three pieces, Scotch- and masking-taped into a hopeful tablet. The pages were bent, with fipped corners, and written on, underlined, and marked up with hot little stars by three diferent pens. “Sorry,” the librarian said of the book. “It’s the only copy we have. People love that book. They steal most copies we get.” She glanced at me like the thief I was (see above) and smirked. “Short stories are easier, I guess.” I’d read my share of books by then, but I’d never even heard of a short story. I read the magazines and left them there, started the novel but I thought it was gassy and serious, so I left it there too. I took that usedup edition of Welcome to the Monkey House home with me, and I never took it back. Kurt Vonnegut’s best stories (and Welcome to the Monkey House contains the bulk of them) are hyperboles of love, or science-fction fables and manifestos, torqued-up conceits run amok within the pretty narrow strictures of his plain-Jane prose. The best ones feel like they come from a writer imagined rather than real—as if they were written by the fctional sci-f writer Kilgore Trout, I suppose, Vonnegut’s nightshade image of himself. I’d never read a book like it. Never tumbled from one story to the next with the hope that it might be even better. Never lived in a circus of the absurd the way I did with that collection. I sometimes think I live there still. Although I pressed on, and read every-
thing Vonnegut ever wrote, I only liked four of his novels well enough to mention (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, and Galápagos). His later essays and letters sometimes seemed incomprehensible, and as an older guy who traveled in literate and literary circles, I learned to not mention him as one of my favorites. Vonnegut was openly pooh-poohed in the stripped-down fuorescent light of the minimalist 1980s and the return of the big novel that followed. I let him drift out of my head until his death in 2007. I still believe the work in Welcome to the Monkey House is his very best. Vonnegut lived 17 years as a writer before it appeared, and it contained the frst story** he ever published, and stories most of the world had never seen, since they frst appeared in places like Galaxy Science Fiction. It goes end to end on the guy. In the time he took to write all that and more, Vonnegut became the man he would remain: former soldier, family man, cranky recluse, unapologetic socialist, artist with pencil, commentator, and angry voice of common sense. He died revered, remembered, and reclaimed, the most moral writer of our age, a guy who was legitimately angry at us all because we weren’t willing to start everything over again, since it had gone so wrong so fast. Kurt Vonnegut left us with a fstful of masterpieces, too, of unforgettable short stories, iconoclastic in their day, iconic in ours. ** “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” about a government effort to turn a professor with superpowers into a weapon.
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who are weaker than we are. Overwhelmingly, it is about the heartbreak of being a have-not when you know what it’s like to be a have.
science fiction for everyone
A CloCkwork orAnge, by Anthony Burgess (1962) Because most of the world’s anger is contained in little parcels known as aimless teenage boys.
t h e i n t u i t i o n i s t, b y c o l s o n w h i t e h e a d ( 1 9 9 9 ) by charles yu, author of the novel h o w t o l i v e s a f e ly i n a s c i e n c e fictional universe and sorry please thank you: stories
t h e r e a r e n o v e l s i l i k e , and novels I love. And then there are those that, even while reading them, I can feel are changing my mind, tearing down and rebuilding the architecture of my interior landscape. This novel is in that last category. It’s almost like a black box—an object of such remarkable construction that it should only be possible in theory. Yet it exists: an extended meditation on the mechanics of elevation, both physical and metaphysical, about the politics and possibility of vertical mobility in America, of moving upward against the gravitational forces of racism and history. Set in a city that is unnamed but clearly evokes a kind of alternate New York, The Intuitionist takes place in a world in which elevators are an important part of the civic discourse and elevator inspectors are powerful, public, often controversial fgures, engaged in a major ideological struggle between two competing schools of thought: the Empiricists, who emphasize “the skin of things” and the Intuitionists, who, as their name suggests, rely on feeling and intuition. No summary could convey the complexity and richness of this novel. It’s a marvel, a book-length rif that works out every last bit of melody and discord, every last note of conceptual music from its brilliant initial motif. To call it an allegory or even a metaphor isn’t exactly accurate. It’s also not quite enough. The Intuitionist is a novel of irreducible strangeness and originality that is a permanent structure in the city of my imagination.
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the stAnd, by Stephen King (1978) Feckless singer–songwriter Larry Underwood tries to escape New York City through a pitchblack Lincoln Tunnel full of diseased corpses. Sleep tight! never let Me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Because of questions like this: “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?” And answers like this: “There was no going back . . . and people did their best not to think about you.” the diAMond Age, by Neal Stephenson (1995) Because this story of working-class girl makes good in a gritty, segregated slum run by guys with guns in their foreheads might as well be a Quentin Tarantino fick.
the lottery, by Shirley Jackson (1948) Evil dressed up in its Sunday best. If Flannery O’Connor had written stories about whole towns rather than individuals, they would have read like this. oryx And CrAke, by Margaret Atwood (2003) What if, instead of founding Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had invented a new race of hominids and killed of the rest of us to give them a chance at survival? Blindness, by José Saramago (1995) The social fabric that prevents us from being unbelievably horrible to one another is so thin that it’s perpetually on the verge of coming undone. Saramago shows us just how easy it would be to pull the frst thread.
the wind-up Bird ChroniCle, by Haruki Murakami (1994) “As if they had been whacked with a huge club by an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air for a moment, then landed on the foor of the cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers had failed to fnish the tigers of with a single volley. Snapping out of their trance, the soldiers pulled back on their rife levers, ejecting spent shells, and took
t y P O g r a P h y by Pa r k e r h u b b a r d
aim again.” And that’s not even the worst part.
Do AnDroiDs DreAm of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) Everything Philip K. Dick wrote is like a bad dream and a good dream at the same time. Or a bad trip and a good trip at the same time. Or, like, what if humans and androids were totally the same and also not the same, and the fundamental question of what makes a human human doesn’t even make sense, man? Did you ever think about that? the ones Who WAlk AWAy from omelAs, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1973) *** Any society that had eternal peace, free sex, and universal happiness would have to have a secret this awful. And we’d all like to think we’d be the ones who wouldn’t accept it. the mount, by Carol Emshwiller (2002) If humans are just animals, then it stands to reason that we could be tamed like animals. You’ll never be able to look at your dog the same way again. the yiDDish policemen’s union, by Michael Chabon (2007) Because Detective Meyer Landsman “has the
memory of a convict, the balls of a freman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fght, [he] tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It’s like there’s a flm score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.” the semplicA Girl-DiAries, by George Saunders (2012) This note to future generations has been true forever: “Sometimes, in our time, families get into dark place. Family feels: we are losers, everything we do is wrong . . . This makes person (Father) doubt value of whole enterprise, i.e., makes Father (me) wonder if humans would not be better of living alone, individually, in woods, minding own beeswax, not loving anyone.” Alif the unseen, by G. Willow Wilson (2012) In a city that is essentially Cairo, the government’s Internet censor is called the Hand of God, and its job is to “discover, dismantle, and subdue.” The Arab Spring gets the sci-f treatment.
fAhrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (1953) The novel that taught us to fear the Kardashians before we even had any Kardashians.
A cAnticle for leiboWitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959) The question it asks is the one we all ask: “Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again?”
a warm can of Coca-Cola, things are dire indeed.
the forever WAr, by Joe Haldeman (1974) Catch-22, with stranger weapons.
GAteWAy, by Frederik Pohl (1977) It’s about that kind of shitty thing you did once and can’t ever forget.
stAnDArD loneliness pAckAGe, by Charles Yu (2010) In a future where the wealthy outsource pain and grief to the impoverished, a hard day at the ofce could go like this: “The lowlight of the day is when I get to be a woman. I get to tell my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The frst year of our marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst.”
Dune, by Frank Herbert (1965) Imagine that there was a substance on earth that had all the usefulness of petroleum and also made people live longer and allowed them to see the future. Now imagine how much we’d fght over it. the roAD, by Cormac McCarthy (2006) When all the pleasure on earth can be contained in
neuromAncer, by William Gibson (1984) It’s the matrix before The Matrix. With cyber cowboys.
Dirk Gently’s holistic Detective AGency, by Douglas Adams (1987) Okay, yeah, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But there is nothing else in science fction like this novel’s Electric Monk, “a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher . . . [that] believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. *** Two honorable mentions, also by Le Guin: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.
brAve neW WorlD, by Aldous Huxley (1932) Because he wasn’t so far of the mark. ■
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Tools and Supplies: Three salvaged bicycle wheels (24 to 26 inches) / hardware cloth or chicken wire / pop rivets or tie wire / 10 fxed casters / 2 x 4 lumber / plywood / 1- or 1-hp electric motor / speed reducer or selection of pulleys and belts / huge pile of dirt or compost
How (and Why on Earth) to Build a Motorized Trommel My neighbor is a good guy with a bad back—and an enormous compost pile. He decided to do something about it. By Jennifer Wilson
I feel bad for my neighbor. Brian’s the earth-biscuit type, with a fop of blond hair and a kayak rack on his Jeep that he actually uses. He’s a community-garden afcionado and a yard farmer who could talk compost for hours—mostly because there’s a massive heap of it in his backyard. Brian’s compost pile is the Everest of our neighborhood. It is robust of scent and full of twigs, old pineapple rinds, his Australian shepherd’s buried rawhide chews, and gigantic mounds of last year’s oak leaves. And buried deep inside is some of the best compost Mother Earth has ever cooked. Amazing stuf, if you can get to it. A few years ago Brian built a manual compost sifter, just a big screen within
P h o t o g r a P h s b y rya N D o N N E L L
This is Brian, the guy facing a composting challenge. We helped him out.
a frame, and he shook small batches of compost through it, separating the fne material from whatever hadn’t fnished breaking down. He used the rich matter to top-dress his lawn, which improves moisture retention and soil structure, and to make his fower and veggie beds go nuts. He reduced the size of his compost mound and made room for the fall leaf drop in our neighborhood. “When you just haul away your leaves, you’re losing that whole year’s worth of solar energy stored as carbon,” he says. See? That’s how Brian talks. He’s committed to the organic and sustainable life. Problem is, Brian has a bad back. Hours of manually sifting heavy compost ran up his chiropractor bills. Then Brian unearthed an old rock bed left behind by a previous owner and thought about how great those rocks would look on the other side of the yard—but frst the bed would need to be sifted and cleaned. The very thought of putting it all through his manual sifter nearly put him in traction. So he hit the Internet to fnd a better solution. Brian decided to build a motorized trommel, a rotating cylindrical screen that separates fne material from rough. It’s especially good at shaking out fne compost from a heap of rot and leaves.
You know how it goes. You start a project, then halfway through Saturday you’re surrounded by tools and a half-fnished mess. Brian had watched hours of YouTube videos by guys who’d successfully built mechanical trommels before him—guys like Paul Miller of La Mesa, California. He watched as Paul framed a basic cylinder with bike rims and screening, then mounted it on a wooden frame with smaller wheels turning the sieve within the rims. Atop the structure he mounted a motor. The whole thing sat at an angle, so when Paul shoveled rough material into the higher end, the cylinder dropped fne material below and dumped chunky debris into a wheelbarrow or hopper. Brian got to work on the cylinder frst: 1. Use three 24- to 26-inch bicycle rims for the cylinder frame. Brian grabbed his from the local bicycle collective. When I interviewed him, Paul said a friend who fxes bikes donated his. You get the idea.
B
Step One: The Cylinder When Brian frst told me about this trommel project, he was so stoked about it that he got me excited too. “I’ll be able to shovel in a few loads and sift out the good stuf, then put the rest back to keep cooking,” he said. “It’ll be great!” But when I arrived at his house to check it out, he took me to a dark corner of his backyard. “There it is,” he said, a little sheepish now, pointing to a screen drum, lying on its side near the compost heap. “I haven’t gotten very far. I’ve hit a roadblock.”
A
B
A
Build the frame from 2 x 4s, or weld together some tubular steel for something sturdier. We based our frame on the design of YouTube user Geof Babcock but added a speed reducer to gear down the motor’s output speed.
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2. Remove spokes from the bike rims with wire cutters, which leaves you with three hoops. 3. Roll hardware cloth or chicken wire (sized according to the gauge of sifting you want to do) into the hoops to form a cylinder shape. Brian pop-riveted his into place but you can also wire it. 4. Choose a motor. Brian bought a ½-hp electric motor at a tool shop. Paul said he found his ¼-hp electric motor for $25 on Craigslist.
Brian got stumped because he wasn’t sure how to connect the motor to the trommel to get it to turn at a speed appropriate for sifting compost. How would he connect it to the cylinder? He wasn’t sure. Other projects flled his workshop. The trommel took a back seat. Eventually, Brian moved the cylinder into the backyard, where he felt bad about it for two years. The compost pile grew and grew.
Step Two: The Power Source Like I said, Brian’s green-living credo is pretty infectious. I wanted to help him fnish his trommel, so I fgured I’d start at the heart of the problem: the motor. Lucky for us, our other neighbor, John, is a mechanical engineer for a major
international manufacturer. “The goal here is not to slow down the motor but to control a properly sized energy source,” John says. The rotational speed of the trommel is critical for safety. About 20 or 25 rpm would be plenty. Plus, lowering the machine’s speed would increase its torque—the twisting force that creates rotation—allowing Brian to sift larger piles of compost. A basic ½-hp electric motor spinning at 500 rpm is obviously too fast to couple directly to a trommel. Additionally, that same motor creates about 5 lb-ft of torque, which is not enough to do the job. To make the motor work, John says the easiest solution is to purchase a speed reducer. These afordable, mass-produced units are readily available from industrial distributors and many websites. Essentially a speed reducer is a gearbox. “In addition to reducing the speed to a manageable level, it’ll increase the torque,” John says. “The neat thing about gears is that when you arrange them such that the output speed is reduced, the torque increases inversely.” For example, if you connect a 500-rpm motor to a speed reducer, and the output speed is now 25 rpm, or ½0 of the original speed, your
SKILL OF THE MONTH
Slowing Down a Trommel With Pulleys Instead of using a speed reducer, Paul, the YouTube guy, rigged up a machine using the trommel’s center rim for speed control. “I used a 21-inch bike rim as a pulley wheel to step down the rpms of the motor,” he says. Other trommel builders use a 1,750-rpm motor with a 2-inch pulley (A) going to a 10-inch pulley (B), then a 2-inch pulley (C) going to the 25-inch trommel frame (D). With that information you can easily calculate the output rpm with this incredibly simple equation:
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1 0 2 O ct o b er 2 014 _ P O P u l a R M eC h a n i C s
T Y P O G R A P H Y B Y PA R K E R H U B B A R D
Brian’s compost heap has grown steadily since he started building his trommel.
rial with a plywood top that’s sturdy enough to attach the motor to. (One YouTube builder made his motor mount adjustable for height because his pulley belts stretched out over time and he wanted to be able to tighten them.) 3. Screw the wheels directly to the frame to turn the cylinder. Paul Miller recommends just screwing the caster into the middle of a 2 x 4 and lining up the caster wheel with the middle of the bike rim, repeating on all four sides at each end. “There was no planning or measuring involved,” says Miller. “I just basically built a square around the rims.” 4. Extend frame legs to the ground or attach wheels to the base to make a more mobile unit. 5. Here’s where you can customize. Some of the YouTube builders added a piece of sheet metal as a guard on one side of the trommel so it doesn’t fing dirt and debris all over the yard. Some builders crafted diferent drums for diferent purposes—smaller screens for composting, larger screening for rock jobs. Others made the trommel contraption high enough that it could be directly positioned over raised garden beds to reduce the amount of shoveling required. 6. Position the trommel at a slight downward angle so, as it turns, discarded debris falls away. Use a wheelbarrow or similar hopper to catch the debris coming out the end of the trommel. 7. Enjoy, as Brian says, “a revitalized and amazing living soil structure with highly organic material!”
torque now increases by a factor of 20. “Your 5 lb-ft of torque is now 100 lb-ft at the gearbox,” he continues. Most motors can be readily adapted to a wide variety of speed reducers through standardized fanges and coupling. “Industrial supply houses and motor distributors can help you put a nice little package together,” he says. “Ask an electrician to make sure your circuit is wired correctly to withstand the load from the motor.” Alternatively, you can reduce the speed using a series of pulleys (see “Slowing Down a Trommel With Pulleys”).
Trommel Safety Is Mostly Common Sense
Step Three: The Frame
1.
Once Brian fgures out his motor system, he can build the frame. And then he can fnish his trommel.
2. 3.
1. The size of the frame will depend on the size of your cylinder and the position of the wheels you use to turn the cylinder within it. Brian planned to mount his trommel on caster wheels from the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore, but you could also use small wheels with an axle from a home store. 2. Frames are best made from 2 x 4 mate-
4. 5.
6.
Operate a motor-driven trommel from a circuit with a ground-fault circuit interrupter. Cover the machine; store it out of the weather. Build the machine with a large, accessible on/of switch. Don’t rely on unplugging it to disconnect it. Don’t allow kids to play with it. Shield belts and pulleys to keep loose clothing and hair from being entangled. Don’t wear loose clothing, and tie back hair when operating it.
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The Tunnel Continued from page 83
in a single dead lift, tilt her face 90 degrees in midair, and set it down beside Elliott Bay, just like lifting the motor out of a car to work on it in your driveway. By then a ship from Osaka, Japan, will have arrived with new parts, including a shiny new bearing assembly—an elaborate improvement, Dixon said, containing seven seals and several diferent chambers, with opportunities for grease to be injected at multiple points in the system. While aboveground Bertha will be disassembled and fxed and get a bit of a face-lift, too, including widened mouths on her cutterhead to make her a meaner eating machine, and 216 steel ribs and plates added to her head as reinforcement. “We want them to get it running,” Dixon said, “and assure us with 100 percent confdence that it can complete the remaining 8,000 feet.” In November everything will be pieced back together like an Ikea chest of drawers and returned to the ground in reverse order—without leaving any 1-ton screws lying about on the surface. If all goes well, Bertha will be tunneling again by early March. Though “it’s too early to say whether they’re going to make their schedule or not,” Matt Preedy, deputy program administrator for the Washington State DOT’s Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Program, said, the tunnel could open in November 2016, just 11 months later than originally promised. Is all of this efort—an 11-story pit, a snatch from the depths—really necessary, I asked Dixon. Couldn’t the tunnel partners make the repairs by, say, using the tunnel? “It can be done,” Dixon replied—and that’s what would happen if Bertha had gone kaput deep under Seattle. But as he told me later, “The repairs would be much more complicated and expensive.” You’d have to disconnect Bertha’s entire body, back it out of the tunnel, make the repairs, then reattach everything. At heart, he said, it’s “just an engineering problem. Certainly things have occurred on other projects—not major catastrophes, but things that you think, now we’re dead in the water. But you always fnd a way to work through those things and complete the project.”
Harder than engineering, Dixon said, is managing human expectations. “There’s three things that are really critical on a major project in an urban environment in the U.S.: politics, the media, and the community. I’ve always just focused on controlling the things that I can control,” he said. “I’m known as having a very even temperament.” He also has reason to remain calm. Bertha is still under warranty. And someone will eventually shoulder the (many) additional costs of the 16-month delay. The lawyers will sort it out, if it comes to that. “It’s to be determined,” Dixon said coyly, smiling. Beyond the lengthened schedule, however, a larger clock is ticking. There is that small matter of the earthquake that ravaged the viaduct in 2001. For now the road is safe, but in 2007 a state study reported
“There’s Three Things T h aT a r e r e a l ly criTical on a major projecT in an urban environmenT in The u.s.: poliTics, The media, and The c o m m u n i T y. i ’ v e a l w ay s jusT focused on conTrolling The Things T h aT i c a n c o n T r o l .” project manager chris dixon
there was a one-in-10 chance another viaduct-threatening earthquake would occur in the next decade. If that happens, Seattle could have a real problem on its hands. So long as it doesn’t, Bertha can spare a few months to recuperate. Dixon can’t think about all that now. For the next fve months, possibly the most crucial period in the entire project, he can focus only on rescuing Bertha— getting her out of her purgatory and back to chewing her way under Seattle. Which is why, even though at 4 pm the viaduct above us was already humming with folks heading home for the evening, Dixon said goodbye to me, hung up his orange vest, and drove back to the ofce. ■
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Photos & Illustrations: p. 13 World Series: base courtesy of Schutt Sports; Conversations: top and bottom by Getty Images; middle by AP Images; p. 16 Inevitable F-35: courtesy of Lockheed Martin; p. 20 How to Raise a Whiskey Pig: styling by Robin Finlay; p. 24 The Doctor Is In: styling by Robin Finlay; p. 25 King of Cause and Efect: Hummingbird Efect illustrations by Brown Bird Design; p. 37 Fall Gear: photograph courtesy of Parker Liautaud; p. 60 Ask Roy: illustration by Martin Laksman; p. 64 Amazing Home Technology: prop styling by Shaun KatoSamuel; wardrobe styling by Constanze Han; grooming by Ryutaro/Halley Resources; product photographs by Philip Friedman/ Studio D; illustrations by Brown Bird Design; p. 89 Car Safety/Volvo XC90: photograph courtesy of the manufacturer; On the Road Now: illustrations by Martin Laksman; p. 92 Sci-Fi Books: photograph by Don Penny/ Studio D; Vonnegut by Getty Images Wardrobe Credits, Amazing Home: pp. 64–65 Tim Ryan (model): pants/LL Bean, shirt/Filson, belt/LL Bean, shoes/Red Wing; pp. 66–67 Tim R.: pajamas/H&M; Michelle C. (model): Victoria’s Secret; pp. 68–69 Tim R.: shirt/Hugo Boss, tie/H&M, shoes/Lacoste; Michelle: dress/ Zara, shoes/Aldo; pp. 70–71 Tim R.: suit/ Hugo Boss, shirt/H&M, tie/H&M, shoes/ Lacoste; Michelle: dress/H&M, shoes/Aldo; pp. 72–73 Michelle: checkered blouse/Zara, skirt/Zara, shoes/Express; Tim R.: shirt/ LL Bean, sweater/Gents, belt/LL Bean, jeans/Mavi, shoes/Lacoste; pp. 64–77 Aidan S. (model): all clothing/Gap Kids
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DO YOU NEED A NEW SMARTPHONE? A few simple questions. Read 10:35 AM
Y
N
Does your current smartphone work?
Y
N
Is that DDR2 RAM?
Y
N
Is the screen smaller than 5 inches?
Y
N
Can you work your phone by tapping it?
Y
N
Do you mind being trapped in the Apple ecosystem?
Y
N
Speaking to it?
Y
N
Shaking it?
Y
N
Are you excited about the new iOS 8?
Y
N
Rocking it?
Y
N
Have you ever had to delete photos to take new ones?
Y
N
Do you have a unibody case?
Y
N
Do you have a micro SD slot?
Y
N
Do you have a quad-core processor?
Y
N
Do you have a front-facing camera?
Y
N
Is it Snapdragon?
Y
N
With more than 2 megapixels?
Y
N
Would you beneft from TouchWiz software?
Y
N
Would you use a 40-megapixel rear camera?
Y
N
Sense 6?
Y
N
Do you have image stabilization?
Y
N
Motion Launch?
Y
N
Laser-assisted focus?
Y
N
An ultra-power-saving mode that saves battery by running in black and white?
Y
N
Would you like a phone with 5 cameras?
Y
N
Is the battery at least 3,000 mAh?
Y
N
And the ability to buy anything you point the camera at?
Y
N
Is the pixel density higher than 500 per inch?
Y
N
Do you want an AMOLED screen?
Y
N
Y
N
2K?
Would your phone score an AnTuTu benchmark over 34,000?
Y
N
4K?
Y
N
Do you have a BlackBerry?
Y
N
Do you have less than 3 GB of RAM?
Y
N
Are you highly covetous?
KEY: Answer all the questions. Add up the number of yeses, then dismiss that number and look at your answers to the last two questions. If you answered yes to either, you need a new smartphone.Â
108 Oc t ob er 2014 _ P O P u l A r M E c h A N I c s
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TAKES YOU…
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Over the decades, scientists have peered into their crystal balls, envisioned the world to come…and shared their predictions with readers of Popular Mechanics. What did they see? Flying ambulances. Space suits made from paper. Utopian cities with elevated sidewalks and sunken streets. Even the cure for the common cold. In our brand new book—a collection of these speculations with original text by Nebula winner and NASA advisor Gregory Benford—the bizarre, wildly imaginative, and (occasionally) eerily accurate Wonderful Future That Never Was comes to life.
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978-1-58816-862-7
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AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD.
1950: Clean your waterproof home with a hose
“After nine years, four Priuses, and over 300,000 miles, we wouldn’t drive anything else.”* The Huangs, Prius owners
toyota.com/prius Options shown.*Vehicle life is dependent on a variety of factors. Toyota basic warranty covers 3 years or 36,000 miles, whichever occurs frst. Actual Prius owner made previously aware their likeness and statement may be used for advertising. ©2014 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.