Popular Mechanics - July 2014 ZA

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Contents

July 2014 Vol 12, no. 12

44

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70 38

SCI ENC E

16

F E AT UR ES

14

Tech watch ●

A wind turbine that floats on air ● Godzilla by the numbers ● Console games at war ● Looking afresh at Mars

56

52

Time’s tangled web 60

Auto intel

70

Reinventing carbon fibre The first truly connected car ● From Tazz to Quest

Skills ●

Ice-cold beer Toolbox upgrade ● Car-wash tactics ● Know your wall anchors

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Saturday mechanic 78

Lies and liars How do we separate truth from untruth? Poorly, it seems

PM DIGITAL ●

Electric avenue: battery-powered vehicles that break the mould ● WIN: CAT Big Twist watches and Skil 1734 AA rotary hammers

84

Opinion ●

Why we fix The truth about 3D-printing piracy ● In defence of jargon ●

TE ST ED

What your smartphone says about you Not all phone users are created equal

46

Dawn of the ultra-chopper Radical new designs will revolutionise helicopter travel

HOME

88

DIY home Build a workbench

93

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Six car sounds you shouldn’t ignore

44

Total immersion Why Facebook paid $2 billion for a virtual reality start-up

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87

The 25 skills you should teach your kid There are still some things to learn from dear old dad

WHEELS

94

36

Fresh food and chilled beverages weren’t always a given

Quantum theory could explain the flow of time

30

A brief history of ice

TECH

Ode to the circular saw After 60 years, time to retire an old faithful?

M O N TH LY

4 6 10 12 38 108

Contact us Editor’s notes Letters Time machine Great stuff Do it your way

U P G R AD E

Activity-tracking fitbands

28

Discreetly logging your lifestyle, 24/7

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Prosthetic limb revolution Re-imagining the Big Apple

16 46 2

28 www.popularmechanics.co.za OJULY 2014

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On the cover: On its as-yet-unnamed helicopter design, AVX uses compound-coaxial rotors and ducted fans to help it reach 425 km/h. Picture: AVX Aircraft Company. This page: While still a teen, Palmer Luckey created the virtual reality system that became the Oculus Rift; barely two years later, Facebook bought his company for $2 billion. Picture: Robert Maxwell.

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HOW TO SUBSCRIBE OR CONTACT US Call: 0860 100 205, Fax: 0866 704 101 or 021 530 3143, E-mail: [email protected] Online: www.magsathome.co.za or www.popularmechanics.co.za Web site: www.popularmechanics.co.za FOR OUR CURRENT SUBSCRIPTION RATES, SEE PAGE 67 Published and distributed by RamsayMedia (Pty) Ltd by permission of Hearst Communications Inc, New York, New York, United States of America. We cannot be responsible for loss of unsolicited queries, manuscripts or photos. For return, they must be accompanied by adequate postage. As a service to readers, POPULAR MECHANICS publishes newsworthy products, techniques and scientific and technological developments. Due to possible variance in the quality and condition of materials and workmanship, POPULAR MECHANICS cannot assume responsibility for proper application of techniques or proper and safe functioning of manufactured products or reader-built projects resulting from information published in this magazine.

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Jeep with ®

EDITOR'S NOTES

IT'S CALLED AREA 31, AND THERE ARE NO ALIENS

H

elicopters are not what they used to be. Our cover story this month describes PM’s visit to a secret facility on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where aerospace engineers are devising a radical new rotorcraft that promises to change military operations and civilian skies forever. It’s called Area 31, and it’s the home of Sikorsky Aircraft’s compound coaxial helicopter, the S-97 Raider – just one of a slew of formidably capable machines that are faster, more manoeuvrable and better equipped than any rotorcraft in the sky today. “Dawn of the ultra chopper” starts on page 46. Lamenting our inability to separate truth from fiction, we present a thought-provoking piece titled “Lies and liars: can you catch them?” As writer David Tenenbaum says, it’s awfully hard to catch a liar or even to know if someone is telling the truth: “The best estimate, based on hundreds of studies, is that people can spot a liar 54 per cent of the time – a ratio that is perilously close to pure chance.” By way of example, Tenenbaum cites a couple of “white” lies that most of us have probably told at some time or another, such as “I have read the terms of service” and “I’ll work on that ASAP”. Remember that British couple who ripped off their insurers by pretending that the husband had died in a canoeing mishap? They were tried for fraud and went to jail. Remember Jeffrey Archer, millionaire novelist and member of the House of Lords? He, too, went to jail after being convicted of perjury. Closer to home, we await the court’s verdict in the case of Oscar Pistorius… Then it’s time for an update on the remarkable story of Palmer Luckey and the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that caused a sensation. You probably recall this young man from last year, when he was judged a winner in the annual POPULAR MECHANICS Breakthrough Awards (USA). He pitched up for the glittering awards ceremony wearing jeans, a wrinkled shirt and flip-flops. It wasn’t calculated coolness, by the way: he was just being himself – and he was, after all, just 19 years old. A few months ago, Oculus VR, the company he founded with a group of 6

financial backers in the American summer of 2012, was sold to Facebook for around R20 billion. Interestingly, Oculus Rift fans immediately turned on Luckey, accusing him of “selling out” to a corporate giant. Even his Kickstarter supporters were unhappy. They were being unfair, and here’s why: the Oculus Rift needs big money to realise its full potential, and Facebook has lots of that. This VR headset and its successors will not only transform the multi-billion rand gaming industry, but will change the way we interact with our world – the way we learn, the way we relax, the way we escape. Virtual reality headsets are already being used to treat post-traumatic disorders and to help cure phobias; many other applications remain to be explored. As I write this, I’m preparing to leave for the annual World Science Festival in New York. Co-founded by renowned physicist and author Brian Greene (he’s also professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University) and Emmy Award-winning journalist Tracy Day, this amazing event brings together thousands of people of all ages in a week-long celebration of science. I fully intend to bring back good ideas for PM’s FutureTech 2014 conference in Cape Town on 10 October. Watch this space – and look out for our “Altered Realities” programme updates online: visit www.popularmechanics.co.za/ futuretech

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WHO REALLY GETS YOU TO THE CHURCH ON TIME? Your trusty alarm clock has probably been responsible for you making some of the most important engagements of your life. And yet, who ever stops to think about just how much you trust every second it keeps for you? Truth is, the things you trust most never stop working to earn it.

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L E T T E R S / W H AT ’ S O N Y O U R M I N D ?

FORGOTT EN TECHNOLOGY

ning Win ter let

When I was a teenager, 55 years ago, my zits were cured swiftly and efficiently by Ayrton’s Sulphur & Yeast tablets. Today, not even pharmacists have heard of them, and I drew a blank on Google. During WW2, by far the best-performing aircraft was the De Havilland Mosquito, its performance made possible by very strong and light construction. It was a monocoque sandwich of balsa within mahogany, pressed into shape against concrete plugs (one of which can still be seen in the Mosquito Museum in London), and was far stronger and lighter than conventional aluminium construction. Production was cheap and simple and could be farmed out to small furniture makers. Yet today, that technology is gone and almost forgotten. The same is true of the geodetic construction of the Vickers Wellington, invented by Barnes Wallis (better known as the inventor of the Dam Busters’ bouncing bomb). On the other side, the German company Jumo developed a supercharged twostroke aircraft diesel that combined all the usual advantages of diesels with a power-to-weight ratio approaching that of a Rolls-Royce Merlin. (One of them can be seen in the RAF Museum at Cosford, near Birmingham.) One really wonders why all modern diesels are not built this way, but the technology has been forgotten by all but geeks like me. Even more striking is the Stirling engine. In the late 19th century, every farm in the Midwest had one, but today the only Stirlings I know of are the engines in Sweden’s AIP (AirIndependent Propulsion) submarines. Years ago, evaporative fridges were common. They “burned” water as their “fuel” – in reality, they depended on a phenomenon called Latent Heat of Vaporisation. I seem to recall that back in the 1950s, somebody came up with a car air-conditioner that worked on the same principle. Evaporative coolers were cheap to build and, as there was almost nothing in them that could go wrong, pretty much trouble-free. They would be ideal for the world’s poor in general, and for South Africa’s shanty dwellers in particular. But they, too, are forgotten. I could go on for pages – but I am sure you get my drift. I should like to see POPULAR MECHANICS run a regular feature on such things with a view to rescuing these useful old ideas from extinction. BILL TOMLINSON MUIZENBERG Editor’s note: Oh, the memories! When I was very young, and living with my family in a rural cottage without electricity (I still have no idea why), my father constructed an evaporative cooler outside the kitchen, using chicken wire and charcoal. I remember being impressed and proud.

Go cycling with junior My young son wanted to go cycling with me but cycle carriers for children are really expensive, so I came up with a plan. I welded together four pieces of flat steel bar (300 mm x 30 mm x 5 mm) to create two angled shapes. Next, I welded on two smaller pieces of flat bar (50 mm x 30 mm x 5 mm) to keep them together. I drilled a couple of holes for bolts, added round tubing for footrests, bolted on a bicycle seat and even provided a pair of mini-handlebars for my little passenger, although it wasn’t strictly necessary (see details in the picture). It works very well. My son sits in front of me, with his feet well away from the chains. To restore the bike to its original state, all you need do is remove two bolts. DAWIE DU PLESSIS LUCKHOFF

Eco-friendly heating solution Write to us, engage us in debate, and you could win an Oregon Scientific Chameleon camera worth R2 999. The world’s first dual-view action camera features dual lenses – each with a 170-degree field of view – positioned at each end, so you can film forwards and backwards simultaneously. Playback automatically syncs the footage from both lenses, giving you an immediate split image (720p per lens) without any fancy editing. Record the trail ahead and behind, the wave as it curls around you, the ground below and the plane above as you dive into the blue sky – share all the action and your reaction at the same time! For more information, contact Oregon Scientific on 0861 123 555 or visit www.oregonscientific.co.za Send your letter to: POPULAR MECHANICS, PO Box 180, Howard Place 7450, or e-mail [email protected] Please keep it short and to the point. Regrettably, prizes can be awarded only to South African residents.

10

A couple of years back, PM ran a story about someone who won an eco-competition with a device that used warmed air from the ceiling cavity to heat a room. I work from home in a room on the south side, so it stays fairly cool all year round and is positively chilly in our Gauteng winter. I happened to have an old blowheater lying around that didn’t heat any longer, so I cut a hole in my ceiling to match its outlet and removed the heating coils. Key to the operation was an outdoor temperature sensor with wired readout, bought from a motor spares shop and www.popularmechanics.co.za • JULY 2014

never fitted. This sensor I positioned on a roof beam, with the temperature readout in my office below along with the switch for the heater fan (which is small, consuming only a couple of watts). A minor initial teething problem was that cold air tended to sneak in under the eaves, over my ceiling insulation and down into my “heater”. The problem sorted by the high-tech solution of a cardboard grocery box shaped to fit, which now draws heated air from the centre of the ceiling. The result is virtually free heat after about 10 or 11 in the morning, when the in-ceiling temperature can rise higher than 26º C. Having dark roof tiles also helps. To cover the ceiling hole when not in use, I considered using complicated sliding or venetian blind-type covers, but settled instead for a simple hinged flap operated by a string running over a hook in the roof beam. In-ceiling temperature can easily rise to well over 35º C even in July, sometimes getting to 45º C (pity poor plumbers!). Result: very eco-friendly room heating at absolute minimal cost. Thanks, POPULAR MECHANICS! DOUG LAURIE VIA E-MAIL

Why Armageddon? I am an avid PM reader and find your articles very interesting. However, I have noticed that you are publishing more and more articles about new military technology. I wonder if anyone realises that these weapons are used to destroy human beings. On receiving your April issue, my eye was caught by the article about the “Armageddon club”. I cannot understand why people are so enthralled by destruction. If you think that your readers find this fascinating, then you have to ask yourself why. With all due respect to the writer, don’t you think it would be more beneficial for your readers to learn about technology that can make the world a better place? What this world needs is not more bombs, but more love. NEIL VAN DER MERWE VIA E-MAIL

Where are the handymen? I have a design and display manufacturing business that I started from scratch 16 years ago. I studied interior design/architecture and am pretty handy, having literally built my company with my own two hands. I still design everything we make myself, but my design expertise has outgrown my manufacturing knowledge and capacity, and although I want to JULY 2014 • www.popularmechanics.co.za

Brewing up a storm I enjoyed your article on home brewing (“Join the homebrew revolution”, May issue), particularly because I was in the game for about 10 years, with varying success (the results ranged from delicious to utterly vile). I learnt the basics from a book I bought in the UK in 1999. Some weeks ago, after a hiatus of about five years, I attended a craft beer festival in the SA Breweries grounds in Cape Town, where I chatted to friendly people who rekindled my enthusiasm for home brewing. What impressed me was their lack of pretension. No one was showing off and everyone was happy to share their knowledge (and beer). Mark my words, this movement is about to grow by leaps and bounds. GEOFF BREWSTER ORANJEZICHT

bring more services in-house, I lack the trade and hands-on experience. It dawned on me recently that there must be retired guys out there with enormous knowledge that I could tap into… guys who want to keep themselves stimulated and help me set up and operate equipment such as flatbed CNC cutters, Perspex benders, vacuum formers, spray booths and so on. I currently outsource most of that work, but as we grow, I want to bring certain capabilities in-house. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated. RICHARD NILSON [email protected]

Okay, so we asked for vigorous debate… If Eva van Belle does not win Letter of the Month (April 2014), you guys are a bunch of idiots, and you should be placed in stocks and pelted with plastic vuvuzuelas that were made overseas. It is a pleasure to read your magazine, and I wish you many more years of success. GW FISCHER VIA E-MAIL Editor’s note: The letter in question proposed that participants in the motorcycle Toy Run (an annual event in which bikers contribute thousands of toys for distribution to underprivileged children) forgo “cheap plastic imports” and instead devote their DIY skills to producing quality wooden toys. Sadly, that month’s Winning Letter prize went to another PM correspondent.

A touch of class The new Brough Superior SS100 (“Class consciousness” May issue) is indeed a class act, even if it does cost the price of a modest apartment in the suburbs. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Ferrariland theme park outside Barcelona, featured in the same issue (“Upgrade”). It’s bizarre, garish and tasteless, and what I find most disturbing is the fact that it will probably make lots of money. T JOUBERT EAST LONDON

PM 11

T I M E M A C H I N E / I T M A D E P E R F E C T S E N S E AT T H E T I M E

1936

In a refreshing departure from the conventional lecture format, the US Department of Labour introduced this “mechanical man” with the ability to deliver a canned (get it?) 4-minute speech at the Texas Centennial Exposition. The subject: men and machines.

1947

1971

It’s not all about aesthetics, you know. As we told it, this “motor scooter” provided perfectly adequate transport when 71-year-old Mrs Mary Spoor of Danville, Illinois, went shopping or visiting friends. Occasionally, we revealed, her 74-year-old husband went along for the ride, perched on the back seat.

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Some 43 years ago, we were quite excited about this design for a 480 km/h monorail that was reportedly being explored as a rapid transit system for US cities. Interestingly, the TriMono-Trans System was originally conceived as a toy by project engineer Marty Trent, who imagined it running from room to room. The field coils are built into the train and the track becomes the armature.

1965

Recalling the celebrated “Tunguska event” of 30 June 1908, when a massive blast over the remote Tunguska River basin in Siberia flattened thousands of trees and made seismographs decidedly agitated, we speculated about the cause of the explosion. Could the culprit have been a lump of antimatter? We spoke to the scientists, who said it was possible that our Universe contained antistars, antiplanets and even antipeople. They may have been on to something. PM www.popularmechanics.co.za OJULY 2014

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ILLUSTRATION By SEAN MCCABE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF . . .

ICE

From icy world trade and chilled beef to magnets that fight melting, we bring you the cold, hard truth about ice. BY AMANDA GREEN

O 1806: Frederic Tudor sells river ice from

Massachusetts to people in Martinique and Cuba. Tudor lands in debtor’s prison, later finding a better way to harvest ice that won’t melt en route. O 1878: Gustavus Swift is the first to ship dressed beef, not live cattle, by train from the US Midwest. He keeps it fresh by hiring engineer Andrew Chase to perfect the ice-chilled railcar. O 1913: Fred Wolf Jr upgrades kitchens with the DOMELRE (DOMestic ELectric REfrigerator), but the device is just an electric fan atop an icebox.

1806 1878

O 1924: Although dry ice was known in 1835, Thomas Slate is the first to sell it for railcar refrigeration. O 1925: Kelvinator – named after Lord Kelvin, who discovered absolute zero – debuts the first selfcontained refrigerator with a compressor and cooling system.

1925 1924

O 1928: Lloyd Groff Copeman patents the first rubber ice-cube tray. Guy Tinkham makes his with flexible stainless steel in 1933. O 1931: Frigidaire uses Freon in fridges. It’s safer

than previously used chemicals, but no one realises until the ’70s how damaging it is to the ozone layer. 1931

O 1934: Ernest Hansen makes a motorised ice-

O 1949: When a chill settles over their ice-block factory, the Zamboni family builds an ice-skating rink, then creates a surface-smoothing vehicle to keep business running smoothly. O 1953: Servel’s Automatic Ice-Maker Refrigerator

1949

thinks outside the tray – and cube (with round ice). O 1963: In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Manhattan Project scientists develop ice-nine, a water polymorph intended to help US Marines walk over mud. Later, it nearly wipes out life on Earth.

1963

O 1966: Batman audiences meet Mr Freeze, a sci-

entist who fights the dynamic duo with an ice gun. O 2013: Sochi, Russia, stockpiles snow for the

2014 Olympics. Sketchy weather turns it to slush and ice. 1966 2014

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O 2014: Magnets aren’t just for outside the fridge. GE investigates the magnetocaloric effect, first discovered in the 1880s, to create energy-efficient refrigerators that replace compressors with metal alloys and magnets. PM www.popularmechanics.co.za • JULY 2014

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EVERETT COLLECTION (MR FREEZE), GETTY IMAGES (OTHER PHOTOS)

shaving machine. Snowball, anyone?

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NEWS TRENDS BREAKTHROUGHS IDEAS

VIDEO > Visit www.popularmechanics.co.za to see how the BAT operates.

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www.popularmechanics.co.za OJULY 2014

MONITOR

Highview Power‘s liquid-air tanks store about four times more energy than compressedair tanks.

READY FOR TAKEOFF BAT will harness high-altitude winds in regions where other energy options are difficult.

A higher power BY SARAH FECHT

JULY 2014

O


Compressed air has been around for decades as a way of storing grid-scale amounts of energy – and it works best when there’s a massive underground salt cavern nearby to store the quantity of air required. Otherwise, things get tricky. But Highview Power Storage, a British company, has a solution: liquefied air at -196 degrees, which can store four to six times more energy than a similar volume of compressed air. The liquid air is stored in off-the-shelf, vacuum-insulated tanks. To retrieve energy, the air is re-evaporated, causing it to expand by a factor of 700 and generating high-pressure gas to spin a turbine. Highview has been running a 2,5-megawatt-hour demonstration plant in London since 2011 has now received a R140 million grant to build a 15-megawatt-hour plant in the UK. The new project will take advantage of waste heat from a gas plant on an adjacent landfill to help warm the liquid air when power is needed, increasing efficiency and reducing cost. – ALEX HUTCHINSON

A centaur with rings ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN LAKSMAN

An 18-metre-wide floating wind turbine is coming to Fairbanks, Alaska. From a height of nearly 300 metres, the Buoyant Airborne Turbine (BAT) will harness winds that are six times more powerful than the winds at ground level, supplying electricity to a dozen local homes. An 18-month experiment targeted for launch in 2015, BAT will fly 80 metres higher than the tallest stationary wind turbine could eventually get up to 600 metres high. At 30 kilowatts, BAT has a larger capacity than the 20-kilowatt Makani Power airborne turbine that received a 2011 POPULAR MECHANICS Breakthrough Award. Whereas Makani’s turbines are supported by an autonomous aircrafts, BAT stays aloft via a helium-filled shell. At its centre, three turbine blades spin a shaft that turns a generator to produce electricity. Tethers hold the turbine in place and deliver the electricity to a portable ground station that interfaces with a grid. After the Fairbanks experiment, the company plans to use BATs to supply power to small offgrid villages in Alaska, where solar power isn’t an option and permafrost makes conventional wind turbines expensive to install.

Liquid-air energy storage

Only giant planets develop ring systems like Saturn’s. Or at least that’s what astronomers believed up until March, when a team from Brazil discovered two dense rings encircling a rock named Chariklo that orbits the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. (Half asteroid and half comet, Chariklo is technically classified as a centaur.) With a diameter of 250 km, Chariklo is about 1/500th the size of Saturn and is by far the smallest object known to have rings. The rings are thought to be composed of water ice that may have formed from debris left over from a collision. – SF

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BIOPRINTED BLOOD VESSELS The problem with bioprinting 3D slabs of living tissue is that, without blood vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients the printed cells on the interior of the slab suffocate and die. To avoid this, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a special bioprintable ink that melts into a liquid when it’s cooled. This ink is used to trace blood vessels during the layer-by-layer printing of a complex tissue; then the structure is chilled and the ink is sucked out, leaving a hollow tube that can function as a blood vessel. Human endothelial cells are injected into the matrix to develop the vessel lining. The researchers now hope to produce bioprinted tissue viable enough to be used in drug testing and eventually to replace damaged tissue in humans. – AH

VIDEO > See how Wyss’ new 3D printing method works at www.popularmechanics.co.za

One pole to rule them all

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Contagious, airborne Wi-Fi virus The Chameleon virus can’t be detected by any antivirus software program because it never actually infects your computer. Instead, it jumps from Wi-Fi hotspot to hotspot, seeking the ones that are least protected and eavesdropping on their traffic. Computer-security researchers at the University of Liverpool developed Chameleon to test how a Wi-Fi-to-Wi-Fi virus would spread. Like a human flu virus, it travels faster in dense areas, such as London, where Wi-Fi spots are generally less than 50 metres apart. The researchers also pointed out that Wi-Fi’s biggest threat is the continued use of open (non-password-protected) networks and outdated encryption (WEP instead of WPA), rather than the technology itself. – AH

For centuries scientists have tallied creatures one by one in order to determine population. In the past five years, though, they’ve turned to satellites and counted penguins, savanna animals, most recently, whales. Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey used an image taken by the WorldView-2 satellite to identify all the Southern right whales in a region of Argentina’s Golfo Nuevo Bay. Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 770 km, WorldView-2 detects dark-blue light, which pierces 15 metres into the ocean and reveals the submerged creatures. Fretwell’s team also designed a computer program that can scan an image and calculate the population. The first-gen algorithm was 89 per cent accurate and is expected to improve, helping scientists understand how whale populations are adapting to climate change and recovering from heavy whaling. – FERRIS JABR


PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN LAKSMAN

A magnetic north pole without a corresponding south pole seems impossible – every magnet found has two poles. But ever since Nobel winner Paul Dirac theorised its existence, we’ve looked for the monopole in everything from Antarctic ice and moon dust to rocks taken from ocean beds and polar volcanoes. A naturally occurring magnetic monopole has not yet been observed. But now physicists at Amherst College in Massachusetts have constructed a synthetic magnetic monopole in a cloud of rubidium atoms that behaves like a magnetic field when cooled to tenths of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Researchers manipulated these atoms to create a vortex, with the monopole forming at its end point. This showed that Dirac’s equations are correct and monopoles are possible – but whether they exist in the universe remains to be seen. The search is ongoing and includes experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. – AH

Counting whales from space

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Scout •

Tesla Motors’ Model S factory

When Tesla’s Model S sedan proved vulnerable to impactrelated battery fires last year, the company acted quickly. Although only three cars caught fire, Tesla developed a new aluminium and titanium underbody shield system to further protect the battery, which is located under the floor (existing models will be retrofitted). With its flexible, high-tech Model S assembly plant, the company was able to swiftly implement the safety modifications.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JURVETSON (FLICKR)

– ANDREW DEL-COLLE

20


VIDEO > Take a peek inside Tesla’s Model S robotic factory at www.popularmechanics.co.za

JULY 2014

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VIDEO > Visit www.pmzone.co.za to watch the Godzilla movie trailer.

NERD OUT

Godzilla in real life Godzilla is back in cinemas, and he’s big. Since his first awakening, the radioactive, fire-spewing kaiju has grown 60 metres and put on more than 150 000 tons. Godzilla is now 30 storeys tall and weighs as much as a cruise ship. No actual animal could take the pressure of being so massive: it would overheat, its organs would implode, it would need to mainline butter to get enough calories. For fun, we surveyed scientists to help us break down the beast’s biology. If Godzilla were real, he would be an incredible specimen. – BY DANIELLE VENTON

LIFE SPAN 2 000 years HEART SIZE 20 metres across 100 tons BLOOD VOLUME 2 million litres WEIGHT 146 000 tons

WEIGHT PROBLEMS

Godzilla would weigh 146 000 tons, according to our keen analysis of the 2014 Godzilla toy and a formula developed by paleontologists to work out the mass of bipedal dinosaurs. We found out he would surpass the theoretical weight limit for land animals – 100 to 1 000 tons. The heaviest dinosaur, the 100-ton Argentinosaurus, stood 21 metres tall, was 35 metres long, and had four limbs to distribute its enormous heft.

POWERHOUSE

BAD TO THE BONE

The force on Godzilla’s bones is roughly 20 times greater than the force on a T rex’s, so his bones would need to be phenomenally strong – about twice as tough as some titanium alloys. Normal bone has a tensile strength of 150 megapascals, but Godzilla’s bones can handle 3 000 MPa – the same pressure found at the base of Earth’s lithosphere, 100 km below the surface. Godzilla’s cartilage would be about 12 times stronger than a human’s, preventing his knees from exploding like overripe tomatoes – and making him the envy of basketball players everywhere. WALKING (er, lumbering) SPEED 2,9 km/h

MASS CALCULATOR 0,00016 x (circumference of femur in millimetres) 2,73 = mass in kilograms 0,00016 x (Godzilla’s femur: 24 200 mm) 2,73 = 148 571 645 kilograms, or nearly 150 000 tons

22

THICK SKIN

Godzilla’s exterior is tough. (Soldiers with rifles, really?) His crocodile-like hide would be embedded with osteoderms, or bony deposits akin to chain mail. Protruding osteoderms on his back and tail vent excess heat.


ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW RAE, PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE GODOT (GODZILLA)

At rest, Godzilla’s metabolism would generate 1,4 megawatts, or about as much power as that of a large wind turbine. On a rampage – smashing helicopters, knocking over buildings, fighting Mothra – he’d generate about 37 megawatts. That’s enough energy to fuel a town of 3 000 people.

Speed read BY JOSHUA A KRISCH

Q + A

How did the video-game industry get started?

In the late 1960s, Ralph Baer, an engineer at defence contractor Sanders Associates, invented video games. But the company didn’t know how to monetise this contraption, so it licensed the idea to Magnavox, which created the Odyssey, the first commercial game console. Odyssey had 12 available games, each involving a ball and slightly different gameplay. The games inspired Atari’s Pong – a major hit. Home consoles became popular, arcade games became popular, video games became a billion-rand industry – until 1983, when the so-called Atari crash happened. The culprit was a glut of bad games. Because the early years had been so successful, Atari and its competitors seemed to think anything would sell.

PICTURE BY SARAH SHATZ, PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN GOLDSTEIN (BOOK); ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN LAKSMAN

Blake Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation

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Q When did Nintendo take over? A While the rest of the industry was floundering, a tiny company

called Nintendo was soaring due to its 1981 hit, Donkey Kong, which eventually became the most popular arcade game of all time. Nintendo used these arcade earnings to resurrect the homeconsole business (with its NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System) when most people had written it off as a passing fad. From 1985 on, it grew like crazy. By 1990, the video-game industry was worth R30 billion – and Nintendo controlled 90 per cent of it. To avoid making the same mistakes as Atari, Nintendo set rigorous quality-control measures. This led to things such as the Nintendo Seal of Quality, as well as a strict third-party licensing programme, where licensees could make only five games per year. Most consumers were oblivious to this, but there’s no doubt Nintendo’s rules angered many gamemakers, which set the stage for a contender.

MEANWHILE, IN SHIP ANTIPIRACY

New hands-free, high-seas defences BY JEREMY HSU

LOW TECH

Q How did Sega take on the juggernaut? A In 1991, Nintendo’s popularity started to give way. Part of

this was because it was facing anti-monopoly suits from the US government. It made an effort to loosen its strict regulations, but meanwhile, Sega was also beginning to find fledgling success under new president Tom Kalinske. Sega was really focused on clever and occasionally outrageous marketing that went way beyond TV commercials. It emphasised both character development and grassroots campaigns, such as placing college reps on campuses to spread the Sega gospel. That low-cost, high-reward strategy paid off. Sega’s unorthodox thinking is ultimately what gave it the edge over Nintendo.

Q Who won the console wars? A I think both sides would say they won, and I think, in a way,

both are correct. If you take a snapshot of the early 1990s, Sega won. Because Nintendo had 90 per cent of the market, the fact that Sega could even compete with Nintendo was a victory, not to mention that it did get up to 60 per cent of market share. But if you expand that and look at the entire life cycle of 16-bit systems, I’d say Nintendo won. You could definitely say the battle played out with Sega as the flashy and short-term-oriented contender – as underdogs often are – while Nintendo played the long game. And in the end, Nintendo came out on top.

The Guardian is a series of bright-orange plastic barriers that fit on ships’ safety rails to thwart potential hijackers. Designed by a British couple, the system uses a bulletresistant, high-density compound to form a slippery, metre-wide overhang that renders ropes, hooks and ladders ineffective – they simply can’t attach. Guardian barriers are custom-made, and crews can install them more safely than they can barbed wire. In May, 2013, a container ship fitted with the barriers successfully fended off an attack by Nigerian pirates.

HIGH TECH

LINGO NINTENDO HARD: Retro arcade games were made very difficult to keep people playing. When these games transferred to the home Nintendo Entertainment System, they were called Nintendo Hard – that is, unless a player was familiar with the plot, routinely dying was all but expected. At its most extreme, today this kind of gameplay is also called platform hell, or masocore.

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WatchStander uses patented software algorithms developed for the US Navy along with off-the-shelf hardware parts to track and deter pirates. The system’s radar can spot small boats from up to 3 km away. If suspicious vessels approach, a tracking spotlight becomes a dizzying strobe light. Manufacturers are also working on getting other non-lethal defences such as blinding lasers, chemical sprays and water cannons, deployed later this year. Earlier in 2014, WatchStander staved off a swarm of 12 Iranian wooden skiffs in the Strait of Hormuz during a pilot test.

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IDEAS

Is it time to stop babying Mars? Mars is no stranger to life. Seven US spacecraft have successfully landed there and all of them took microbes to the planet’s surface (though the bugs probably did not survive for long). Yet the world’s space agencies continue to maintain strict spacecraft sterilisation procedures in the hope of minimising the spread of Earth life beyond our planet. For decades this ethos – known as planetary protection – prevailed. Now, some scientists say, these precautions are undermining the search for life beyond Earth by raising costs and inhibiting innovative missions without meaningful benefits. Of all missions to Mars to date, only the Vikings, the first trips to the Red Planet, were intended explicitly to test for life. Spacecraft that went later did not have that ability. But a future mission will, and, the protectionist thinking goes, a rover might not be able to distinguish between a life form native to Mars and one with origins on Earth. In July 2013,

astrobiologists Dirk SchulzeMakuch and Alberto Fairén disputed this in Nature Geoscience. “If Earth micro-organisms can thrive on Mars, they almost certainly already do,” the authors write. “If they cannot, the transfer of Earth life to Mars should be of no concern, as it would simply not survive.” With clear evidence of a watery history and some signs of water present, Mars could be where we find life in our solar system. And with the development of Curiosity’s precise landing system, we can finally reach the intriguing parts of the planet. But it’s these areas that require a craft sterilisation process. In the 1970s, Vikings 1 and 2 revealed what seemed like a dead planet, so planetaryprotection requirements were relaxed. Now, with a more nuanced understanding of Mars’ environment, missions set to visit areas with evidence of flowing water below the surface have to meet the rigorous – and more costly – Vikings standards. “In practice, everyone kind of avoids [these areas] because it really increases the price tag on the mission,” Schulze-Makuch says.

The cost increase is generally said to be around 10 per cent, but Cassie Conley, Nasa’s planetary protection officer, says this is not accurate; the number is closer to 4 per cent of Curiosity’s R25 billion budget. Planetary protection is a game of risk assessment, she says, and it just makes good sense. “You’d think they’d want to protect their ability to do their science without contamination,” Conley says. “It’d be like trying to study bacteria in the lab and spitting on your petri dish.” But Conley’s concerns over false positives might just be a red herring. According to Schulze-Makuch, the dissimilarities in the two planets’ environments surely would have led to the evolution of distinguishable differences. Finally, there’s the philosophical conundrum of what responsibility, if any, we have to other planets and any life we leave there. The truth is, we’re never going to be able to fully protect Mars if we intend to explore it. And spreading is simply what life does. “If we want to survive for a long time, we have to expand beyond Earth,” Schulze-Makuch says. “There’s no other way.” PM

ILLUSTRATION BY SHOUT

BY LAURA DATTARO

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ON THE OTHER HAND i-Limb ultra revolution

Touch Bionics, a provider of world-leading prosthetic technologies, has enhanced its already phenomenal i-Limb Ultra Revolution prosthetic hand with a slew of innovative technologies, including something called Grip Chips (Bluetooth-enabled devices that allow the user to assign a grip to an object) and i-Limb Skin Active TS (patients wearing this covering are able to use touchscreen devices such smartphones or tablets with compatible i-Limb prostheses). And there’s more. The company’s My Grips – Biosim and My i-Limb mobile apps have been enhanced by 12 additional custom grips, allowing patients to easily program custom settings to produce up to 36 different grip options.

The history of Touch Bionics began with a programme of work conducted at the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital in Edinburgh from 1963, starting with comprehensive research into developing prosthetic solutions for children affected by Thalidomide.

VIDEO > Catch the new i-Limb Ultra Revolution in action at www.popularmechanics.co.za 28


FUTURE SHOCK

Urban Alloy Towers Late last year, Metropolis magazine launched a design competition with the theme “Living Cities”, challenging architects and students to create solutions for the housing crisis that would soon face New York. The city was expected to gain a million more residents by 2040, said the magazine, and the initiative sought to address this urban influx. Participants were tasked with formulating proposals for a residential tower 30-40 storeys tall, to be sited within the five boroughs of New York. All designs were required to use and articulate an innovative structural steel system. Factors such as sustainability, multi-use strategies, lifestyle amenities and multigenerational design were critical elements for submissions. This futuristic concept, titled Urban Alloy Towers, is one of two winning entries. Chad Kellogg, Matthew Bowles and Nina Mahjoub of AMLGM Labs imagined a massive transportation, entertainment and residential hub with outstretched tendrils that acted as tunnels for subway and railway trains. How cool is this?

JULY 2014 • www.popularmechanics.co.za

29

Auto

INTEL

HOT RIDES TOP TECH TEST DRIVES Compiled by ANTHONY DOMAN [email protected]

THE FIRST (REALLY) CONNECTED CAR 2015 AUDI A3 There’s a temptation to grow nostalgic for a time when cars needed regular lubrication instead of app updates. But this misses what cars have always been about – connecting people with other people and other places. It’s the same reason we love our phones, computers, and tablets. Now available in applicable markets – the US, for instance – with a 4G LTE data connection and a wealth of advanced tech, the 2015 Audi A3 takes connecting to a new level by combining the physical and digital worlds better and faster than ever before. Just be ready to pony up: an A3 with Audi’s full technology suite will cost around at least R400 000 in the consumer-friendly USA. The future has, after all, never been cheap. – By John Pearley Huffman

A. CONTROLLER WHEEL Instead of a separate touchpad like on larger Audis, the one here is integrated into the controller wheel. A separate volume knob doubles as a seek button.

B. DISPLAY

A D

B C

The 100 mm thick pop-up screen is dazzling. Powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, its 175 mm display is a precise, 3D instrument for monitoring everything about the car or accessing the world’s accumulated knowledge.

C. INFOTAINMENT This is Audi’s first use of the Modular Infotainment Platform, which houses the hardware in a standard-size box. It’s modular because the entire unit can be swapped out and upgraded without affecting other systems. In other words, the design is future-proof.

D. CONNECTIVITY Google point-of-interest search is built into the navigation menu. It also uses that connectivity to offer voice-dictation text messages. Finally, a car that implements technology as well as your phone – without the embarrassing selfies. 30


ON THE WEB > Download wallpaper images of selected cars at www.popularmechanics.co.za

GRILLE TO GRILLE

PORSCHE AND MERCEDES WANT THEIR PIECE OF THE GROWING LUXURY COMPACT SUV MARKET. BUT HOW DO THEIR NEW MODELS STACK UP? FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK.

2015 MERCEDES-BENZ GLA45 AMG Economy Output

10,3 litres/100 km (est) 265 kW, 450 N.m

AMG. Typically those three performance-packed letters are enough to make us swoon over any model Mercedes. Not so with the new GLA-Class. Hold on, hear us out. With its turbocharged 2,0-litre supplying 265 kW – an extra 110 kW over the standard GLA250’s engine – the 45 is certainly good fun. Steering is precise, and acceleration is immediate. But here’s the catch: the standard GLA 250 is a superb small luxury SUV for the price. It lacks the power of the AMG or Macan S, but it’s no slouch and is easily the best deal in this segment. So much so that we can’t justify paying the AMG premium. – Andrew Del-Colle

2015 PORSCHE MACAN S Economy Output

14 litres/100 km 254 kW, 460 N.m

Physics has a way of limiting the driving dynamics of tall, heavy SUVs. Don’t expect the transcendent driving experience of the Boxster. But the Macan handles better than other small SUVs. More important, it looks and feels like a Porsche, right down to the seating position and steering. The 254 kW Macan S is priced competitively (unlike the 300 KW Macan Turbo with its eye-watering price tag), yet is less expensive than any other Porsche, save the base, manual-transmission Cayenne. You get the cachet, performance and quality of a Porsche crest at a bargain price, which gives the Macan S the edge here. – Michael Austin

2014 TOYOTA YARIS

NOTE THE RESEMBLANCE

For 2014 the Yaris has been given a makeover that brings it in line with current Toyota design. The bold new front treatment features a fullwidth upper grille, new-look triangular headlamps and a substantial trapezoidal lower intake. Toyota says that these are all key elements of its design theme that are being introduced progressively across its range. The restyling continues at the rear, though less strikingly so, and there are also under-the-skin changes. Engines continue as before, with a 1,0or 1,33-litre petrol engine. The hybrid drivetrain will be retained, too. JULY 2014

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AUTO INTEL

VOLKSWAGEN UPDATES

China is no longer just another place on the car show calendar. For many, it is the place to be in what is possibly the world’s biggest market. At the Beijing Show this year, long-standing Chinese automotive associate VW had plenty to display, but four vehicles grabbed most of the attention.

NEW TOUAREG Seemingly more of an evolution than anything else, the new Touareg has more dynamic styling and tech updates that include, on the V6 TDI version, a coast function. Available in Germany in the third quarter of 2014, it will be offered with a turbodiesel or hybrid drivetrain.

MIDSIZE COUPÉ CONCEPT Volkswagen continues to take the fight to rivals – even some within the greater VW Group stable – in its quest to prove that it’s more than just a maker of compact cars. This four-door coupé is said to combine the worlds of saloon and sports cars. The roof features an integrated panoramic sunroof and alongside the striking grille are LED headlights with 3D optics. Wheels are 20-inch with 245/40 tyres.

GOLF EDITION CONCEPT Celebrating 40 years of the Golf, the Golf Edition is anything but a people’s car. Outfitted like a limo and running on 19-inch alloy wheels, it features special metallic paint with a gold shimmer that visible only from certain angles. The interior is done out in quilted leather and wood.

GOLF R 400 CONCEPT The number in the name refers to the engine output in horsepower, which translates into 294 kW. That’s some output from any engine, never mind a “mere” 2,0-litre petrol direct injection unit. Performance? Breathtaking, with zero to 100 km/h in 3,9 seconds and a top speed of 280 km/h. Peak torque is 450 N.m and the drivetrain is permanent 4-wheel-drive 4MOTION.

SUZUKI V-STROM 1000 ABS

WELCOME BACK

3

A completely new 1 033 cm V-twin engine in an all-new chassis headlines the return of the Suzuki V-Strom 1000 after a six-year absence. The 1000 was dropped in 2008 because of emissions regulations, leaving the 650 as the only V-Strom in the adventure tourer category. The 1000 engine is designed for optimum performance across a broad range of applications. Efficiency improvements on the original include new cylinders and cylinder heads, redesigned pistons and con rods, a new crankshaft and clutch, and twin coils and twin iridium spark plugs per cylinder. That’s all resulted in an average fuel consumption figure of 4,8 litres/100 km – an improvement of 16 per cent over the previous 996 cm3 V-twin. The V-Strom 1000 is also the first Suzuki motorcycle to feature three-way adjustable traction control. According to Suzuki, 250 times a second the system monitors the front and rear wheel speeds, as well as several other parameters. Brakes have been beefed up, too. Price: R134 750. 32


A STALWART RE-IMAGINED TOYOTA QUEST

Remember the Tazz? Of course you do. It sold like crazy because it was cheap, cheerful and Chi… no, silly, it was Japanese. Back in the1990s Toyota re-invented its previous-generation Conquest hatchback, slapped a funky name on its pert rear and watched it simply fly off the showroom floors. Toyota wasn’t alone, of course. Volkswagen had pioneered this thinking with its Citi Golf and Mazda was one of those that followed suit with its Sting. South African buyers were certainly sold on the price, if not the modest features package. In 2014, the Tazz is long dead, but the Quest has been created in the same spirit. Having launched the new 11th-generation Corolla, Toyota began looking enviously at the “supercompact” bracket. They didn’t have a competitor there. So they created one on price, if not on size. As a result, the retreaded previous-generation Corolla has gone on sale as the Quest. Toyota describes it thus: “a sensible, spacious and, above all, affordable family car”. SIMPLIFIED PARTS Matt black exterior trim for the grille and numberplate garnish ● Relocation of the repeater lamps from the side mirrors to the fenders ● Carpeting and roof headlining derived from the company’s locally produced IMV (innovative international multi-purpose vehicle) LCV platform ● Fixed, not split, rear seat ● Revised, locally made trim ● New-design headlights ●

JULY 2014

O www.popularmechanics.co.za

Built on the same production line to the same exacting standards as latest-generation models, the Quest provides bigger-car values at smallercar prices. Speaking of which, prices start at R174 900, though we suspect private buyers will be looking at the better-specced next model up, which costs R20 000 more. And no, it wasn’t done by stripping out the features and conveniences we’ve become used to. So how did they do it?

ONLY ONE ENGINE All-aluminium 1,6-litre in-line four PARTS COMMON TO 2014 COROLLA ● Engine ● Seats

TOOLING AMORTISED The initial investment in tooling up for the previous-generation car has long since been recouped

33

AUTO INTEL

REINVENTING CARBON FIBRE

CHEAP CARBON COMPOSITES, MANUFACTURED ALONG SUSTAINABLE PRINCIPLES FROM LOWER-PRICED RAW MATERIALS, COULD REVOLUTIONISE EVERYTHING FROM BRAKES TO BODYWORK

Brakes that are high-tech, more powerful, lighter – yet cheaper: this is just one of the benefits predicted to flow from a project that, it is hoped, will revolutionise production of carbon fibre and make it more accessible to the mass market. Thirteen leading global companies with top carbon fibre expertise – among them supercar maker Lamborghini – are behind the project. They call it Newspec (new cost-effective and sustainable polyethylene-based carbon fibres for volume market applications). Essentially, it’s about developing sustainable carbon fibre technology. The process could be on stream as early as 2017. Currently, carbon fibre is created using Polyacrylonitrile (PAN). That’s a process that is expensive and has massive environmental impact. Could new materials retain existing carbon fibre’s combination of strength and lightness while being more planet-friendly and cheaper? If so, it could have huge implications for mass-market products that use materials such as steel. According to the consortium, they are looking into promising, low-cost, sustainable precursors. An example is polyethylene (PE), which could be derived from bioethanol or recycled. Lamborghini will build and test carbon composite prototypes for the project. The role of these prototypes will

be to ensure the functionality of the PE-based (both virgin and recycled) fibres. The company has two CFRP development centres (the Advanced Composite Research Centre at its headquarters and the Advanced Composite Structures Laboratory in Seattle in the US). It brings more than three decades of experience in carbon fibre and has specific expertise in developing alternatives to PAN.

A new, cost-cutting recipe Newspec’s main aim is to develop carbon fibre using through promising low-cost polymers, such as polyethylene (PE). In PE’s favour are a high carbon yield of around 70 per cent, high processability and chemical flexibility. Significantly, it’s relatively cheap, at about R30 per kg. Compared with the PAN precursor currently used, it could save up to 70 per cent in raw material costs. Production cost of converting PE to carbon fibre is R150 per kg versus about R225 per kg of PAN fibres. That’s a 30 per cent cost saving on similar production scales, says Newspec. Polyethylene (PE) precursors for carbon fibre look like a promising avenue. There are three main sources for PE: ● bioethanol ● synthetic oil ● recycled plastics.

A pilot facility for continuous carbon fibre processing is the starting point. If it proves workable this will be scaled up to an industrial-size operation. For those interested in the technicalities of it all, here’s the inside story on the PE-to-carbon process. Newspec says that, for PE stabilisation, an original dry oxidation method is proposed. This is assisted by Electron Beam Curing (EBC), which introduces heteroatoms at the precursor stage. They say this has technical, economic and ecologic advantages. In addition to this, it can facilitate innovative and flexible development of new CFs. To reduce the graphitisation temperature, they are looking at the use of nucleation agents such as cellulose nanowhiskers, CNTs and fine graphite powders.

WHERE WE’LL USE IT BRAKE ROTORS AND PADS Carbon ceramics materials will revolutionise braking, says Newspec. Carbon brake discs weigh about half as much as grey cast iron brake discs. To start with, that’s a huge saving in unsprung mass. But even better, the higher-tech material has significant mechanical and thermal properties. Cheaper carbon fibre will open up the mass market to ceramic brakes, especially where light weight is crucial, such as with electric cars.

Lamborghini Huracán

34


AUTOMOTIVE STRUCTURE, BODY AND INTERIORS Carbon fibre reinforced composites and plastics (CFRP) are become more and more widely used in body and chassis components. Forged CFRP is stiffer than glass fibres; carbon fibres made from PE can help save up to a quarter of costs, with potential uses foreseen in high-end cars. AEROSPACE LOW LOADED, SECONDARY AIRCRAFT STRUCTURES The aerospace industry’s heavy hitters Boeing and Airbus have recognised the significant advantage of composites in its superjumbos such as the B787 and A380. The proportion of composites in these aircraft, which weigh over 250 tons, is almost 50 per cent by weight and 80 per cent by volume. WIND TURBINE BLADES OF MORE THAN 50 M LENGTH Carbon fibre’s strength/rigidity combination will come in useful as wind turbine blades stretch 50 metres and beyond, massively increasing the enormous tensile loads on rotors. The material can also be used on smaller blades as a retrofit.

OIL AND GAS PIPELINES, PRESSURE VESSELS FOR OIL/GAS COMPONENTS Harsh environments are common in the fossil fuel industry. Think high pressures and maritime zones with their corrosive climates, for instance. Pressure vessels, oil

and gas pipelines can benefit from using low-cost CFRC instead of glass fibres to strengthen and retrofit corrosion-damaged and distressed structures. PM ●

Source: Newspec, Lamborghini

PM TESTED

What your smartphone says about you BY JENNINGS BROWN

Be you pro-privacy or paranoid, you are now able to buy the first secure smartphone – if you live in America, that is. Silent Circle’s Blackphone (costing about R6 300) uses a heavily modified Android OS equipped with a 2 GHz quad-core processor and 16 GB of storage. The only difference is that users can choose when they want to go off the grid. Ordering Chinese food? No encryption necessary. Ordering Chinese M-80s? Turn on Silent Phone mode – although to be honest, it’s a bit more complicated than that. True encryption works only with Silent Circle subscribers. We support the company’s mission, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t formed opinions about the first people who ordered it. In fact, PM we have assumptions about every phone and its users.

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ANDROID

WINDOWS

BLACKBERRY BLACKPHONE

Watch

TED Talks

anime

American Idol

Bloomberg

Homeland

Web

PM (natch)

reddit.com

yahoo.com

bdlive.co.za

cryptome.org

Drink

craft beer

Red Bull

dry white

latté

rainwater

Music

Lorde

Skrillex

Coldplay

Bocelli

Rage Against the Machine

Social

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

neko.io


PHOTOGRAPHS BY GETTY IMAGES (LORDE, ANIME), SHOWTIME (HOMELAND)

iPHONE

A TOYOTA HILUX DOUBLE CAB VALUED AT R470 000! #Where2next?– Darling of the Dakar, polar conqueror and the poster child for indestructability – where to next for this motoring legend? How about your very own driveway? A brand spanking new Toyota Hilux 3.0 D-4D 4x4 Raider Double Cab (with selected body kit and cabin accessories) valued at over R470 000 is up for grabs in the #Where2Next? competition.

HOW TO ENTER Send us a story with photographs of your recent road trip to popularmechanics@ ramsaymedia.co.za (no longer than 300 words, hi-res images no bigger than 5MB) T&Cs apply visit www.popularmechanics.co.za. Competition closes 30 November 2014.

FULL HOUSE: The Hilux is a South African best-seller and is renowned for its quality and durability, not to mention exceptional offroad capability. Its stonking 3,0-litre turbodiesel engine churns out 120 kW at 3 400 r/min and 343 N.m of torque at just 1 400 r/min. Fuel efficiency, however, is not compromised – the 3,0 D-4D returns a laudable 8,6 L/100 km. The range-topping Hilux Double Cab Raider comes with a full house of specifications, including: remote central locking • full-colour infotainment system with Bluetooth and reverse monitor • multifunction steering • auto lights • electronic climate control The Raider pack boasts a rear styling bar and tonneau cover on top of the standard 17-inch alloys and stainless-steel side steps. And, bear in mind that the prize vehicle will come with extra aesthetic enhancements! Watch this space for details.

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HERE’S THE NEWEST GEAR YOU’LL WANT TO OWN

STUFF

Compiled by SEAN WOODS [email protected]

CANSONIC HD ACTION CAMERA More than just an action cam An action camera with all the bells and whistles, but without the heavy price tag, sounds almost unbelievable. Well, it’s true. Cansonic’s HD Action Camera – aside from capturing Full HD video and stereo sound – boasts so many features that you’ll be spoilt for choice. Motion detection, for instance: that’s ideal for setting up the camera at a watering hole to film wildlife that might be scared off by humans. And impact detection, so you can record that parking-lot fender-bender that happened while you were gone. It also measures g-forces (x, y, z axes), features a GPS so you can plot your position on Google Maps – and it’s a dashboard camera, too. Wi-Fi enables its use as a baby monitor, via your smartphone. Another neat feature: the time-lapse function, which allows you to compress scenes such as sunsets into 1-minute video clips. With a 3,8 cm colour screen, waterproof housing (rated to 30 m), suction cup, bicycle attachment, various helmet mounts (flexible and otherwise), 12 V car charger and a 32 GB micro SD card, what’s not to like? Price: about R4 000. Contact Planetron on 0861 752 638 or visit www.planetron.co.za

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Data cruncher High-end laptops used for video processing and other data-heavy applications usually cost a bomb. That said, budget-constrained engineers, designers and video editors should check out Dell’s new entry-level mobile workstation, the Precision M2800. It can be configured with fourth-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, AMD FirePro W4170M graphics with 2 GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory, up to 16 GB of RAM and up to 1 TB of storage. You can also choose between an HD or FHD (1920 x 1080) 40 cm UltraSharp display. Plus, you get external multi-monitor support and docking capabilities to simplify your transition from the road to your desk-based workspace. To maximise the performance of CAD, digital content creation and editing software, it comes ISV-certified for leading applications such as Autodesk Auto CAD, Dassault Systèmes Solidworks and the like. It also features Dell’s Precision Performance Optimiser, which automatically adjusts system settings to give specific applications a boost. Prices start at around R22 600. Visit www.dell.co.za

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GREAT STUFF

DELL PRECISION M2800 MOBILE WORKSTATION

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OREGON SCIENTIFIC BLUETOOTHENABLED WEATHER STATION Whatever the weather Who needs the hassle of scouring TV and out-of-date newspaper listings, or the Web, every time you need a reliable weather forecast with pressure trends? Chic, space-saving home weather stations are the answer. But there’s more: Oregon Scientific’s new Weather@Home adds the convenience of an app for smartphone or tablet. This Bluetooth-enabled device allows viewing of weather updates via its main unit or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled smart device. Best of all, its low-latency rating and 30-metre transmission range means you can freely move around your house while checking out the latest updates and planning your next big outdoor excursion. Price: about R900. Contact Oregon Scientific on 021-508 4700 or visit www.oregonscientific.co.za


POWERLINE WI-FI RANGE EXTENDER Cover your zone Homes weren’t designed for delivering Wi-Fi efficiently; even the lucky ones invariably have an inconvenient blind spot somewhere. If this sounds familiar, then TP-Link’s AV500 Powerline Wi-Fi Range Extender could be for you. Here’s the kicker: it extends your Internet connection throughout your home not wirelessly, but via the existing electrical circuitry. Initial set-up is uncomplicated, involving nothing more challenging than pressing the adaptor’s Wi-Fi clone button to copy the wireless network name (SSID) and router password. Then you simply place it anywhere around the home where you would like wired or Wi-Fi network access. It boasts a 300-metre range over household power circuits and data transmission speeds of up to 500 Mbps, making it suitable for lag-free HD or 3D video streaming and online gaming. Price: about R1 400. Contact Linkqage on 0860 538 869 or visit www.linkqage.co.za

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EVERKI CONCEPT LAPTOP BACKPACK Travel easy Delays at security checkpoints, unwieldy hand luggage and damaged gadgets can put a damper on even the most exciting trip. All too familiar with these annoyances, Everki has designed its Concept laptop backpack specifically with frequent travellers in mind. The checkpoint-friendly computer compartment accommodates laptops up to 44 cm in size and allows for quick and easy pass-through at airport security checkpoints without you having to remove your computer. Removable EVA foam covers protect laptop corners, for example, if the bag is dropped. There’s a hard-shell sunglasses/gadget case, positioned on top of the bag, to prevent valuables from getting damaged or forgotten on a plane. A five-point balance strap system takes the pressure off your back, neck and shoulders. Plus, there’s a dedicated, felt-lined tablet/ e-reader pocket for those who travel with more than one device. Price: about R3 000. Contact Rectron on 021-555 8200 or visit www.rectron.co.za

PHILIPS WIRELESS SPLASHSPROOF SPEAKER Flip it, wet it or bump it With winter here, you’re not going to be using Philips’ rugged SB2000B wireless splashproof speaker around the pool anytime soon. But hey, you can always take it outside and sing in the rain. Designed to go places and push out big sound from its 7,62 driver, it can connect to smartphones, tablets and music players via Bluetooth or an audio-in port, promising compatibility with a wide range of devices. There’s also a built-in microphone for hands-free calls and a convenient auto-sensor for music on/off. Price: about R1 000. Contact Tarsus Technologies on 011 531 1000 or visit www.woox.com/news

WD MY PASSPORT PRO Safe and secure Creative types looking for a safe, portable solution for data storage should take a look at WD’s My Passport Pro. Comprising two 2,5-inch hard drives housed in a sleek aluminium enclosure, it features a user-selectable RAID function. You can choose data stripping (RAID 0) for high-performance or mirroring (RAID 1) for data redundancy. Powered via its integrated Thunderbolt cable – a design unique to WD – it clocks in at speeds of up to 233 Mbps, providing super-fast transfer, edit and backup capabilities for data-heavy users such as photographers, videographers, musicians, graphic designers and architects. Price: about R3 300 for the 2 TB model and about R4 800 for the 4 TB version. Visit www.wd.com

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ALCOSENSE ELITE BREATHALYSER Watch your limit

MOTOROLA DIGITAL WIRELESS VIDEO BABY MONITOR Watch them dream Keeping a watchful eye on your little one while he or she sleeps has just become easier, thanks to Motorola’s MBP36 Digital Wireless Video Baby Monitor. Its portable remote control features an 8,9-cm colour LED screen and allows you to adjust the camera’s angle and zoom from up to 300 metres away. Darkened rooms are no problem thanks to infrared night vision, activated automatically when light levels drop below a certain threshold. A high-sensitivity microphone facilitates two-way communication, too. The device monitors baby’s room temperature and, to help coax your family’s new addition to sleep, has five lullabies programmed into it. Price: about R2 800. Contact Just Fun on 011-405 3300 or visit www.justfun.co.za

Having one too many, then getting behind the wheel, is a recipe for disaster. If you’re in any doubt, keeping a quality breathalyser in your car’s glovebox could be a good idea. AlcoSense’s flagship breathalyser, the Elite, does the necessary with the minimum of fuss – and fits into the palm of your hand. Its airflow sensor ensures you can’t blow too hard or too softly, which would compromise the accuracy of the reading. If you don’t blow at the correct pressure, it displays an error message and asks you to retake the test. For the record, it shows your bloodalcohol level in either micrograms per litre of blood or percentage of alcohol content, displaying the readings in increments of 0,01. It even alerts you when you are near or over the drink-drive limit. An auto-clean feature helps keep the sensor accurate. Price: about R970. Contact The Gadget Shop on 012-346 2726 or visit www.thegadgetshop.co.za

BLACKFIRE CLAMPLIGHT LANTERN Light up your life Whether you’re spending the night under the stars or your mains power is on the blink again, being able to see what you’re doing is always a huge help. Blackfire’s Clamplight Lantern can be attached to tents, branches, backpacks and boats. In fact, it will maintain a firm purchase on virtually anything that its clamp handle can grip – making it one of the smartest outdoor lanterns around. If you can’t find anything to attach it to, don’t stress: its clamp can easily be converted into a stand by releasing a sliding lock mechanism. Two CREE brilliant white LEDs provide up to 230 lumens of light in high mode and 95 lumens on the low setting. In flashlight mode, it delivers up to 100 lumens. The head pivots to deliver the light exactly where you need it and high/low battery indicators show the status of its 3 AA batteries. Manufactured from high-performance plastics, and rubber coated, it’s lightweight, yet tough. Price: about R500. Contact Cape Union Mart on 021-464 5808 or visit www.capeunionmart.co.za

VICTORINOX CHRONO CLASSIC Form meets function Designed as a tribute to a 130-year knifemaking legacy, Victorinox’s Swiss Army Chrono Classic watch features many of the company’s signature design elements. Its dial is composed of two assemblies – a guilloche top plate over a sunray-finished bottom plate – creating an effect of depth and making the three chronograph counters stand out. Other features include a 41 mm-diameter stainless steel case with screw-on back, stopwatch, protected crown, scratch-resistant sapphire glass with triple anti-reflective coating, and a 100-metre depth rating. Most importantly, it comes with a precision, Swiss-made ETA G10.211 quartz movement. Price: around R8 000 (with leather strap) and R9 000 (with bracelet). Contact Picot and Moss on 011-669 0500 PM or visit www.picotandmoss.co.za

SMS AUDIO STREET BY 50 OVER-EAR HEADPHONES

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Live the beat It turns out rappers are more multi-dimensional than music traditionalists might think. Curtis Jackson – better known by the moniker 50 Cent – has lent his name to the audio headphone and accessories brand SMS Audio, which has launched STREET by 50 Over-Ear ANC (active noise-cancelling) wired headphones for those wanting to take their good vibes with them while on the go. Designed to eliminate unwanted ambient noise while replicating professional, studio-mastered sound, these phones feature enhanced bass and comfortable oval-fit earphones to make them suitable for all music lovers, not just rappers. Other features include a rechargeable battery said to be good for up to 70 hours of play from a single charge, a compact foldable design and removable cable with microphone. Price: about R3 500. Contact distributors Gammatek on 011-201 0800 or visit www.gammatek.co.za


Brought to you by

Altered Realities

2014 – Embrace your future! POPULAR MECHANICS cordially invites you to sign up for its second FutureTech conference, an exciting one-day event that forms part of the official World Design Capital Cape Town 2014 programme. Attracting clever, information-hungry people from all over South Africa, the conference aims to demystify our world and introduce us to concepts and breakthroughs that will restore our faith in the future. This year’s theme is “Altered Realities”, a neat catch-all for an initiative that’s destined to become an institution. As PM editor Alan Duggan explains it: “To survive and flourish, we need to embrace certain realities, some of them deeply exciting and others a little scary. We set the bar quite high in 2012 with a line-up of presenters at the top of their game, ranging from a social media entrepreneur to a wireless communications expert, from a cyber-forensics specialist to a green-energy guru, from a world-renowned cosmologist to an A-rated scientist who shook up our ideas on nutrition – and this year’s offering promises to be just as good.” Integral to PM’s 2014 plans is a series of smaller-scale initiatives under the banner of “Altered Realities”, all of them happening in Cape Town and designed to be affordable. Be prepared to be entertained and impressed, and perhaps have some of your preconceptions challenged. Autodesk, the multinational 3D CAD software company, is underwriting the conference, PM’s annual Inventor of the Year competition (see details elsewhere in this issue) and related events. Meanwhile, POPULAR MECHANICS is calling for submissions from technology leaders, scientists and innovators to fill presenter slots. Synopses should be sent to popular [email protected], with “FutureTech submission” in the subject line, before 31 July.

GO ON, BOOK IT NOW! The FutureTech conference happens in Cape Town on 10 October (venue to be announced later). To book your place at the all-inclusive Early Bird rate of R500 a head, please visit www.popularmechanics.co. za/futuretech If you would like to receive updates on the programme, please e-mail Kate Simons at [email protected] with “FutureTech 2014 update” in the subject line.

TESTED

KEEP TRACK – 24/7 ACTIVITY TRACKERS ARE THE HOTTEST NEW ITEM IN THE FITNESS MARKET – By ANTHONY DOMAN

HANDS ON, WITHOUT F E A R O R FAV O U R

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Compiled by THE EDITORS popularmechanics@ ramsaymedia.co.za

SPECIFICATIONS GARMIN VIVOFIT FITBIT FLEX PRICE: CONNECTIVITY: BATTERY: APPS:

R1 400 ANT, Bluetooth 1 year PC, Mobile

R1 400 Bluetooth 5 days PC, Mobile

OREGON SCIENTIFIC DYNAMO R700 Bluetooth 14 days Mobile

EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU. But just how good, really? In the absence of a coach or personal trainer providing human feedback, active people are increasingly turning to devices that help monitor their performance. The latest in a long list of these gadgets is fitbands. And there’s lots to choose from. Pedometers and heart rate monitors were among the first wave of personal devices and are still popular. With the opening up of GPS transmissions to the public, soon wristmounted combination sat-nav/heart rate monitors took hold. These “sportwatches” tended to be expensive, bulky and geeky, though. The rise of wellness programmes that focused on lifestyle as opposed to just workouts created a new need. What was needed was something uncomplicated that could still tell the exercise story. Enter the fitband, which uses miniature accelerometers to detect movement. Instead of measuring workouts only, the new breed of band is designed to work 24/7. In short, it’s a lifestyle tracker. So that not just exercise as we know it, but all physical activity, can be measured and analysed. And yes, that includes sleep. For the fitband, that means it must be something you’d be happy to wear all day long. It must be discreet and light. And it must be easy to use. To try out the fitband experience, we took a look at the Fitbit Flex, Garmin Vivoflex and Oregon Scientific Ssmart Dynamo. How do they stack up?

Fitbit Flex I’ve had the Flex for a few months now, having got it as a gift. So, I am familiar with its method of operation. To look at, it’s nothing more than a band (it comes supplied with two sizes of band and is available in several colours). A closer look reveals that the Flex consists of a tiny capsule that slots into a recess in the band. The band is a bit fiddly to clip into position, but once closed it is secure. The capsule itself is removed for recharging. A Bluetooth USB adaptor is supplied for connecting the device to your computer. Although small, the Flex can run for 5 days on a charge. It takes a couple of hours

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to recharge via a supplied adaptor (also fiddly to operate). It is easy to use, though. As you progress through the day, a row of LEDs on the device lights up to show your progress towards your activity goal. It also has a useful vibration alert, which can be programmed as an alarm or simply to check on progress. Both the LED and vibration features were useful, I found. Should you do an actual workout such as a run, the Fitbit provides a fairly accurate estimate of distance based on steps. In use, tapping the Fitbit twice brings up the LED display. Tapping it continuously for a few seconds puts it in or out of sleep mode, indicated by a fixed two-LED display. Back home in front of the computer, with the Fitbit, if you’re not careful, you can become quite bogged down in the minutiae of activity tracking. Inputting your meals (there’s an online dataset of foods and their calorie values, for instance) can become quite time-consuming. The customisable dashboard is easy to use and good for setting goals. There is also a smartphone app if you’re away from a computer, with motivational messages displayed when you hit targets.


After its line of highly successful GPS sportwatches it was natural that Garmin would enter the fitband market as well. Mindful of the style value of these items, like some other makes the Garmin offers bands in more vivid colours. Default colour is black, and two bands of different sizes are supplied. The band’s waterproofing is excellent, so the Vivofit is happy to be used for swimming. Unlike the other two on test here, though, the Vivofit has a display that can be cycled through at the push of a button. It displays data such as time, steps and calories burnt. Instead of just having a band on your wrist, you actually have a wristwatch. One drawback, though: the always-on display doesn’t have lighting. A significant advantage for the Vivofit is that its ANT connectivity allows it to be used with a heart rate strap, with which it is bundled. That

PM TESTED

Garmin Vivofit

probably means it can be used with other non-Garmin ANT straps. Also unlike the other two, the Garmin has the great asset of not needing recharging. Its replaceable battery is said to be able to provide power for a year. As with other fitbands, the Garmin has its own dedicated software for both PC and mobile device. The company’s expertise in the fitness field shows, too. The software is generally easy to use and intuitive. I did find the supplied ANT interface stick to be incredibly small and liable to be mislaid easily. The Vivofit is the first Garmin device to use the company’s new-look Connect online exercise-logging platform, which now has a mobile app counterpart. Usefully, Connect allows multiple devices to be added, so you can log workouts from, say, a Garmin Forerunner sportwatch. Information screens include steps, goal, distance, calories burned (estimated from details such as weight and height), time, date and heart rate. The Vivofit “learns” your activity profile and is able to adapt your goals accordingly. In terms of analysing workout data, the Garmin is the clear winner. However, it does need more user involvement.

Oregon Scientific Ssmart Dynamo The Oregon differs from the other two on test here in being the only one to be matched solely to a smartphone app. That app is available for either Android or iOS models. Charging is by means of a cradle-type adaptor that doesn’t always place the watch with its LED showing charge state clearly visible. Of the three, the Dynamo shows the least information on the actual band. Its 4-colour display shows either red, blue, yellow or green depending on status (Bluetooth pairing, low or high activity, for instance). That makes discerning your performance from the band alone pretty confusing; you almost have to have a smartphone handy. Standard wristband colour is black, though alternatives are available. The band itself falls between the Fitbit and the Garmin in terms of discreetness,


with a mild hump in the middle concealing the gadget’s “works”. Operation is by means of a single small pushbutton. The clasp is easier to lock in position than the Fitbit’s and the band is said to be good for operation in water up to 10 metres, so swimming in the Dynamo is definitely an option. It can store up to 14 days’ worth of data. Overall, the Dynamo is a competent product. However, it doesn’t offer anything overwhelmingly superior to or different from the PM other two reviewed here.

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D A W O T H U L T R

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CHOP

VIDEO > Take a closer look at the four JMR-TD competitors at www.popularmechanics.co.za

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BY JEFF WISE

PER

AT A SECRET FACILITY, AEROSPACE ENGINEERS ARE PLOTTING TO END T HE HELICOPT ER AS WE KNOW IT, A ND D EV ISING R A D ICA L NEW R OTOR CRAFT TO REPLACE IT. THE RESULT MAY CHA NGE MILITA RY OPER AT IONS – A ND CIV ILIA N SKIES – FOR EV ER .

Sikorsky technicians at a hangar in Florida work on the S-97 Raider, the first production-ready prototype of a compound-coaxial helicopter. 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

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THE BUILDING

and its variants have proven track records, but are limited doesn’t look like much – one of several nondescript hangars by a maximum speed of 294 km/h. alongside an airstrip on the edge of the Everglades, baking Aside from the FVL Medium, it is envisaged that three in the eternal monotony of the central Florida sun. other classes of future flying machines will have roots in This is the home of Sikorsky Aircraft’s Area 31, where this programme: the FVL Light, to replace the Kiowa scout the company works on its most advanced rotorcraft prohelicopter; the FVL Heavy, to replace the brawny twinjects. Like Area 51, the famously clandestine Air Force base rotor Chinook; and the FVL Ultra, a brand-new class of airin the Nevada desert, this airfield is home to experimental aircraft being built and tested. The mystery projects here craft that would combine the hauling capacity of a C-130 need to be kept not only from other nations, but from cargo plane with the ability to take off vertically. If the other aviation companies, too. Millions, possibly billions, of rand are at stake. For that reason, Sikorsky is Sikorsky’s X2 flew at 481 km/h in 2010, proving that compound-coaxial helos are viable. hesitant to allow journalists on the grounds and does so only if the tour is restricted and the photography limited. Inside the hangar, bathed in fluorescent light from banks of industrial lamps, is a molasses-dark fuselage with unusual twin fins jutting vertically from its tail. The fin structures are vertical stabilisers with rudders built in. Even at a glimpse, the half-finished airframe is something new. This is the S-97 Raider. When it takes to the air in 2015, it will be the first production-ready prototype for a new kind of rotorcraft, the compound-coaxial helicopter. The Raider has two rotors that turn in opposite directions on a central mast, enabling it to fly up to 440 km/h. That’s more than 150 km/h faster than a conventional helicopter, giving it twice the range. The S-97 is among an emerging generation of advanced craft that could redefine the meaning of vertical-lift aviation. In 2011, the US Army funded the Joint MultiRole Rotorcraft Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) programme. This is the first step in an effort to replace the US military’s entire inventory of helicopters. Retired first will be the UH-60 Black Hawk, to be replaced with the Future Vertical Lift Medium, at the earliest in 2030. The FVL Medium will have big shoes to fill. The Black Hawk provides the bulk of vertical-lift capability for the US Army, Navy, Marines, Special Operations Command and Coast Guard. It first entered service with the army in 1979; over the next 30 years, more than 2 300 aircraft saw service at home and abroad. The Black Hawk

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Osprey, used by the US Marine Corps and Special Operations Command. The Osprey tilts its rotors 90 degrees to fly like an aeroplane and land like a helicopter. But there’s a demand for a smaller combat rotorcraft instead of an Osprey-size heavy lifter. The JMR Technology Demonstrator will be designed to carry 11 troops, compared with the Osprey’s carry capacity of 24. The other type of vertical aircraft is the jump jet, which can vector its engines towards the ground to hover.

plan comes together, these machines will replace every US military helicopter. Changes on the battlefield are posing dangers for traditional helicopters. Longer-range missiles can target bases and ships, putting helicopter staging areas at risk. Aircraft that can fly faster and travel farther can complete their missions with less risk. And, since more capable rotorcraft can cover more ground, fewer of them need to be bought. Today’s most advanced vertical-lift aircraft is the V-22

THE CONTENDERS

W H AT M A K E S HELICOPTERS SO SLOW? A When a helicopter is stationary, its rotor blades move at the same speed relative to the air. However, when a helicopter flies forward, the blades on the advancing side move faster, relative to the wind and the blades on the retreating side move slower. As soon as the helicopter’s forward speed matches the speed at the tip of the rotor, the retreating rotor tip momentarily experiences zero airspeed. At that point the rotor is generating no lift, a phenomenon known as retreating-blade stall. With half the rotor disc no longer holding the aircraft up, the helicopter tends to roll to the side. This aerodynamic principle limits conventional helicopters to about 320 km/h.

Coaxial rotors: Sikorsky’s entry in the Black Hawk replacement programme is the SB-1 Defiant. With a top speed of more than 480 km/h, the Defiant will be faster than the company’s internally funded S-97 Raider. The Defiant uses two rotor discs that move in opposite directions to defeat retreatingblade stall. Counter-rotating rotors have an advancing blade on each side of the aircraft, giving balanced lift at all The UH-60 Black Hawk, operated by US Customs and Border Protection.

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speeds. Advanced composites make the blades extremely stiff, so they can whir through the air in proximity without hitting each other. Pusher prop: This rearmounted propeller provides extra thrust. “It’s an incredible sensation to realise that you’re at the cruise-power setting of a normal helicopter, but going [400 km/h],” Sikorsky chief test pilot Kevin Bredenbeck says.

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Examples include the AV-8B Harrier and F-35B Lightning II, both carrier-capable fighter airplanes. These are not well suited as utility lifters and attack helos because they burn too much fuel and are not light or manoeuvrable enough to fly missions close to the ground. The goal of the JMR-TD programme is to create an aircraft that is as nimble as today’s Black Hawk while hovering, but with a ferry range of 3 400 km and a cruise speed of more than 425 km/h. Industry engineers declare that it’s

possible, but the military establishment launched the JMRTD programme to be convinced. “It’s an investment to inform ourselves about the technology that’s available,” says Dan Bailey, the Army programme’s director. “What we are looking at is a leap ahead in capability.” Last year, the field was narrowed to four JMR-TD competitors, including two giants – Sikorsky and Bell Helicopter – and two tiny firms, AVX Aircraft Company and Karem Aircraft. Each was awarded nearly R70 million to produce a design. By mid-year, two of the four will be selected to turn that design into hardware, with flight tests planned from 2017 to 2019. It has been made clear that whoever survives the

THE CONTENDERS

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Karem Aircraft

Bell Helicopter Tiltrotors: Bell is building its entrant, the V-280 Valor, based on its experience with the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor. The smaller, nimbler version will be able to carry 11 soldiers 425 km, hover for 30 minutes and return at 515 km/h. No need to worry about retreating-blade stall: to go fast, pilots toggle a thumb wheel that tilts the twin rotors

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90 degrees, transforming them into propellers. The Valor’s two engines will be fixed in a horizontal position, with only the rotors pivoting up and down. The Valor will sport flexible rotor blades for a new level of manoeuvrability at low speeds, while still providing the range and efficiency that no traditional helicopter can match.

Side doors: “The breadand-butter mission for the Army is air assault,” says V-280 programme director Keith Flail. “When soldiers are coming into a landing zone, they need clear fields of view and clear fields of fire out the sides of the aircraft.”

Optimum speed tiltrotors: Karem’s TR36TD concept uses twin tiltrotors to achieve a top speed in level flight of more than 675 km/h. The company developed a technology, the Optimum Speed Tiltrotor, that allows the pilot to adjust the revolutions per minute of the rotor depending on the phase of flight. The rotors don’t need extra power to turn during forward flight, so decreasing their revs increases efficiency.


downselect will not necessarily be the winner of a $100 billion production contract for building as many as 4 000 aircraft. But even losing companies stand to gain by flying demonstration aircraft, since the JMR-TD designs will inspire versions suitable for civilian markets. In a few decades these futuristic rotorcraft could be as common in the skies as conventional helicopters are today. “This is a step change,” says Steve Weiner, Sikorsky’s director of engineering sciences. “It’s going to be similar to when fixed-wing airplanes went from piston to jet engines.”

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AVX Ducted fans: AVX’s design relies on a compound-coaxial helicopter like Sikorsky’s, but with rotors that are lighter and more flexible, saving weight and therefore reducing power requirements. A pair of ducted fans on the rear of the airframe will give AVX’s as-yet-unnamed rotorcraft extra speed. The rotors and the ducted fans push the demonstrator up to a maximum of 425 km/h.

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Forward canards: In cruise mode, much of the lift will come from a pair of canard wings near the nose. “Based on our analysis, the coaxialcompound helicopter will outperform a conventional helicopter and the cost will be essentially the same,” says AVX president Troy Gaffey.

If next-generation rotorcraft will be more capable than today’s fleet, they are also going to be considerably more expensive. It takes a lot of power to go fast; bigger engines add both weight and cost. “If you want to go above 150 knots [about 270 km/h], you’re going to have to pay a premium of 50 to 100 per cent,” says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group. US government-funded demonstrator programmes allow manufacturers to work out the kinks of new designs and bring down prices. “Looking downstream, it’s obvious that there’s certain commercial applications of this technology,” says Bell’s Keith Flail. Some niches will be easier to exploit than others. “Offshore oil rigs could be a market,” Aboulafia says. With exploration moving into ever-deeper waters, a vehicle that can make twice as many trips ferrying rig workers in the same amount of time will be worth the steep price tag to the big energy companies. Another potential market, Aboulafia says, is the VIP market. Corporate executives and other wealthy individuals already take helicopters on short-hop trips, but more advanced rotorcraft could ferry passengers as far as 800 km, avoiding airport hassles. In a more critical application, medevac, speed can mean the difference between life and death. “There’s a thing called golden hour,” AVX’s Troy Gaffey says. “If you can get someone to a hospital within that time, they’re a lot more likely to live.” If these early markets pan out for tilt-rotors or compound-coaxial helicopters, there’s no telling how many other uses they’ll have. Right now vertical lift means a conventional helicopter, with niches occupied by the jump jet and the tilt rotor. Some day that relationship could reverse, if this new generation of vertical-lift aircraft becomes the norm, relegating conventional helicopters to the fringe. “You’ll see the ratio change in that direction,” Flail predicts confidently. “The evolution is coming.” PM

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the 25 skills you should teach your kid.

By Walker Lamond

Age 1: You’re new, I get it. Just remember, if it’s hard or shiny, you’re still too tiny. If it bounces or bends, it’s all yours, my friend. Age 2: Let sleeping dads lie. Age 3: You’ll learn some of the best lessons when holding a torch for dad.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARCOS CHIN

Age 4: Don’t throw away that empty jam jar. Marbles, odd bits of LEGO, loose change, milk teeth (from those occasions when the Tooth Fairy didn’t play ball) and broken crayons are just a few things you can put in an empty jam jar. You wanna save the planet? Don’t just recycle. Reuse.

Age 5: When fishing, a firm grip on the rod is as important as a firm handshake. Move

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your forearm forward and down with a slight wrist motion, gently sweeping the rod forwards. As it passes vertical, release. Be quiet, be patient, and keep in mind that fish don’t have eyelids, so cast into the shade.

Age 6: You can’t learn anything with your hands in your pockets. Grab that screwdriver, bat or motherboard kit and get to work (or play). There are plenty of how-tos on YouTube, but until you get your hands dirty, you’ll have no clue.

Because being a father today means more than just following your son or daughter on Instagram. And while they may think you’re an idiot when you can’t jailbreak your iPhone, there are still some things a kid can learn from dear old dad. 53

Age 8: You can learn a lot about a person by how they coil a hose. Ditto an extension cord, climbing rope or strings of Christmas lights (which are programmed in the factory to become a hopeless tangle). If you have ever struggled to unkink a garden hose or unknot a giant ball of Christmas lights, you know that the proper coil is not just about tidiness, it’s an act of courtesy to the next person that uses it. Even if that person is you. Age 9: The key to building a tree house is making sure that you secure the structure without harming the organism that’s holding you up in the air (that is, the tree). It’s going to take a lot of work, and you’ll learn that physics sometimes gets in the way of imagination. But when we’re done, you’ll have a place of your own – and everyone needs a good hideout. Age 10: Carry out your own bike repairs. A bike is a great starter kit for a young mechanic. And like a car, it will probably break down anywhere that is not your driveway. So, learning to fix your own ride is as much about survival as it is about saving money at the bike shop. Don’t get carried away, though – there is such a thing as too tight and too much oil. Age 11: When using a saw, patience, not strength, is needed to make the smoothest cut. It’s not just where you start the cut – it’s where you finish.

Age 12: Follow instructions – you’ll be done in half the time. You have to earn the right to improvise. And remember, sometimes the best tool is a walk around the block. Sometimes it’s a hammer. Age 13: Build a good reputation, online and off. Keep your word. Be nice to the younger kids. And never post a picture online you wouldn’t show your teacher, your mom or your future boss.

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Age 14:

Here’s the first thing you need to know about using a compass: put it away if you can’t read a map. If you don’t have either, look at the Sun, which, as you know, rises in the east and sets in the west. If you have a watch, match the 12 o’clock mark with the direction of the Sun. The direction that is midway between the hour hand and 12 is north. That reminds me: you should wear a watch.

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15:

When chopping firewood, aim for the chopping block beneath the log, not the top of the log. Let the axe do the work.

Age 16: Okay, so this one sounds quaintly old-fashioned, but give it a try: it’s called Be Upstanding. In short, when visitors arrive at the family home, whether they’re relatives or friends of your folks, wrench yourself away from that video game or TV movie, stand up and greet them politely. Your cred will be elevated by several notches. Age 17: Okay, so you’re old enough to earn a learner’s licence: now you need to know a little about the nitty gritty of car ownership. Learning how to change a wheel is a no-brainer, but if you’re the prospective owner of a very second-hand car, you might also like to know how to change the engine oil – an introductory course towards learning how your car works. Hint: warm up your vehicle a bit beforehand – it makes the oil flow faster. www.popularmechanics.co.za OJULY 2014

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTIN LAKSMAN

Age 7: You can do your homework after you’ve finished playing outside.

Age 18:

Step 1

Step 2

Make yourself useful on a boat. Unless you’re a Somali pirate, you won’t need to know how to commandeer a large ship. But if you find yourself on someone’s boat – be it a dinghy or a 90-foot schooner – it’s best to know what you’re doing so you don’t sit there like you’re riding the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. Learn the cleat hitch to ward off pilings when the captain Step 3 Step 4 is docking. And if nothing else, fetch the ice.

Age 19: Learn another language, preferably an indigenous one (and yes, this includes Afrikaans). If you have already ticked this box, feel free to have a go at French, which will impress the ladies (and the occasional waiter) but won’t be especially useful in your day-to-day activities.

Age 20: If you’re asked for help opening a jar, you had damn well better open it. Make sure your hands are dry so you can grip the lid as tightly as possible. For extra traction, wrap the lid in a kitchen glove. If the lid is stubborn, run it under hot water. If you’re truly desperate, fashion a handle out of duct tape. And if you give up (never give up), don’t claim that you loosened it first. Because you didn’t. Hint: An unwritten rule (that is, until now) of jam jar opening requires males to display no change of expression while they are unscrewing a lid.

Age 21: Real men have green thumbs. A garden can provide more than herbs or flowers for mom. After spending hours staring at a screen, time in the garden gives your mind (and eyes) a chance to reset. Start with a tomato plant. Clear a patch of dirt or build a raised garden bed and try growing some veggies from seeds. No matter where you go in life or your career, you will seldom get as much pride and joy as you do from a successful harvest. We’ve just re-read this item: it’s not going to happen, is it?

AGE 22 (AND BEYOND):

AFTER WRITING AN ANGRY E-MAIL, READ IT CAREFULLY, THEN DELETE IT.

AGE 23: TAKE ON A WOODWORKING HOBBY. BUT NEVER USE A CHISEL FOR ANYTHING BUT ITS INTENDED PURPOSE, OR YOU WILL SOON BE OUT OF CHISELS. Age 24: Be a regular at your local fleamarket. You’ll find some of your favourite tools, some of your weirdest neighbours, and inspiration for some of your best DIY projects.

Age 25: Stay young (at heart). Accept a stupid bet. Make things. Break things. Eat something bigger than your head. Jump fences. Go on a spontaneous road trip. Never turn down an invitation to dance. Unplug, on occasion. And lay off Facebook – it’s all PM old people now. Walker Lamond is a father of three and the author of Rules for My Unborn Son.

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TIME’S

tangledW

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QUANTUM THEORY COULD EXPLAIN THE FLOW OF TIME

WEB BY NATALIE WOLCHOVER

ISTOCKPHOTO/OKEA

Buildings crumble and stars fizzle out, physicists say, because of a strange quantum effect called “entanglement’. In theory, anyway, there is nothing in physics that says this cup cannot reassemble itself from the shards, and its tepid contents spontaneously heat up.

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Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a Universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. In 1927, the astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible “arrow of time”. But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the Universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the Sun. “In classical physics, we were struggling,” says Sandu Popescu, a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the UK. “If I knew more, could I reverse the event, put together all the molecules of the egg that broke? Why am I relevant?” Surely, he says, time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance. And yet, since the birth of thermodynamics in the 1850s, the only known approach for calculating the spread of energy was to formulate statistical distributions of the unknown trajectories of particles and show that, over time, the ignorance smeared things out. Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact – a strange effect called “quantum entanglement”. “Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” says Tony Short, a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.” Popescu, Short and their colleagues, Noah Linden and Andreas Winter, reported the discovery in the journal Physical Review E in 2009, arguing that objects reach equilibrium, or a state of uniform energy distribution, within an infinite amount of time by becoming quantum mechanically entangled with their surroundings. Similar results by Peter Reimann of the University of Bielefeld in Germany appeared several months earlier in Physical Review Letters. Short and a collaborator strengthened the argument in 2012 by showing that entanglement causes equilibration within a finite time. And, in work that was posted on the scientific preprint site arXiv.org in February this year, two separate groups have taken the next step, calculating that most physical systems equilibrate rapidly, on time scales proportional to their size. “To show that it’s relevant to our actual physical world, the processes have to be happening on reasonable time scales,” Short said. The tendency of coffee – and everything else – to reach equilibrium is “very intuitive,” says Nicolas Brunner, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. “But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.” If the new line of research is correct, then the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, Nature is inherently uncertain. An elementary particle lacks definite physical properties and is defined only by probabilities of being in various states. For example, at a particular moment, a particle might have a 50 per cent chance of spinning clockwise and a 50 per cent chance of spinning counterclockwise. An experimentally tested theorem by the Northern Irish 57

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ESA AND THE PLANCK COLLABORATION

physicist John Bell says there is no “true” state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it. Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time. When two particles interact, they can no longer even be described by their own, independently evolving probabilities, called “pure states”. Instead, they become entangled components of a more complicated probability distribution that describes both particles together. It might dictate, for example, that the particles spin in opposite directions. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is “mixed” with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other, a feature Albert Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance”. “Entanglement is in some sense the essence of quantum mechanics,” or the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale, Brunner says. The phenomenon underlies quantum Right: Last year, the European Space computing, quantum cryptography and Agency’s Planck satellite delivered its first all-sky image of the Cosmic Microwave quantum teleportation. Background (CMB), bringing with it new challenges about The idea that entanglement might explain our understanding of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. the arrow of time first occurred to Seth The image provided the most precise picture of the early Universe, Lloyd about 30 years ago, when he was a capturing light emitted just 380 000 years after the Big Bang. 23-year-old philosophy graduate student at Cambridge University with a Harvard physics degree. Lloyd realised that quantum uncertainty, and the way it spreads as not ready,” says Renato Renner, head of the Institute for particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. “No one understood it. uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the Sometimes you have to have the idea at the right time.” arrow of time. In 2009, the Bristol group’s proof resonated with quantum Using an obscure approach to quantum mechanics that treatinformation theorists, opening up new uses for their techniques. ed units of information as its basic building blocks, Lloyd spent It showed that as objects interact with their surroundings – as several years studying the evolution of particles in terms of the particles in a cup of coffee collide with the air, for example – shuffling 1s and 0s. He found that as the particles became information about their properties “leaks out and becomes increasingly entangled with one another, the information that smeared over the entire environment”, Popescu explains. This originally described them (a “1” for clockwise spin and a “0” for local information loss causes the state of the coffee to stagnate counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the even as the pure state of the entire room continues to evolve. system of entangled particles as a whole. Except for rare, random fluctuations, he says, “its state stops It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual changing in time”. autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, Consequently, a tepid cup of coffee does not spontaneously the correlations contained all the information, and the individual warm up. In principle, as the pure state of the room evolves, the particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particoffee could suddenly become unmixed from the air and enter a cles arrived at a state of equilibrium and their states stopped pure state of its own. But there are so many more mixed states changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature. than pure states available to the coffee that this practically “What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated never happens – one would have to outlive the Universe to witwith each other,” Lloyd recalls realising. “The arrow of time is an ness it. This statistical unlikelihood gives time’s arrow the arrow of increasing correlations.” appearance of irreversibility. “Essentially, entanglement opens a The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf very large space for you,” Popescu says. “It’s like you are at the ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there park and you start next to the gate, far from equilibrium. Then was “no physics in this paper”. Quantum information theory you enter and you have this enormous place and you get lost in was “profoundly unpopular” at the time, Lloyd says, and quesit. And you never come back to the gate.” tions about time’s arrow “were for crackpots and Nobel laureIn the new story of the arrow of time, it is the loss of inforates who have gone soft in the head”, he remembers one mation through quantum entanglement, rather than a subjective physicist telling him. lack of human knowledge, that drives a cup of coffee into equi“I was darn close to driving a taxicab,” Lloyd says. librium with the surrounding room. The room eventually equilibAdvances in quantum computing have since turned quantum rates with the outside environment, and the environment drifts information theory into one of the most active branches of even more slowly towards equilibrium with the rest of the physics. Lloyd is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute Universe. The giants of 19th century thermodynamics viewed of Technology (MIT), recognised as one of the founders of the this process as a gradual dispersal of energy that increases the discipline, and his overlooked idea has resurfaced in a stronger overall entropy, or disorder, of the Universe. form in the hands of the Bristol physicists. The newer proofs are Today, Lloyd, Popescu and others in their field see the arrow more general, researchers say, and hold for virtually any quantum of time differently. In their view, information becomes increassystem. ingly diffuse, but it never disappears completely. So, they assert, “When Lloyd proposed the idea in his thesis, the world was

IMAGE: CHRYSTAL CHERNIWCHAN

A watershed paper by Noah Linden, left, Sandu Popescu, Tony Short and Andreas Winter (not pictured) in 2009 showed that entanglement causes objects to evolve toward equilibrium. The generality of the proof is “extraordinarily surprising”, Popescu says. The paper triggered further research on the role of entanglement in directing the arrow of time.

although entropy increases locally, the overall entropy of the Universe stays constant at zero. “The Universe as a whole is in a pure state,” Lloyd says. “But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the Universe, are in mixtures.” One aspect of time’s arrow remains unsolved. “There is nothing in these works to say why you started at the gate,” Popescu says, referring to the park analogy. “In other words, they don’t explain why the initial state of the Universe was far from equilibrium.” He says this is a question about the nature of the Big Bang. Despite the recent progress in calculating equilibration time scales, the new approach has yet to make headway as a tool for parsing the thermodynamic properties of specific things, such as JULY 2014

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coffee, glass or exotic states of matter. (Several traditional thermodynamicists reported being only vaguely aware of the new approach.) “The thing is to find the criteria for which things behave like window glass and which things behave like a cup of tea,” Renner says. “I would see the new papers as a step in this direction, but much more needs to be done.” Some researchers expressed doubt that this abstract approach to thermodynamics will ever be up to the task of addressing the “hard nitty-gritty of how specific observables behave”, as Lloyd puts it. But the conceptual advance and new mathematical formalism is already helping researchers address theoretical questions about thermodynamics, such as the fundamental limits of quantum computers and even the ultimate fate of the Universe. “We’ve been thinking more and more about what we can do with quantum machines,” says Paul Skrzypczyk of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona. “Given that a system is not yet at equilibrium, we want to get work out of it. How much useful work can we extract? How can I intervene to do something interesting?” Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, is employing the new formalism in his latest work on time’s arrow in cosmology. “I’m interested in the ultra-long-term fate of cosmological space-times,” says Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. “That’s a situation where we don’t really know all of the relevant laws of physics, so it makes sense to think on a very abstract level, which is why I found this basic quantum-mechanical treatment useful.” Twenty-six years after Lloyd’s big idea about time’s arrow fell flat, he is pleased to be witnessing its rise and has been applying the ideas in recent work on the black hole information paradox. “I think now the consensus would be that there is physics in this,” he says. Not to mention a bit of philosophy. According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a build-up of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd puts it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.” The backdrop for the steady growth of entanglement throughout the Universe is, of course, time itself. The physicists stress that despite great advances in understanding how changes in time occur, they have made no progress in uncovering the nature of time itself or why it seems different (both perceptually and in the equations of quantum mechanics) from the three dimensions of space. Popescu calls this “one of the greatest unknowns in physics”. “We can discuss the fact that an hour ago, our brains were in a state that was correlated with fewer things,” he says. “But our perception that time is flowing – that is a different matter altogether. Most probably, we will need a further revolution in physics that will tell us about that.” ● Reproduced with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the PM physical and life sciences. 59

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As a teenager, Palmer Luckey was obsessed with building an unparalleled virtual-reality headset for gaming.

At the age of 19, he succeeded, unveiling the first affordable system that would allow users to explore three-dimensional digital worlds.

The Oculus Rift won support from an army of Kickstarter backers, attracted big-money venture capital and turned Luckey into a rising rock star in the tech world.

And then Facebook came calling…

VIDEO > Visit www.popularmechanics.co.za to watch a video highlighting how the recently

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JACK DYLAN

announced DK2 promises to be even better than the original Oculus Rift development kit.

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hors d’oeuvres, suits and cocktail dresses, and displays of robots and autonomous UAVs. There was a queue to try out the Oculus Rift demo. Luckey walked in alone. He was wearing jeans, a wrinkled grey shirt and flip-flops. There are tech celebrities who deliberate over which ripped jeans and hoodie to wear to a formal event. Palmer Luckey is not one of those people. He is not pretentious. Arrogant, perhaps, if you consider it arrogant for a 19-year-old to build something that upends an industry. Mainly, though, he is enthusiastic. He listens well. He is smart. He likes other people to feel smart, too. “Virtual reality is pervasive throughout our culture,” Luckey told me. “Since we’ve had video games, people have dreamed of stepping into games. Movies like Tron and The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man are all based on this idea.” But an affordable virtual-reality system wouldn’t just benefit gamers. Architects are already using VR to step inside buildings that haven’t yet been constructed. Doctors can perform virtual surgery before cutting a patient open. “We’re focused on gaming to start because it’s very demanding and it’s a large market,” Luckey said. “If we can make it good enough for gamers, then it’s going to be good enough for a lot of other markets.” The first virtual-reality device, the Sensorama, was built in the 1950s. It included a 3D display, fans to create the sensation of wind, stereo speakers, a vibrating chair and even a module for emitting odours. Head-mounted displays and flight simulators appeared over the following 20 years. Motion-capture gloves and body suits were developed in the 1980s by pioneers that included Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, musician and writer. (It was Lanier who popularised the term virtual reality.) Today, car designers wear HMDs and motion-capture gloves to test ergonomics and sight lines inside virtual prototypes. And VR systems are common in medical and military settings. “Virtual reality is not even glamorous any more,” Lanier told me recently. “In some applications, it’s almost commoditised.” But for ordinary people, the dream of virtual reality has been slow to materialise.

Palmer Luckey likes to go barefoot. However, when he met the men who would become his business partners in Oculus VR, a company that was recently sold to Facebook for $2 billion (about R20 billion), he decided to wear flipflops. It was an important meeting. This was in 2012, and he was just 19 years old. Luckey was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he was carrying a plastic bin. Inside were a tangle of wires, a small monitor mounted in a frame with a pair of inexpensive glass lenses attached, and a computer. It was a prototype for a headmounted display, or HMD. The men he was meeting – Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell and Michael Antonov – were older than Luckey. They were gaming industry veterans who had worked together at Scaleform, a company that Iribe and Antonov founded, then sold. Once Luckey got his equipment working, the men took turns peering into it. What they saw was a bare-bones room with a short set of stairs. It appeared in 3D, and they could explore it by turning their heads to the right or left and by looking up or down. As they turned their heads, the picture moved, too. This was not the first head-mounted display for virtual reality, and it was not the best. For one thing, the image wasn’t very clear. Users could see the individual pixels on the screen. If they moved their heads quickly, the image blurred. However, sophisticated virtual-reality systems were restricted to university, military and industrial settings. They cost tens of thousands of dollars. Luckey believed he could sell his HMD to the public for under R5 000 and he was planning to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund the launch. He already had a name for the device. He called it the Oculus Rift. •• Last October, Palmer Luckey travelled to New York from his home in California as a winner in the annual POPULAR MECHANICS Breakthrough Awards. Luckey was now famous, and his company had received millions in venture capital funding. By the time he arrived, night had fallen. The cocktail party was being held on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower, overlooking Central Park and the pixellated lights of midtown. Inside the room was champagne and

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•• Palmer Luckey was home-schooled. This gave him time to


HOW IT WORKS

PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN GOLDSTEIN (NOTEPAD)

The Oculus Rift enables users to explore virtual worlds in stereoscopic 3D. Rift inventor Palmer Luckey sketched the system for POPULAR MECHANICS over lunch at Oculus headquarters in Irvine, California.

break things. As a young teenager, he cannibalised The headDVD burners for their laser mounted display diodes. He used them to (HMD), straps on build etching equipment. like ski goggles. He got into a hobby called The user’s field of portablising, rebuilding view is entirely old video-game consoles taken up by an to produce handheld OLED screen (1) gaming devices. that is divided in His family lived in Long half, displaying a Beach, in Southern California. unique image for His father sold cars; his each eye. As in mother stayed home with other 3D displays, Palmer and his three the images appear younger siblings. Palmer to be offset from had a workshop in the each other, creatgarage and a part-time job at the US Sailing Centre of Long Beach, scrubbing decks, repairing boats and doing grounds keeping. He raced dinghies. He briefly trained for a job rowing Venice-style gondolas for a company that provides canal tours. By the time he was 16, Luckey was an adept junkyard engineer, sifting through the detritus of electronics that languished in online auctions and liquidation sites. He launched a Web forum, ModRetro, devoted to portablising, where he posted under the name PalmerTech. The members described their projects and traded tips on hardware hacks and where to source parts. In those old posts, Luckey comes across as an open-hearted and enthusiastic site manager. He had a passion for the exchange of ideas that forums

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ing the illusion of depth. To track the movements of the user’s head, the system employs a camera (2) that scans the position

of 38 infrared LEDs (3) fixed on the headset. The system’s computer (4) continually adjusts the onscreen image accordingly. A major challenge for Rift engineers has been to cut motion blur and judder, in which an

image seems to stutter as users turn their heads. To address the problem, they are using a screen with a high refresh rate and low persistence – each pixel flashes its image and then instantly turns to black.

encourage. He showed a talent for organising and motivating people, most of whom he’d never met face to face. Some of the threads are highly technical. Others are charmingly adolescent. A few weeks after the site launched, Luckey was faced with a growing to-do list of functionality problems on the site. He wrote: I try, I try! IRL (in real life) can come down hard sometimes, and my current list of IRL stuff that needs to be done is: O Extra Credit Math O Finish cleaning garage/workshop O Get all my materials for debate camp together O Finish Gondolier training

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1968

1984

1989

1999

The Sensorama augments short films of motorcycle and helicopter rides with a vibrating chair, odour emitters, stereo speakers, and fans to simulate wind.

The first digital head-mounted display shows 3D images that shift with the user’s head movements. A mechanical arm is needed to support the heavy headset.

Neuromancer, a novel by William Gibson, launches the cyberpunk genre and introduces the concept of a cyberspace that humans can plug into.

The first surgery simulators model the lower leg, allowing doctors to practise tendon transfers and predict a patient’s post-surgery walking ability.

Two movies, eXistenZ and The Matrix, highlight VR’s potential to blur the line between reality and the digital world and to be exploited for nefarious ends.

Luckey’s other emerging passion was virtual reality. In August 2009, he joined an online forum called MTBS3D. The letters stand for Meant To Be Seen, and the site had been founded by 3D gaming enthusiast Neil Schneider, who also started a non-profit organisation that is now called the Immersive Technology Alliance. Schneider hoped that if MTBS3D were successful, the gaming industry would be motivated to meet the unfilled demand. This was not a practical thought. At the time, the worldwide community of VR enthusiasts numbered in the low hundreds. “Among the vocal people, there were maybe 150,” Schneider says. “And I’m being aggressive with that number.” Many of the members were engineers, 3D filmmakers or software developers. Online, they shared their frustrations over the poor quality of LCD displays and the fact that game developers were turning away from 3D. With Schneider’s permission, Luckey started a section of the site devoted to DIY projects. “He was always very enthusiastic, very excited, like a big ball of energy,” Schneider says. The forum became a hub for people trying to Frankenstein together HMDs from spare parts. There is no precise definition of virtual reality. “At the bare minimum,” Luckey says, “there’s some threshold you cross into a sense of presence, being in a space and forgetting that it is not a real space but a virtual one.” In 2011, Luckey got a dream job working as a technician at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern

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BY WILL DIETRICH-EGENSTEINER

California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There, he had a chance to cross deep into VR territory. On 25 September, he posted the following on MTBS3D. (These excerpts are condensed and lightly edited.) “I told you guys I would give a writeup on what it feels like to use the Wide5/body tracking/ Unity based engine setup we have at my work… It sounds crazy, I know, but The Matrix is so much closer than we all think… These are lifechanging experiences we are talking about, keeping it all to high-end government research labs is a travesty!... as a gamer, as a DIYer, and as a person who dreams… I want these everywhere.” He described the experience in a 1 500-word narrative titled “Truly immersive” (AKA “Holy crap, this is real”) VR simulation. “You stand in the middle of a brightly lit warehouse. Cameras, blinking lights and expensive simulation gear litter the walls and rafters. Your focus is concentrated on the backpack being tightened around your waist and the headpiece that you are adjusting. You hear a mechanical ‘click’ as the backpack is switched on, and the cooling fans carry a slight vibration into your body. Seconds later, your field of view is engulfed in an enormous scene. You seem to be standing on a post-apocalyptic bridge.” In the distance, Luckey could see a forest and mountains. He felt the wind. He walked most of the length of the bridge, which was rusty and scarred by battle. “You try to convince yourself that you are looking at a


PHOTOGRAPH BY EVERETT COLLECTION (THE MATRIX)

FROM VIRTUAL TO REALITY

“You take a look around, and marvel at how real the warehouse seems. Wow, the shadow effects on the bright lights are amazing, and the tracking is flawless! In the next moment, you remember: this IS the real world. The bridge that you were on? That was just a simulation.”

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2016

Facebook buys the company that Palmer Luckey co-founded, Oculus VR, for R20 billion. Consumer versions of the headset are expected to go on sale by early 2015.

The US Air Force plans to flight-test a new generation of F-35 helmets that integrate video and infrared images, giving pilots a 360-degree view around the aircraft.

‘ Up until now, the most immersive medium on the planet has been a five-storey IMAX screen. Now it’s a phone-size, head-mounted screen. ’ — DJ ROLLER, 3D FILMMAKER

PHOTOGRAPH BY LOCKHEED MARTIN (HELMET)

screen, but staring into the blue sky, focusing into the vast distance, it is hard to believe that is the case.” •• Luckey heard someone calling his name, and he sprinted back along the bridge to meet an avatar who had appeared, wearing full desert gear. They shook hands. “So, pretty cool, eh?” the soldier said. “And then as quick as he came, the soldier thanks you for the help, and blips out of existence.” Luckey stayed in the virtual environment for 20 minutes, and then it was time to unplug.

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•• I visited the Mixed Reality Lab in February. It was hard to find. There is no signage outside and it is located on an industrial side street in the Playa Vista neighbourhood of Los Angeles. I arrived at about 4:30 on a rainy afternoon. Mark Bolas, the lab’s director, has an office just inside the front door. The facility is a joint effort between the ICT and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he explained, developed to train art and engineering students in virtual-reality design. His team also works on a number of military systems. Bolas showed me the warehouse that Luckey had described in his post. A copy of the Wide5 HMD that Luckey wore was hanging there, clipped to a metal stand. Bolas and a business partner started developing the Wide5 in 2005. It has a horizontal field of view of about 150 degrees and it is studded with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In the rafters of the room were 80 cameras, which track a user’s movements by picking up on those LEDs. (The Oculus Rift works in much the same way, using a single camera.) When Luckey first showed up at the lab, Bolas says, he “had a passion in his eye that is rare to find”. Bolas, too, dreams of developing low-cost virtual-reality systems for consumers. He assigned Luckey to a team already at work on some of these projects. Bolas showed me tabletops littered with several generations of inexpensive, immersive head-mounted displays. They combined foam or 3D-printed head mounts with monitors, smartphones and tablets. The lenses came from cheap, handheld magnifiers. Throughout his time at MxR, Luckey continued to tinker on his own head-mounted-display project at home. By the American spring of 2012, he was ready to make it public. He wanted to get it into the hands of tinkerers and programmers. Like Schneider several years before, he was hoping the gaming industry would take notice and start designing wide-field-of-view, immersive displays. On 15 April, he wrote on MTBS3D: “Hey guys, I am making great progress on my HMD kit! All of the hardest stuff (optics, display panels, and interface hardware) is done. The goal is to start a Kickstarter project… I won’t make a penny of profit off this project, the goal is to pay for the cost of parts, manufacturing, shipping and credit card/Kickstarter fees with about $10 left over for a celebratory pizza and beer.” Things turned out differently. John Carmack, one of the most respected game developers in the world, had joined MTBS3D, and Luckey sent him a prototype. In June, Carmack showed off the Oculus Rift at E3, a gaming convention

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held in Los Angeles each year. The Rift was a sensation. That summer, Luckey combined forces with Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell, Michael Antonov and Andrew Scott Reisse to form Oculus VR and launch a Kickstarter campaign featuring a slickly produced video. (Carmack eventually joined the company as chief technology officer.) By 1 September, the campaign had raised over R24 million. Many contributors donated small sums to promote the technology and get a T-shirt or poster. But more than 7 000 paid at least R3 000, which entitled them to Rift headsets and access to the software developer’s tools needed to write code for the platform. (They also received a copy of

•• “You are a f***ing sellout. We had ONE CHANCE AND you f***ed it up.” – a Reddit poster, 26 March. On 25 March, in a conference call with reporters, Facebook announced that it was buying Oculus VR for $2 billion (about R20 billion), including R4 billion in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. The gaming-industry rollout would come first, the company said in a Facebook post under CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s name. But, the statement said, that was just the beginning. “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face to face – just by putting on goggles in your home. This is really a new communication platform.” Within hours, many virtualreality and gaming enthusiasts turned on Palmer Luckey. Fans were simply outraged that Oculus would sell to a corporate giant. And Facebook wasn’t even cool. One poster on Reddit wrote: “I honestly thought Palmer had a chance to be the next Steve Jobs. Now he’ll most likely be relegated to a footnote in VR history.” Another replied, “He’ll be loathed. He is going to go from the man who resurrected VR with his vision, to the Palmer Luckey worked as a technician at USC’s Mixed Reality Lab from August 2011 until June 2012, on a hated sellout who killed his team that was designing low-cost head-mounted displays. Some of the headsets have been used in research on how to employ virtual reality to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. own baby.” Kickstarter supporters, in particular, felt betrayed. Those donors had helped launch the company in 2012, but to build the consumer the game Doom 3 BFG, optimised for the Rift.) The product Oculus VR had decided it needed developer’s kits started shipping the following March. much more money. It took R160 million from Oculus began showing a new version of the Rift a venture capital firms in June 2013 and another few months ago under the name Crystal Cove. The R750 million in December 2013. Now, just four months later, those Silicon Valley VCs were resolution was sharp and the motion blur (technically, cashing out with huge returns – before Oculus “judder”) was largely gone. Anticipation built as the ever released a consumer product. Game Developers Conference – the world’s biggest Joel Johnson, the editorial director of Gawker gathering of video-game creators – approached in Media and a longtime tech journalist, had mid-March. It was rumoured that Oculus would be releasing a commercial headset before Christmas, contributed to the Rift Kickstarter project and and people were speculating about which gaming publicly hailed the technology. He doesn’t titles would be Rift-ready by then. Gamers and developers accuse Oculus VR of wrongdoing, but, he says, “ultimately, were rooting for Palmer Luckey. He was the garage-hackI think this and (the controversy surrounding) the Veronica Mars movie will be the first steps in a movement away er kid with a dream and the passion to make VR happen. from pure crowdfunding”. If the company did make a big announcement at GDC, it Luckey spent the early morning hours of 26 March would be electrifying. explaining the sale on Reddit and other forums. He argued that the acquisition would provide the capital Oculus needed to hire more engineers and release the best possible product. A couple of days later, he texted me: “The big picture will become clear in the long run. I don’t blame the criticisers.” But he found few supporters that night. Around dawn, he

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went back to the old neighbourhood, the MTBS3D forum where his VR obsession had begun. Some members were worried or angry, others were hopeful that Facebook would help the technology scale up quickly. The vitriol of the Reddit thread was largely absent. Finally, Luckey logged on to ModRetro, the portablising site he had begun as a 16-year-old. There, a user named Zero was defending him: “This is a good thing, even in the long term. Everyone here especially should know that Palmer wouldn’t publicly support this if it wasn’t.” Besides, Zero pointed out, anyone worried that Facebook would now be calling the shots was ignoring the obvious: Luckey had already lost the freedom to do whatever he liked with the Rift. PalmerTech thanked his old friends for their support. Then he wrote: “Zero is right about stakes in the company. We did not sell out control to FB, we did it a long time ago when we had to raise money to keep going.” •• A few weeks before the Facebook announcement, I met Palmer Luckey for lunch. We were at the Oculus VR headquarters in Irvine, California. The company is housed in a dark glass-and-marble office building. It has short escalators, empty lobbies and skylights. Luckey and I walked to a parking lot next door and bought hamburgers and fish tacos from a pair of food trucks. As we ate, I asked whether he would have succeeded in building the Rift if he hadn’t found MTBS3D. “Not a chance,” he said. “One guy can only go so far. Without Internet communities, you’d just have a few people scattered across the country who were still interested in VR but didn’t know where to go with it.” That’s not a problem any longer. The company shipped about 75 000 of the original developer’s kits and plans to sell even more of the DK2s. Gaming companies are hustling to create Rift-ready versions of many titles. Motion-capture gloves, competitive headsets and other VR peripherals are being announced. And the innovation doesn’t stop at gaming. D J Roller, one of the world’s premier 3D filmmakers, is planning to supply VR capabilities for sporting events, news and movies through Next3D, a company he co-founded. “Up until now, the most immersive medium on the planet has been a five-storey IMAX screen,” he says. “Now it’s a phone-size head-mounted screen.” Luckey feels certain the Rift will succeed in the videogame market. But he also has expansive ideas of what virtual reality might do some day. “If you look at sci-fi, virtual reality is almost always a plot device that leads to this broken dystopian world. But I think that virtual reality is going to end up being a huge positive for humanity.” In the near term, he sees students taking virtual field trips to ancient Rome. People will manipulate data files with their hands. Users will be able to see in the infrared

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spectrum, bend the laws of physics and squeeze into impossibly small spaces. Decades from now, he thinks, many people will choose to spend their days in virtual environments, enjoying luxuries they could never afford in the real world. Luckey does not claim to have invented these visions. “If you want to know about optics and low-persistence OLEDs, I’m a good person to talk to,” he said. “For the future of VR, there are smarter people.” Jaron Lanier is one of these. He has seen repeated cycles of expectation and disappointment over the past three decades. “Every two or three years there’s another wave of interest in VR,” he said in a phone interview. “What happens typically is that there is insane speculation that reality will be transcended or something like that.” He laughed. “I started that, so I apologise. It’s my fault.” Yet this time could be different. The global boom in mobile phones has made display technology inexpensive and lightweight. Ordinary PCs can now run processorheavy graphics programs. The software and skills to build complex 3D worlds are well-established. These conditions have been in place for several years. They’ve just been waiting for a catalyst to come along and get the whole thing moving. The Rift, or rather Palmer Luckey himself, may prove to be that catalyst. Media reports have tended to portray Luckey as a solitary genius. But rarely, if ever, does someone invent anything in isolation. Even as a precocious 16-year-old, Luckey excelled at recruiting people to his passions. He had collaborators on the MTBS3D forums and, especially, at the Mixed Reality Lab. That doesn’t diminish his accomplishment. No one else combined Luckey’s talent for tinkering and his obsession with making an affordable headset for gaming. Someone had to stay up all night, soldering iron in hand. When he was finishing up one of his prototypes in September 2011, Palmer-Tech wrote on MTBS3D: “Sorry for the long ramble, been up for more than 30 hours without any sleep, hopefully I make some sense. Thanks for the support! I would never have been able to do any of this without the knowledge and inspiration of the members here.” Luckey had to get back upstairs to the office. Our lunch had run long and he was a half-hour late for a meeting. I’d never asked him the most obvious question: Hey, Palmer, what’s your favourite game? “Chrono Trigger,” he said. “It’s awesome.” Now there’s a game that will never be played on the Rift. It has blocky graphics and the same synthesised, 16-bit music from when it was introduced for Super Nintendo in 1995. The narrative is rich, though. You and your companions travel through time, overcoming danger, misunderstandings and rejection. (There’s a great essay online titled “Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Chrono Trigger.”) It’s hard to imagine when the founder of a R20 billion peripherals company finds time to play Chrono Trigger. But I hope he does. Because it’s Palmer Luckey’s kind of game. It isn’t about action or richly rendered graphics. It’s about building a virtual universe that’s actually worth living in. PM


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PROJECTS TIPS ADVICE

What you’ll need • • • • • • • •

Can of air duster Can of beer Pliers Nail or screw Cigarette lighter Plastic container with lid Duct tape Kitchen gloves

Directions

Ice-cold beer

B Y D AV E Y A L B A

STEP 1

Scrounge a spare nail or screw from your toolbox; make sure it’s long enough for you to grip it with pliers. Heat it up with a lighter, and while the screw is still piping hot, melt a tiny hole through the plastic container, making it just wide enough for the straw on your can of air duster (visit PriceCheck for local suppliers) to fit snugly through the gap.

STEP 2

Place your beer inside the plastic container and tape the lid closed so it doesn’t fly off. Make sure to wear your gloves – they protect against frostbite. Turn the can of air duster upside down and poke its straw through the hole, making sure it doesn’t touch the beer. Pump for about 1 minute. (One can of air duster can chill a six-pack of beer.)

STEP 3

If the air duster contains a nasty-tasting bitterant, which is sometimes added to discourage deliberate inhaling, pour the beer into a clean glass. Job done! Now sit back and enjoy your ice-cold brew.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY ISTOCKPHOTO/LAURI PATTERSON (BEER), ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL HOEWELER

Boom!

No one likes warm beer. And no one likes waiting around for cold beer. Thankfully, you can chill a brew instantly using household products.

K N O W YO U R S T U F F

Plastic sleeves provide enough friction within drywall to hold small picture frames and mirrors. Back in the day, DIYers made their own sleeves from scrap wire insulation.

Split-ribbed anchors open up as you install the screw, so they hold better than sleeves. They don’t endure daily abuse, though, so use something else for the towel bar.

Self-drilling anchors save you the hassle of finding a bit, but they shred if they hit a stud. Don’t know what’s beneath the rock? Use the metal version.

Anchors array Studs? Forget those guys. They’re never around when you need them most, like when you’re hanging stuff on drywall. Instead, use hollow-wall anchors.

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE GONOT

B Y D AV I D A G R E L L

These anchors hold up to 72 kg, but Toggler recommends no more than a quarter of that load. That’s real talk – and wise advice for using any wall anchor.

JULY 2014

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Generic toggle-style anchors don’t work loose, so use them to hang lightweight bathroom fixtures. Install in walls of any thickness; the only limitation is the screw length.

A renter’s dream: once removed, hammerin anchors leave a small slit that’s easy to patch. Your landlord’s walls – and your security deposit – remain intact.

If you must hang a 40-inch flatscreen TV without a stud, use beefy toggle-style anchors like these. Our advice? Don’t risk it. Find a stud, and rearrange your furniture.

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610

MAKE THIS

Classic upgrade Recognise this toolbox… kind of? Carpenters have been using the A-frame form for over a century – and that’s exactly why we’re updating it now.

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B Y PA U L S T E I N E R

What you’ll need 152

Recommended tools • Table saw with sliding mitre gauge or custom-made sled, and a dado set • Mitre saw • Band saw or jigsaw • Cordless drill • Pocket-hole jig • No 8 countersink drill bit • Router table with round-over bit Basic supplies • 1/2 sheet of plywood • 38 mm No 8 pocket screws • 38 mm No 8 stainless-steel wood screws • PVA wood glue

Open-top toolboxes trump lidded boxes because they provide easy access to the tools I use most. Best of all, they’re 279 customisable. As a high school workshop teacher, I have my students customise the design and build something to suit their own needs. But they always start with the same A-frame template. Here are five examples I created for PM, which I made primarily out of plywood and screws. Rough and ready? Sure,

but these boxes are workhorses, not works of art. I build each box more or less the same way, regardless of its features. First, I rip

THE CARPENTER

THE MECHANIC

I cut a 50 mm x 6 mm slot in one side and installed spacers for storing chisels. Hold-down clamps can be repositioned. Dividers keep tools organised.

The diamond-plate exterior catches leaky fluids. I can remove the steel pipe handle and slip it on to a spanner for extra leverage.

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The maker I used aluminium-faced plywood, which resists soldering-iron burn marks. Don’t be intimidated by this material: you can cut it with carbidetipped woodworking blades.

Parts

and crosscut all the parts to size. I cut the tapered side blanks on a sliding table-saw sled set at 10 degrees. I could also cut them carefully with a jigsaw or

Qty

Part

Dimensions

Material

2 2 1 2 2 2

End blanks Shelves Bottom Sides Handle Spacers

279 mm x 343 mm 267 mm x 597 mm 279 mm x 610 mm 152 mm x 610 mm 38 mm x 610 mm 63 mm x 254 mm

6 6 6 6 6 3

circular saw, but I’d never use a mitre saw. The workpiece wouldn’t be sufficiently supported by the saw’s fence, and the blade could easily grab the piece and pull my hand into its path.

mm mm mm mm mm mm

plywood plywood plywood plywood plywood plywood

I cut rebates for the sides and a tenon for the handle in both end pieces at the same time by doubling them up with double-sided tape. That saves time and ensures I fabricate both pieces to exactly the same shape. The rest of the joinery is straightforward: I cut dadoes into the side and end pieces to accept shelves. The box is assembled mostly with pocket screws. I use a Kreg jig to bore holes no more than 10 cm apart, and I glue the joints before driving the screws. Finally, I laminate two pieces of plywood for the handle, but I could imagine using a thick dowel instead. To make the handle more comfortable, I shape its corners with a round-over bit installed in a router table.

THE GARDENER

This houses all I need for my next maintenance project. I kept the main compartment divider-free for unhindered storage of everyday tools.

An expanded metal bottom lets me rinse my harvest and tools. Marine-grade plywood ensures years of longevity in damp conditions.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROSS MANTLE

THE HANDYMAN

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DO N’T BE A N IDIOT

Keep the cord clear

PM THROWBACK Shed upgrades

Slicing through a power cord? A fail. Slicing it again? A systemic breakdown. But on good days, carelessness breeds ingenuity.

You’ll often find us mining tips from the yellowed pages of issues past. Yes, some advice is outdated – and some is downright dangerous. But among the cigarette lighters fashioned from spent shotgun shells are solid tips, like these from a 1967 special edition, that deserve a second look.

I was having way too much fun trimming a large shrub recently, and I think I got a little overenthusiastic. As I swung the bar of the trimmer up and down one of the bush’s sides, the cord swung too – right into the slashing jaws of the trimmer. Thunk. Trimmer silent. Breaker blown. Pride dented. I just spliced the cord – I wasn’t going to throw away a 12 m extension cord – and kept working. (Yes, I’m fully aware that my actions probably violated multiple standards, warranties and safety codes.) Twenty minutes later, it happened again. I really needed a better system. Or more electrical tape.

MOVABLE SHELF sits on a pair of nails driven into the gap between uprights in your tool shed. Make the shelf 5 mm narrower than the smallest gap. Drive nails in various places throughout the shed for quick installation of the shelf.

THE FIX: I hang a carabiner (a spring-loaded clip that climbers use) off my back belt loop and run the cord through that to keep it from swinging in front of the trimmer. I look dorky with my yellow power-cord tail dangling behind me, but at least I don’t have to keep splicing it back together.

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COAT HOOKS attached to uprights cradle hoes, rakes, shovels or even a lightweight, straight-shaft string trimmer. See? PM readers were repurposing stuff long before it was cool.


ILLUSTRATIONS BY GUY SHIELD (CORD CUTTER), MARTIN LAKSMAN (SHED UPGRADES)

BY JAMES B MEIGS

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T O O L HAC K

Make boring less galling

1 of 4 Dremel hampers worth R6 495 each

It’s one of life’s great frustrations: drilling a hole perfectly perpendicular to the workpiece. A drill press is ideal, but it won’t help you install hardware on a cabinet or a deadbolt on a door. Instead, try one of these solutions. B Y D AV I D A G R E L L 1

2

3

1. Straight Got an old CD lying around? Of course you do (thanks, iTunes). Place it label side down on the workpiece and centred over where you want the hole. Set the drill bit into the disc’s hole, and position the drill until the bit is in a straight line with its reflection. 2. Straighter Nail together a couple of scrap pieces of wood to form a right angle. It’s important to make everything true and square or you’re wasting your time. Position the drill bit tight into the corner of the jig and bore your hole.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JULIA STOTZ

3. Straightest A guide attachment turns your hand drill into a portable drill press. Like a drill press, you can set the depth of the hole and change the angle of attack. Unlike a drill press, you can pack this attachment in your toolbox.

JULY 2014

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Each Dremel hamper includes a 4200 multi-tool, a MS20-1/5 Moto Saw, a 940 glue gun, a VersaFlame and a Multi-Max oscillating tool, all designed to enhance your home DIY projects with a compelling combination of superior quality and efficient operation. The Dremel 4200 multi-tool’s high-performance motor delivers optimum performance at all speeds, offering precise and controlled cuts in addition to sanding and fast material removal, and is ideal for polishing, cutting, sanding, grinding and carving tasks. Electronic feedback automatically adjusts the tool’s speed and power, and the variable speed switch offers the user increased versatility. The compact Dremel Multi-Max oscillating tool is suited to a variety of tasks around the home, and comes with a Quick Fit function for projects that require multiple accessories. An integrated “fuel gauge” indicates the remaining battery charge.

To enter, answer the following question: Does the Dremel 4200 multi-tool feature electronic feedback? SMS the word DREMEL, followed by the answer, your name and e-mail address to 32697 (R1,50 per SMS; this service does not allow for 8ta numbers), or visit our Web site at www.popularmechanics.co.za. Competition closes 31 July 2014, and winners will be drawn on 8 August 2014. For the competition rules, visit www.popularmechanics. co.za For more information, contact Dremel on 011-651 9858 or visit www.dremel.com BE THE FIRST TO KNOW

TAC DOTN’T I CS BE A N IDIOT

It’s all in the detailing Before he ever laid a microfibre towel on Jerry Seinfeld’s fleet, Ammo NYC founder Larry Kosilla had mastered the perfect car wash. There’s more to it than rinsing grime off your ride, but it still shouldn’t take all Sunday.

For starters, never even touch your car without a lubricant such as water, spray wax, waterless wash or soap. These lift contaminants from the surface, “so you won’t grind soil into the paint and spend the rest of the day buffing out the scratches,” Kosilla says. Try to be methodical and work in this order: wheels, paint, interior and glass. Otherwise, you’ll waste precious time fumbling around washing and rewashing. Doing the wheels first, before you wet the rest of the car, prevents water spots from forming on the paint. Wash the glass last in case you smudge the windows while cleaning the interior. Dirty wheels often contain brake dust, which can scratch paint, so designate one bucket and mitt or rag for painted areas only, and keep another wash mitt in a separate bucket for the wheels. Also use a Grit Guard Insert in your bucket to keep soiled mitts clean and prevent them

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from picking up dirt that settles at the bottom. Scrub wheels with Wheel Woolies. These brushes are engineered to quickly get into intricate spokes and lug-nut crevices. On paint, always use microfibre towels (not sponges), which are ideal for both washing and drying because of their ability to pick up and release dirt. “Microfibre has replaced the traditional chamois leather,” Kosilla says. He uses a heavy 300- to 400-gsm (gram-persquare-metre) cloth, which is gentler on paint. You can skip

water altogether and clean your car with a waterless wash product. Apply it with a clean microfibre towel folded into quarters. “Use a scooping motion while applying the least amount of pressure necessary for the cloth to make contact and pick up the dirt,” Kosilla says. This will require five to 10 towels and 10 to 20 ounces of waterless wash. For waxing, his pro tip is to apply a light-mist spray wax or a hydrophobic drying agent to the wet painted surfaces and wipe dry with a damp towel.

“The microfibre towel will pick up any remaining dirt that was missed during the wash and apply a thin layer of protection during the drying process.” Shoot air into tight spots such as mirrors, taillights and emblems with a portable vacuum blower. “The point is to release trapped water that will ultimately spill out as you drive away.” And, of course, use the vacuum’s attachments to clean every gap, crevice and air vent in your car’s interior. PM Now, get cleaning!


PHOTOGRAPH BY REED YOUNG

BY MIKE SPINELLI

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To enter, answer the following question: Do Rotary watches come with a lifetime guarantee on the movement? SMS the word ROTARY, followed by the answer, your name and e-mail address to 32697 (R1,50 per SMS; this service does not allow for 8ta numbers), or visit our Web site at www.popularmechanics. co.za Competition closes 31 July 2014, and winners will be drawn on 8 August 2014.

Competition rules: 1. Entry is open to anyone except employees (and their immediate families) of RamsayMedia and associated agencies. 2. Only one online entry per person. You may enter via SMS as many times as you like (R1,50 per SMS; this service does not allow for 8ta numbers). 3. Competition runs until 31 July 2014. 4. We will draw the winner(s) on 8 August 2014. 5. The prize is not redeemable for cash. 6. Prizes not claimed within 3 months will be forfeited. 7. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. 8. Regrettably, only South African residents are eligible for prizes. 9. By entering this competition, you agree to receive future correspondence from Popular Mechanics. You can opt out at any stage by: (a) Sending an e-mail containing the relevant details with the subject line “opt out” to pmmailers@ramsaymedia. co.za; or (b) Sending an SMS including the word “STOP” to 31699. Standard SMS rates apply.

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LIES and LIARS: As sprinter Oscar Pistorius stands trial on charges of murdering his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day last year, we’re forced once again to do the near-impossible: separate truth from untruth. Is he lying, as he describes shooting Reeva Steenkamp through a closed bathroom door? Or was he, as he says, legitimately frightened, and protecting her from an intruder?

▲

TO TELL THE TRUTH, it’s awfully hard to catch a liar, or to even know if someone is telling the truth. The best estimate, based on hundreds of studies, is that people can spot a liar 54 per cent of the time – a ratio that is perilously close to pure chance. But with lies being told every day – to abet financial skullduggery, everyday politics and, of course, everyday crime – the business of truth-telling ought to be booming. Have you ever told these lies? – I’m fine. – I have read the terms of service. – You look great in that dress. – Your table will be ready in five minutes. – She is only a friend. – I’ll work on that ASAP. After all, researchers say, “Deception is a major aspect of social interaction; people admit to using it in 14 per-cent of e-mails, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and 37 per cent of phone calls.” We’re not worried about white lies, the grease of the gears of human relationships. We’re worried about lies like the cascade of chicanery uttered by Bernie Madoff, the prince of Ponzi, who was convicted of a decades-long fraud that fried investors for an estimated R200 billion. We’re worried about bigwigs like former president Bill Clinton, who lied when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman”, and his predecessor Richard Nixon, who lamely (and laughably) proclaimed “I am not a crook” as the Watergate scandal closed in. And we’re worried about athletes like Lance Armstrong, the erstwhile king of the Tour de France. After years of denials, he finally admitted that he, like many fellow bike racers, had been chemically enhanced. DETECTION INFLECTION Truth is, after decades of work, the lie detection business is floundering. “Reliable” techniques come and go. For decades, the instrument called the lie detector

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has been a mainstay of cop shows and station houses, but it’s fallen from favour with the recognition that it can be beaten. Meanwhile, other supposed “tells” of untruth, such as avoiding eye contact or scratching certain parts of the face, are easily avoided by practised liars. There is a huge literature of studies suggesting that we are “very poor” at lie detection, says Leanne ten Brinke, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley school of business. “If I show you 10 videos, and five show people lying and five show them telling the truth, your accuracy will be 50 per cent. Flip a coin; don’t bother watching the video. It’s discouraging.” Professionals don’t necessarily do much better, according to Ten Brinke and colleague Stephen Porter who commented: “Even trained professional lie catchers often fail in detecting high-stakes lies.” Ten Brinke and Porter say that when researchers showed police officers clips of people who, like the Canadian Michael White, had pleaded for help locating a spouse who had disappeared, “the officers could have flipped a coin and performed as well”. Courts later ruled that White and many of the other “pleaders” had murdered the “vanished” person. LYING: WHY SO CONVINCING? “Deception is a very complex human behaviour and in spite of years of pondering over how to spot a lie, we humans are not very good at this task,” according to Victoria Rubin, assistant professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Her e-mail continues: “Computer programs can bring systematic ways of looking for what might give away a lie, but there is no simple solution. There is no real consensus among researchers in the field about what these best predictors of deception might be.” One reason for the difficulty, Aldert Vrij wrote in an e-mail, is that “people are good liars because they have a lot of practice, and practice makes skill”. Vrij, a professor of applied social psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, added that, “people lie every day (many white lies but also more serious lies) and children are instructed to lie (white lies) by their parents from a very early age (‘pretend you like the present grandma gave you’)”. Liars notice if listeners swallow their spiel, “and people can learn from accurate feedback”, says Vrij.


CAN YOU CATCH THEM?

By DAVID J TENENBAUM

So what do we know about deception detection? What seems to work, and when? As we survey the human quest to ferret out lies, we’ll focus on psychological tests, computer analysis of text and video, and advanced interrogation techniques.

Liar, liar: economising with the truth hastened the downfall of, main picture, Bill Clinton and above, from top, Bernie Madoff, Lance Armstrong and Richard Nixon.

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BILL CLINTON BY CLINTON PIC; BERNIE MADOFF BY PUBLIC DOMAIN; LANCE ARMSTRONG BY WIKIMEDIA/DANIEL BAYER; RICHARD NIXON BY PUBLIC DOMAIN

NATURALLY SELECTED? You might think we humans have an advantage, since the ability to detect lies would seem essential enough to be favoured by evolution. “We thought natural selection would promote this ability,” Ten Brink says, “and we also thought that for lie detection to be accurate and adaptive, it did not necessarily need to be conscious; you don’t need alarm bells going off in your head. It could be subtle, so when you hear someone speak, you don’t really trust them, don’t feel like you want to lend them money or go on a second date.” To test that premise, Ten Brinke and colleagues looked for implicit associations – concepts that are

triggered by exposure to something in the environment. For example, if you harbour stereotypical feelings about green people, after seeing a photo of a green person, you would be more likely to understand, choose or recognise words – such as “bad”, “nasty” or “untrustworthy” – that express your discriminatory feelings. In two studies, the conscious ability to distinguish truth from fiction was no better than chance, Ten Brinke says, but “people responded faster to ‘truth’ words after they saw a truthful video, and to ‘lie’ words after they saw a lying video. This suggests that the unconscious mind does discriminate”. The moral is that we might be better lie detectors than we thought, “but the ability does not live in our conscious mind”, Ten Brinke said. The study might support a tactic of going with your gut, but the false confessions uncovered by DNA tests show that this attitude among police investigators has put innocent people in prison. “I’m very unclear about the implication,” says Ten Brinke. “This does create a new interesting perspective on humans as lie detectors and opens a bunch of potential avenues. Can we look at the behavioural reaction of the receiver of a message to determine something about the veracity of the sender?” HOW HIGH ARE THE STAKES? Many studies of lie detection are criticised because the subjects are, too often, university students who are asked to lie about trivialities. Critics question the realism of that set-up and argue that, lacking sufficient emotional stress, subjects fail to reveal the “tells” that often accompany high-stakes, real-world lies. “The behavioural cues to deception tend to be quite subtle, especially when the lie is not high-stakes,” Ten Brinke told us. “When students come to the lab and tell a lie about their summer vacation, that’s not high stakes. Unless it means a lot to you, you are not worried about being caught and might not leak any clues.” To deception researchers, “leak” means to unintentionally reveal a telltale sign of lying. While researching her dissertation, Ten Brinke focused on high-stakes liars by studying videos of people who had issued a televised plea for help finding a loved one. Half of the 78 cases were genuine. In the other half, the pleader was later found to have murdered the disappeared person. The pleader videos contained “pretty clear cues to deception”, Ten Brinke told us. “Deceivers smiled more; that’s a very unlikely emotion for someone who’s genuinely disturbed. They were unable to replicate genuine sadness in the face. There are muscles that are very difficult to control, so they were not able to pull off that look of sadness, particularly in the forehead.” Still, the tells were difficult to catch in real time, she adds. “My study was frame by frame; a very exhaustive, expensive analysis.” Working in real time is a very difficult task so videotaping is always recommended. “The cognitive load (mental work) for the lie detector is incredibly high, especially if you are in conversation, and looking for an appropriate question, and examining the speech pattern and body language all at once.”

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OSCAR PISTORIUS BY GALLO IMAGES/CITY PRESS/HERMAN VERWEY; RICHARD NIXON BY PUBLIC DOMAIN; MARION JONES BY WIKIPEDIA COMMONS/THOMAS FAIVRE-DUBOZ

Oscar Pistorius at a bail hearing on 20 February 2013, in Pretoria, South Africa. Pistorius is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on 14 February last year.

Above left: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” President Nixon, with edited transcripts of Nixon White House Tape conversations during broadcast of his address to the nation, 29 April 1974. Nixon resigned in disgrace after the US House of Representatives impeached him for multiple crimes, including obstruction of justice. Above right: Sprinter Marion Jones won five medals at the 2000 Olympics, then gave them all back after her 2007 confession for doping.

The face, she says, is “an incredibly valuable cue to deception if you know what to look for; it can tell you a ton of interesting information”. Some people get away with lying for years (and sometimes, they seek redemption). Take the case of Briton Anne Darwin, who served half of a six-year sentence for her part in an insurance scam after pretending that her husband, John, had drowned when he paddled out to sea in his canoe. Five years after his disappearance, he turned


Above left: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” said Bill Clinton, straying seriously from the truth. Above right: Bernie Madoff is an American convicted of fraud in 2009. A former stockbroker, investment adviser and financier, he admitted to running a Ponzi scheme that is considered the largest financial fraud in US history.

up alive – and they both went to jail. Last year, a UK newspaper reported that Anne was spending five days a week working at an RSPCA second-hand shop. THE INTERVIEW Much of the focus in criminal deception detection today concerns the interrogator, not the subject. One goal is to increase the subject’s “cognitive load” (need to think fast) during interro-

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LANCE ARMSTRONG BY WIKIMEDIA/DANIEL BAYER; BILL CLINTON BY CLINTON PIC; BERNIE MADOFF BY PUBLIC DOMAIN

In October 2012, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned from competitive cycling for life by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) for doping offences following a report from the US Anti-Doping Agency.

gation. One way to do this, Vrij says, is to ask people to recall the event in reverse order. “You said you went for lunch with your friend. Tell me in detail what happened in the restaurant (working backwards) from when you and your friend left the restaurant.” With co-operative witnesses, Vrij says, reverse order recall often results in new information, but liars “will attempt to say again what they said when asked in normal order. This is difficult to do and may lead to contradictions. Also, because liars focus on repetition, it is unlikely to result in new information”. Indeed, Vrij says, finding lies is all in the questioning. “Through good interview techniques, deception may become apparent, but poor interview techniques are unlikely to elicit cues.” For example: O Passive or general questions, such as “Tell me in detail all that happened” give liars the opportunity to report their planned lie, Vrij says. O Leading or suggestive questions, such as “Did you take the money?” can cause symptoms of nervousness among liars and innocents alike. (Scientists interested in interrogations have tried to evaluate the ability of various techniques to uncover lies. More recently, sparked by capital-case confessions that were later proven false by DNA evidence, researchers have tried to identify techniques that coerce the innocent to confess. One key offender: interrogators who falsely claim to have incriminating evidence.) COMPUTER VISION? It’s the computer age. So what can our digital slaves add to the enigma that is deception detection? Computers may lend a hand in analysing the highly expressive human face, which nonetheless baffles most human efforts to detect lies. Aware that slackers seeking disability benefits often lie to doctors about pain, Kang Lee, at the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, asked subjects to show real or faked pain. Lee elaborates: “The question was, when humans express a genuine emotion, do they use one group of muscles, and when they express fake emotions, do they use a different group of muscles?” (The experimenters immersed subjects’ hands in cold water, which Lee says is very painful, but safe.) Because pain is a universal experience, says Lee, “We are very well versed in faking pain,” which makes the task tough for deception detectors. When Lee trained people to analyse the videos, their accuracy rose from chance to 56 per cent. “It was very poor, and that’s been found before,” he says. The old-fashioned lie detectors measure sweating, respiration and heart rate, which indicate heightened arousal caused by the state of deception – or something else. Critics say the detectors are far from foolproof. By using machine learning, Lee, working with Marnie Bartlett of the University of California, San Diego, taught computers to detect deception with 82 per cent accuracy. “That’s a big leap forward, and it tells us there are signs in the facial expression that can indicate if they faking or are experiencing

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Left: Anne Darwin, the wife of “back-from-the-dead” Briton John Darwin, leaves Manchester Airport police station in 2007. Anne was detained on her return from Panama, where she was tracked down after her husband walked into a London police station, claiming to remember nothing since he disappeared five years earlier after an apparent canoeing accident.

Below left: Acclaimed British author and former politician Sir Jeffrey Archer in 2012 during his South African book tour for Sins of the Father.

pain for real,” Lee says. Frame-by-frame video analysis revealed that real and faked pain have different expressions. “When faking, the mouth opens with a very regular, rhythmic dynamic,” Lee says, which does not appear with real pain. That subtle distinction shows the advantages of computer vision, he says. “The computer can remember frame by frame; our cognitive system has a low capacity, so we can’t remember these dynamics, and the mouth is only one part; we also have to look at the eyes, the nose, the cheeks and the words. That is lot of information to compute concurrently.” THE WORDS HAVE IT! In a recent study, Lynn van Swol, an associate professor of communications arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that lies were easier to detect by computer chat than from watching a video. Why? “There may be just too much to analyse in a video,” says Van Swol, “and that takes away from probably one of the best indications… what the person is saying, and putting it in context.” The context includes common sense and knowledge of the world. Say, while trying to decide if someone were truthful, you asked about favourite pastimes and were told, “I like to write poetry”. “You might think, how many people could truthfully give that response?” says Van Swol, “rather than looking at whether his eye is twitching or he’s scratching his chin.” Poetry

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TRUST A COMPUTER? Computers can also analyse text, looking for “a pattern of objectively observed predictors of deception”, as Rubin wrote to us. For example, if it’s true that liars try to avoid the first-person pronouns “I” and “we”, a computer can quickly examine text to look for an abnormally low number of first-person pronouns. The pronoun theory is debated, and Rubin agrees that any one indicator is not definitive, but rather “should contribute towards the overall decision-making – is this given text truth or a lie?” Computers, she notes, are fast, consistent and obedient. They have a certain type of objectivity, assuming the programmer instructs the program based on scientific consensus, and not his or her personal opinions. “Computer programs can be trained to look through large volumes of data, observe patterns and make certain conclusions on which to base their further decisions.” Using this so-called “machine learning”, Rubin and colleagues created software that detected 65 per cent of lies – somewhat better than the 50 to 63 per cent performance from people in the same study. What might account for the slight advantage for computers? People, Rubin wrote, are not necessarily objective, nor systematic, “nor do we know what exactly to look for to spot a lie”. He added: “We quite often rely on intuition. We are subjective and have emotions; for instance, liking an idea might help us validate it. We might misinterpret cues. We multi-task as we read – we need to understand what is said and perhaps think how it’s phrased, make connections to what we already know, remember what we’ve read in order to evaluate its veracity. Ultimately, the task is cognitively taxing, and we are just human.” But being human has advantages, Rubin adds. We have the powers of true comprehension of the situation in a life context and the ability to see the big picture, to reason and be self-aware. “Say that someone is stating the opposite of what’s obviously true. A human knows to interpret it as sarcasm and how to react to it, and what it actually means.” Between crime, sports and politics, the need to detect deception is not fading away. And Rubin reminds us of another playground for deceit. “We communicate and get our information via computer and mobile devices. We are unsuspecting, truth-biased (tending to believe what we read, in other words), and potentially vulnerable to online predators, spammers, scammers and opportunists with malevolent deceptive intentions.” PM O Source: University of Wisconsin, Board of Regents.


ANNE DARWIN BY ANDREW YATES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SIR JEFFREY ARCHER BY GALLO IMAGES/FOTO24/LOANNA HOFFMANN

is a scarce avocation, so that answer is a possible – but hardly conclusive – tell of deception.

WHY WE FIX By KYLE WIENS There are certain sounds that I feel in my bone marrow: the scraping of metal on metal, the death grind of misaligned gears, the low clanking of an engine on the verge of failure. These are the noises that have defined my life. I’m a tinkerer by inclination and a fixer by profession. Ten years ago, my university roommate and I founded iFixit, a free online repair manual. We teach people how to repair the stuff they own, in part because most of them have lost both the skill and the inclination to repair. Fixing things is a dying art. This cultural lapse is reinforced by society’s celebration of ending over-mending. But here’s the thing: broken isn’t a permanent state. It’s a challenge, as if entropy were issuing us a personal ultimatum: “Fix this, or it’s mine.”

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@kwiens

Challenge accepted. Just the other day, my Ridgid air compressor started making an unfriendly racket. A bolt had worked loose and was rattling around inside. I took the compressor apart, fished out the renegade bolt and worked it back into position. But I got a little too enthusiastic during reassembly: I over-tightened a screw and snapped it in two. It was only after I broke the air compressor that I bothered to wonder if Ridgid provided service manuals or spare parts. My experience in the repair industry has taught me to expect neither. That’s because I specialise in repairing electronic devices – things like smartphones and laptops. I started out repairing products made by Apple, a company that doesn’t exactly encourage customers to take their gadgets apart. In fact, Apple uses proprietary screws to keep tinkerers out. And where Apple leads, others follow. With the exception of companies like Dell and Lenovo, most computer brands have stopped releasing repair information or replacement parts to the public. It’s the same story in the wider market. Twenty years ago, replacement parts for things such as televisions and refrigerators were easy to come by. The corner mom-and-pop repair shop could replace a capacitor or find the replacement motor you needed. Now those repair stores are almost all gone. Many manufacturers have stopped supporting repair-minded consumers. When my air compressor broke, I just assumed that the growing repair black hole had already swallowed up the power-tool industry. I was wrong. Nearly all the major brands of power tools have diagrams and replacement parts available on their Web sites. I found the part I needed, and Ridgid shipped it to me. My out-of-pocket expense: R130. I popped the piece into place, flipped the switch and fired up my air compressor. Good as new. I live for moments like that. I fought a battle and won. I hear similar victory stories every day from people who used iFixit guides to repair something they didn’t think they could – university students who salvage coffee-soaked laptops, mothers who rescue a broken iPod for their kids, soldiers overseas who patch up their phones and can call home again. Fixing something helps them reclaim their power – over technology, over consumerism, over helplessness. Repairing our possessions is starting to make inroads into popular culture again. In 2012, 86 per cent of voters in Massachusetts, USA, passed a Right to Repair law that requires motor manufacturers to give owners access to the same diagnostic and repair information that authorised repair facilities have. Last year, 114 322 Americans signed a petition demanding that the White House legalise cellphone unlocking. Legislation is now creaking through Congress, and if our voices are loud enough, Americans just might earn the right to tinker with their phones. Making something whole again expresses what it means to be human: a demonstration of our capacity to be resourceful, meet challenges and solve problems. Speaking of problems: that repaired air compressor? My brother loaded it into the back of his truck and took off up a hill. The air compressor rolled down the truck bed, through the tailgate and on to the road. It’s broken. Challenge accepted.


PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHANAEL TURNER

Opinion

@melbakurman @hodlipson

Kurman and Lipson coauthored Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT 3D-PRINTING PIRACY

PORTRAITS BY BRAM VANHAEREN

BY MELBA KURMAN and HOD LIPSON While browsing thingiverse.com, a popular site for sharing design files for 3D printing, you’ll see more than 50 downloadable digital blueprints for everything Yoda, including cufflinks, custom key chains and plastic figurines. Perhaps because the threat of revenue loss is so minimal on a Star Wars cultural icon that’s been around for more than 35 years, Disney (Yoda’s new master) has not yet tried to prevent fans from 3D-printing their own plastic versions of the company’s copyrighted, pointy-eared gnome. Other media companies have not been so pragmatic. When the Belgian company Moulinsart discovered 3D printing designs on thingiverse.com for the cartoon rocket of their beloved character, Tintin, it asked the site owners to take down the offending files. Last year, HBO sent designer Fernando Sosa a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, insisting that Sosa stop selling his 3D-printed Game of Thrones iPhone dock. Tech-savvy people know that a 3D printer is a manufacturing machine that creates physical objects by layering raw material according to instructions from a digital blueprint. The technology has been around for decades, but in the past five years, consumer 3D printers have vaulted the process into the mainstream. Amid the excitement, however, lurks concern over intellectualproperty rights as users gain the ability to produce unauthorised copies of copyrighted, patented or trademarked products. The market research firm Gartner predicts that by 2018,

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businesses will lose more than R1 trillion a year to 3D printing-enabled IP theft. We’ve covered the field since its inception, and we believe it’s highly unlikely that in the next few years, markets will be flooded with counterfeit 3D-printed products. Here’s why.

BITS VS ATOMS Fifteen years ago, the music and media industries became targets for IP disruption when digital media files replaced compact discs and paper books. Unlike a CD, DVD or book, digital files are easy to copy, and once consumers began sharing content over the Internet, big-media companies began bleeding revenue. There’s a world of difference, however, between making a copy of an MP3 file and making a copy of an object. Despite ever-improving software, scanners and 3D printers, it’s still challenging to print high-quality replicas of cheap, mass-produced physical things. The process is ruled by the laws of physics. Raw materials come into play. Tyrannies of time and distance introduce cost and complexity to the process.

IT’S A MULTI-MATERIAL WORLD If you look around your home or office, you’ll notice most of the things that surround you are made of several kinds of materials. Even the humble pencil consists of wood, metal, rubber and a graphite-clay compound. It will be years before a consumer-priced 3D printer is capable of fabricating an object 3D-printed composed of such different substances. items do not Because of this, materials limitations will continue to have a dampening effect on benefit from widespread 3D-printed counterfeiting. economies of

scale, which make the process an unattractive method for brazen piracy. Few consumers opt to pay more for a counterfeit.

SLOW MANUFACTURING Even if multimaterial 3D printing becomes affordable, there’s another challenge: time. 3D printing is slow. It takes seconds, at most, to copy a song, but hours to copy even a simple plastic cup. Imagine a counterfeiter from the future who buys a multi-material 3D printer and sets up a shadow factory. She painstakingly prints copies of namebrand products, puts her wares up for sale, and learns a hard economic lesson: 3Dprinted items do not benefit from economies of scale, which makes the process an unattractive method for brazen piracy. Few customers would opt to pay more for a higher-priced, 3D-printed counterfeit than for an identical name-brand original.

WHO WILL BE AFFECTED? The companies that will struggle to compete with 3D-printed knock-offs share

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two characteristics: their product lines could be described as overpriced plastic, and their profit margins rely on vigorous IP enforcement. In addition to the toy industry, another such market segment is the replacement car-part industry. Big motor manufacturers control that market by using design patents to block competitors from making lower-cost generic versions of bumpers and other parts. Once 3D-printed generics become available, it’s going to be difficult for rights-owning companies to convince customers to pay their steeply marked-up prices. Why spend R1 000 for a floor mat when you could download the design file and print out the object on a home machine, or pay a professional 3D-printing service to do it for you for a fraction of the price?

EMBRACE, DON’T FIGHT IT We predict that 3D-printing technologies will create new markets, not gut profits from existing ones. The toy company Hasbro recently signed a partnership with 3D Systems to co-develop a website where children can design and print their own custom plastic Hasbro toys. Smart companies will add value to existing products or entice customers to pay a premium to purchase authentic products that come with a quality guarantee. Wise companies will embrace 3D printing to enrich the users’ experience, not embark on quixotic IP battles against their own customers.

Melba Kurman is an author and the founder of the technology consulting firm Triple Helix Innovation. Hod Lipson is a Cornell University roboticist who won a 2007 PM Breakthrough Award for Fab@Home, a tabletop 3D-printer kit designed for consumers.

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IN DEFENCE OF JARGON

James B Meigs is the former editorin-chief of POPULAR MECHANICS.

BY JAMES B MEIGS Sticklers, grammarians and high school English teachers concur: jargon is the sworn enemy of good communication. I disagree. Some of the most interesting words in the English language started out as jargon. Take scuttlebutt. Today it means gossip. But the roots of the word go back to the days of wooden sailing ships, when the scuttlebutt was a barrel, or butt, with a hole, or scuttle, in the top. One of these was located on deck and filled with water so sailors could stop and take a drink. Like the water cooler in a modern office, the scuttlebutt became the place where the crew loitered to grumble and gossip; hence the word. Mariners in the days of sail used thousands of words and phrases that were specific to the nautical world – words such as bight, bobstay, bower, bunt (and those are just a few of the b’s). You could call those words jargon – since most landlubbers would have found them unintelligible – but they were crucial to seafaring. If you were a jack tar heading up the mizzen to reef a topgallant in a squall, your shipmates’ lives depended on your knowing the name of every scrap of sail and rigging. Some phrases – loose cannon, even keel, flying colours – eventually crossed over into everyday speech, but most did not. The enemies of jargon would admonish those sailors not to use their specialised vocabulary when talking to the rest of us. “It’s far better to use commonplace words that everyone will understand,” advises Richard Branson, the Virgin Atlantic airlines founder and fierce critic of business jargon. He’s right that some vernacular obfuscates more than it enlightens. But would a conversation with a 19th century mariner be more informative if he simply called every sort of ship a boat, rather than its precise name: schooner, barque, frigate? The key to intelligibility isn’t avoiding a term, but explaining it. Who wouldn’t enjoy learning that an East Indiaman was a massive merchant ship plying the trade routes to Asia and armed just enough to fight off the occasional pirate? Almost every specialised field develops this sort of private language. When pilots talk to air traffic control or engineers confer over a CAD file, the acronyms and technical shorthand are usually too thick for civilians to follow. But this lingo helps get difficult jobs done quickly and precisely. The jargon of any field – engineering, aviation, business – can be fascinating once you understand it. Those words are windows into a complex and demanding world. Part of the appeal of reading a magazine like POPULAR MECHANICS is learning the vocabulary involved in all the fields we cover. I’m not a pilot, but I love knowing that VFR means Visual Flight Rules (in other words, clear weather and no navigation instruments required) and that a flight designated heavy is a wide-body aircraft likely to leave dangerous turbulence in its wake. You don’t really know any field well until you’ve mastered its shoptalk. Take woodworking. Some words, like dovetail and veneer, long ago passed into common usage. Others might seem obscure to the general public but are steeped in history to initiates in the sawdust cult. A kerf (the gap made by a saw) comes from the Old English cyrf, or cutting. A dado (a rectangular slot used in joinery) derives from the Latin word datum, or starting point. Those Romans were great builders – of infrastructure and vocabulary. Our word plumbing comes from the Latin plumbum, or lead, the malleable metal Romans used to create the first pipes. And we can check that something we’ve built is plumb vertical by using a plumb line, a small chunk of lead tied to a string. Technology, from the earliest stone tool to the latest microchip, has demanded that we invent new words, forcing us to expand the capabilities of our language. The vocabulary of our digital age – terms like bandwidth, download and open source – will no doubt enrich our language into the future. Rather than banish these words, I say embrace them. Humans are a technological species. These words help make us who we are. PM


PM DIGITAL

JULY 2014

MULTIMEDIA TECH SCIENCE HOME HOW-TO WHEELS OUTSIDE BLOGS ‘ELECTRIC AVENUE’

YOUR TWEETS @CamLl @popmechsa You had me at ‘Robots are amazing’

We’ve seen the electric bicycle in many shapes and configurations, and quite frankly, some of them are rather yawn-inducing. The Gi-Bike is different: it’s foldable, knows when you need help and assists you by activating the electric motor, plus it integrates with your smartphone.

@Biogap1 @popmechsa Have PM SA seen this bagger288meccano.blogspot.com It seems incredible. The model is bigger than the one in Ripley’s St Augustine museum.

As weird designs go, the Austrian-built Johammer electrocruiser takes the prize. But it’s also a technological tour de force: the 12,7 kWh battery stack delivers 200 km range on a full charge and the company guarantees a battery service life of 200 000 km or four years without dropping below 85 per cent of its original capacity.

@NRF_SAASTA Pack your spacesuit! First Earth-size planet found in the habitable zone of another star ow.ly/w6vrb @popmechsa @Biz_Marketing Popular Mechanics joins the beer revolution bizcom.to/1/2eug | @popmechsa #bizpressoffice @NRF_SAASTA How a children’s game inspired the design of a robotic mule that goes to war ow.ly/vT53k @popmechsa #thatsscience @Gezza_sa Thanks @popmechsa for the awesome prize! Lots of fun still to be had. pic.twitter.com/ IuWmRcfYr0 @BLOODHOUND_SSC Check out this great article in @popmechsa on how #BLOODHOUND aims to shatter the land speed record: bit.ly/OOPoCn #SouthAfrica

COMPETITIONS

Lito Green Motion’s revolutionary Sora electric motorcycle has officially entered production. Sora is an eye-catching combination of street fighter and “bobber”. The result? A big and brutal zerocompromise electric superbike.

Visit www.popularmechanics.co.za to enter our competitions.

Win 1 of 2 CAT Big Twist watches, each worth R1 795

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Build a WORKBENCH A RUGGED, VERSATILE YET EASY-TO-BUILD WORKSHOP UPGRADE Every home needs a DIY area, no matter how much is done around the house or what size projects are tackled. Whether you’re an expert craftsman, a weekend hobbyist or a busy dad with some hand tools, a suitable work surface and basic storage will be needed. The dining room table isn’t a good idea as the jigsaw blades tend to get mixed up in the children’s cornflakes, and jars of nails just don’t go with the décor. In a previous workshop, I had limited space, so I designed this workbench to take up the full width of the small room I was using. Later, when I had a larger workshop, I set it up as a freestanding bench and again it proved useful for all types of DIY requirements. You will find this workbench a welcome addition to your garage or workshop and you can make it in just a few hours.

DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION An important aspect of any work surface is ergonomics, and how you will be positioned when you use it. As a rule, workbenches are for standing next to while desks are lower because we sit at them in one position for longer periods. To get the right height for my requirements, I built this workbench with a higher work surface than I needed and trimmed off the legs until it was comfortable to stand at for long periods of time. However, there are some tasks that will require sitting at the workbench, such as using the scroll saw, soldering and model work, in which case an ordinary stool will be useful to sit on while working. If you are sitting, you can rest your feet on the lower surface of the workbench, which is also useful for storage of larger tools and materials. I mounted a bench vice on the

2 080 mm long x 660 mm wide x 990 mm high 21 None Basic assembly Easy 4 hours

left and installed a drawer on the right to hold a socket spanner set, but these are optional and can be omitted if preferred.

WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME I used solid pine for the bottom shelves, but thick plywood also works and is much cheaper, which helps if you are on a tight budget. The illustrations in this chapter show a version with a plywood bottom shelf while the photos show the solid pine version that I actually built. You should fasten the back of the work surface to the wall, but for extra rigidity you can also fasten the lower portions of the three back legs. This will require simple right-angle brackets mounted with wood screws to the legs, and masonry screws and plugs to fasten on to the wall. A second storage shelf would also be useful; place it halfway down and make it half the width of the bottom shelf.

STEP BY STEP MAKE THE LEG ASSEMBLIES

1 Lay out three of the legs (E x 3) in the configuration of the leg assembly and mark the position of the bottom shelf support (C). TIP: As shown in the photograph, use a try square to measure accurately from the base of the legs.

Cutting list and materials A B C D E

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Part Work surface Bottom shelves Bottom shelf supports Work surface supports Legs

Quantity 3 2 4 3 9

Thickness 45 mm 20 mm 35 mm 45 mm 70 mm

Width 220 mm 660 mm 35 mm 70 mm 70 mm

Length 2080 mm 935 mm 660 mm 660 mm 900 mm


Workbench design used with kind permission of Handyman Club of America, owned by North American Membership Group, Inc (www.handymanclub.com) JULY 2014 • www.popularmechanics.co.za

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DIY HOME / BUILD A WORKBENCH 2 Fasten the bottom shelf support (C) to the bottom of the legs (E x 3) in the marked position, using a power drill and two cut screws for each joint, as shown in the photograph. Repeat these two steps for all three leg assemblies.

ASSEMBLY DIAGRAM

3 Take one of the leg assemblies and fasten another bottom shelf support (C) to the opposite side using cut screws and a power drill, as shown in the photograph. This will be the leg assembly in the middle of the length of the bench, which has a bottom shelf support on both sides.

4 On the underside of one of the work surface supports (D), measure and mark off the position of the top of the middle leg (E) using a steel ruler and carpenter’s pencil. TIP: The outer legs of each assembly will be positioned at the ends of the work surface support so their position does not need to be marked off.

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ASSEMBLE THE WORKBENCH

SIDE VIEW OF COMPLETED WORKBENCH

990 mm

745 mm

7 Choose the desired

660 mm

position of the workbench and place the three leg assemblies against the wall, as shown. The spacing between them must be equivalent to that of the length of the bottom shelves (B). TIP: Ensure that the back legs are flush against the wall and compensate for an uneven floor with wedges under any of the legs (E), as needed.

8 Place each of the bottom shelves (B x 2) on the bottom shelf supports (C x 4) and fasten down with cut screws along all adjoining sides. TIP: Accuracy and aesthetics are not important for constructing the workbench, but it’s still good practice to use pilot holes and space the cut screws evenly as this strengthens the joint.

9 Starting at the back, successively position the work surface boards (A x 3) on the top of the work surface supports (D x 3), as shown in the photograph. TIP: Ensure that major knots in the surface or corners of the wood are on the underside as they will weaken and erode the top surface after prolonged usage.

5 Position, clamp and fasten the outer legs (E x 2) to complete the first leg assembly. Repeat the whole process for the other two leg assemblies.

10 Move the assembly away

6 The three leg assemblies, as shown in the photograph, are now complete. Line them up and check that they are the same height, width and construction since they form the main structure of the workbench and need to be well built.


from the wall and clamp the work surface boards (A x 3) to each other along the width of the assembled work surface, using sash clamps. This will ensure a tight fit and improve the integrity and strength of the work surface. In the clamped position, fasten the work surface boards (A x 3) with cut screws using a power drill to fasten along the top of the three leg assemblies, as shown in the photograph.

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DIY HOME / BUILD A WORKBENCH BOTTOM VIEW OF WORKBENCH 935 mm

225 mm

660 mm

70 mm

2080 mm

OPTIONAL: mount a bench vice 11 Drill the required holes in the workbench to accommodate the mounting bolts for the bench vice you wish to install. The position and size of the bolts will vary depending on the size and make of your bench vice. For this vice, I chose to countersink the holes so that the head of the bolt does not protrude above the work surface. TIP: Generally, the vice goes on the side of the workbench which corresponds to your strongest hand, which would have been the right-hand side for me. The reason for this is that you would use this hand to tighten the vice; however, I prefer to use my strongest hand to position the work piece in the vice, which means the vice must be mounted on the left-hand side. Your needs may vary and you can always move the vice later on if required. 12 The bench vice in the photograph required four bolts in the positions shown. Mount it using a spanner and socket wrench and ensure the nuts and bolts are tightened well to withstand strenuous clamping. If the vice is new, you will need to mount small boards on each of the inside clamping faces of the vice. Use small bolts in the holes provided and ensure that these bolts are countersunk.

OPTIONAL: install a drawer 13 I also mounted a drawer underneath the work surface on the right-hand side of the workbench. This photograph is taken from underneath the work surface and shows the back of the drawer, as well as one of the wooden side brackets on which the drawer railings were mounted. 92

In the photograph above, note the two small boards mounted on each of the inside clamping faces.

14 I fitted a socket spanner set inside the drawer for handy access when using the workbench. Although the set is good quality, the case in which it is packed does not keep the different components in place when it is moved around. Now that the case is fixed in place and conveniently located, PM I can quickly access any component I need.

● Extracted from Woodworking for Everyone, by Peter Alkema. Published by Struik Lifestyle and available from all good booksellers. Visit www.woodwork ingbook.co.za PM


HOME

ODE TO . . .

The circular saw BY ROY BERENDSOHN

ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN INZANA

ood man. You don’t hear people say that much any more. On the rare occasions when they do, it’s as if they are deliberately being old-fashioned. It seems we can’t speak from the heart the way we once did. Which brings me to Louis Peterson, a man for whom that was a particularly apt description. An industrial engineer, Navy man and World War II veteran, he was also a self-taught carpenter, and a fine one at that. Pete, as he was called, built the house where he and his wife, Beatrice, raised their seven children, whom they had in orderly boy-girl-boy-girl fashion. No 6 grew up and married me. That’s how I met Pete.

JULY 2014

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At the centre of Pete’s projects was a gigantic 1950s Skil circular saw, the very embodiment of the American power tool. Introduced by the company in 1924, the saw is known as a worm-gear type. It makes use of a heavy, spiral steel “worm” on the end of its motor shaft, which spins a worm gear below it. The output from that gear drives the blade. The bulky arrangement does a remarkably good job of reducing motor speed and

increasing torque output. The design also puts the blade to the left of the saw body, improving the right-handed user’s visibility of the cut line. For Pete, the Skil was breakthrough technology. He had already built a house, sold it, and used the proceeds to build a larger one. He sawed every stick of timber in that first house by hand. But the second time around, the building department required that the end of every floor joist be cut at a sloping angle. Called a fire cut, this prevents burning and collapsing floor joists from pulling down outer brick walls. My father-in-law hung up his handsaw, tied on his canvas nail apron, picked up the Skil, and never looked back. Recalling that house, Pete said, “That was a lot of cuts”. If ever there was an understatement in the annals of owner-built housing, that was it.

Despite the revelation that the old Skil turned out to be, it was no picnic to use. Think about this: the fact that a slippery, uncomfortable, loud and heavy tool – it’s about 8 kilograms of motor and steel – was still a labour-saving device tells you how difficult it is to cut a house’s worth of timber with a handsaw. The worm-gear Skil saw that I own is essentially the same version as Pete’s. Not to outdo my late father-inlaw, but my Skil is somewhat smaller and has a higher power-to-weight ratio than his because it’s over 1,3 kg lighter. This also makes it less tiring to operate. With it, I’ve cut timber for construction projects and made forms for pouring concrete. I’ve even used it to build a boat. Skil still produces a Chinesemade version of its grand old saw, and a few years ago, the company celebrated the 75th anniversary of the tool. Ironically, the marketing campaign hinged on the catchphrase “The Saw That Built America”. As for Pete’s saw, my brotherin-law Dave now owns it. He reports that in the midst of a recent project, its trigger switch went kaput. Maybe 60 years on one power tool is enough. Maybe. On the other hand, I don’t think the saw is ready to retire. We’ll look around for a new switch and get back to you in another 40 years or so. Pete Peterson would PM approve.

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S AT U R D AY M E C H A N I C

Sharp tapping like a clunky washing machine, increasing with engine revs.

4

Worst-case scenario: Connecting-rod knock. Bad stuff that can happen: Broken rod blasts hole through the engine block; metal parts and flaming oil shoot out. Why: Usually a failure of a rod bearing due to oil starvation. What to do: Stop driving immediately. If caught early, the bearing can be replaced.

SIX CAR SOUNDS YOU SHOULDN’T IGNORE

BY MURILEE MARTIN

2

Questlove drumming underneath your rear-drive car when it’s moving, increasing with vehicle (not engine) speed.

Worst-case scenario: Failing universal joint or driveshaft bushing. Bad stuff that can happen: U-joint fails completely, driveshaft digs into pavement, and the car pole-vaults and crashes. Why: Both the U-joint and bushings simply wear out. The noise comes from the driveshaft flopping around like an ailing fish. What to do: Inspect the driveshaft for worn or broken parts, replace them, or get to a mechanic.

A diesel-like clattering in your petrol-powered car.

1

Worst-case scenario: Detonation, also known as pinging or knock. Bad stuff that can happen: Damage to spark plug electrode, pistons/piston rings, and/or knock sensor. Why: Things such as contaminated petrol or incorrect ignition timing cause the fuel to go boom too early. If left unchecked, you risk serious engine damage. What to do: Switch to higher-octane fuel, which resists detonation, and check the timing.

6

Worst-case scenario: Brake pad or shoe material completely gone. Bad stuff that can happen: Destroyed brake rotors or drums. Car may pull to one side under braking and possibly crash. Why: Brake pads should make a squeal when the pad has worn down to the danger zone. But sometimes we don’t notice this sound. What to do: Fix the brakes.

A whine like an empty ice machine when you turn the steering wheel, especially at low speed.

Worst-case scenario: Failing power-steering pump.

A million fingernails scraping on a chalkboard when you start up the engine or accelerate from a stop, often during winter.

3

Worst-case scenario: Loose accessory drive belt. Bad stuff that can happen: Your enraged neighbours will kill you. Why: The belt is slipping on the pulleys, either due to age and wear, or improper tension. What to do: Inspect the belt for minor cracks or fraying. Replace as needed.

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Grinding metal – think train going around a bend or braking to slow down as it pulls into a station.

5

Bad stuff that can happen: Loss of steering assistance. Why: Low power-steering fluid or a pump groaning to death. What to do: Check the fluid level, top off as needed, and get ready to buy a new pump. PM


ILLUSTRATIONS BY RUI RICARDO

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D O I T Y O U R W AY / U S E F U L , C L E V E R T I P S F O R Y O U R H O M E

WINNING TIP A BETTER MOUSETRAP? I’m not sure if this falls into the category of DIY hints, but it was an interesting project and could be of use to your readers. My wife and I live on the edge of a wetland and have some unusual creatures that find their way into our house. We are reluctant to kill them as we can return them to the wetland, and this is normally easy to do, but when the mice arrived, I decided to make a humane trap. The box is constructed from melamine offcuts nailed together, with a springloaded door and very basic electronics running off a 12-volt DC supply. The mouse smells the peanut butter and bread bait at the back of the trap and walks in. Near the back of the trap, he interrupts an infrared beam that energises a solenoid, releasing the spring-loaded door. Over one week, we caught nine mice in the trap. RODGER D’ALTON FISH HOEK

Make your mark The ability to drill holes is a common requirement of modern relationships. Marking the desired spot is easy when you can use a pen or pencil on a light-coloured wall, but darker surfaces require different treatment. My tip: use correction fluid to “paint” a dot through the hole of the item to be hung. DRIES CORNELIUS CENTURION

Vacuum design 101 Recently, the vacuum hose broke on my old wet and dry vacuum cleaner. After struggling to find a replacement hose, I decided to try something else. I cut out the old fitting and took it to my local hardware shop, which stocks a range of

good-quality pool cleaner hoses. I found that most types of pool cleaner hoses are just the right size, and bought a brand with a “twist and lock” system. Back home, I cut the female section off the new hose and glued it to the vacuum cleaner attachment. It fitted securely and I did not need the pipe fitting for extra support. Using a carpet knife, I carefully removed the broken piece of pipe from the socket that screws on to the vacuum cleaner drum; then screwed the pool hose into the socket. To be safe, I also glued the pipe to the socket. I then had a short hose that could be attached to the attachment holder, so I am now in a position to decide how long a hose I want to use. It works beautifully, and my vacuum cleaner is now working as it should have been in the first place. CHARLES CLASSEN RANDBURG

SEND US YOUR HINT

WIN

– AND SCORE! Send us your best home, garage, workshop and general DIY hints – and win! This month’s best tip wins a Makita compact router/trimmer kit worth R3 569. Powered by a 710 W motor that delivers 10 000 to 30 000 r/min, this an awesome tool to add to your woodworking arsenal. Light and compact, it features variable speed control, three bases, and accessories that allow you to match the tool to your application. For further information on Makita power tools, visit www.makita.co.za Send your tips to: PM Do It Your Way, Box 180, Howard Place 7450, or e-mail popularmechanics @ramsaymedia.co.za Please include your name, address and contact number. Regrettably, only South African residents are eligible for the prize. Prizes not claimed within 60 days will be forfeited.

Unused phone chargers? Most of us have those unused mobile phone chargers lying about the house, and they should be put to work. Rather than toss them, recycle the chargers and save on the cost of batteries by using them to power mini-whisks and other small kitchen appliances. HERMAN COETZEE PORT ELIZABETH

RESERVATION OF COPYRIGHT The publishers of POPULAR MECHANICS reserve all rights of reproduction or broadcasting of feature articles and factual data appearing in this journal under Section 12 (7) of the Copyright Act, 1978. Such reproduction or broadcasting may be authorised only by the publishers of POPULAR MECHANICS. Published by RamsayMedia Pty Ltd for the Proprietors, POPULAR MECHANICS (SA) Pty Ltd, Uitvlugt, Howard Drive, Pinelands, Western Cape. Distributed by RNA, 12 Nobel St, Industria West, Johannesburg, and printed by CTP Gravure, 19-21 Joyner Road, Prospecton, Durban. Apple Mac support: Digicape tel 021 674-5000.

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