Innehållsförteckning för October 2019 från Popular Mechanics

We believe in the beauty of handcraftsmanship. Taking your time. Doing things right. It's why we partnered with Knob Creek®leader of hard-earned, small batch whiskey-on this three-part build a bar project. Because just like how Knob Creek® takes no shortcuts when creating their signature full flavor bourbon, you should take no shortcuts when finishing and furnishing your bar. In the third and final installment of this series, we'll show you how to customize your bar with pyrography (a decorative wood burning technique), wireless LED lights, and all the finest tools for entertaining at home. So at the end of the day, you can pour yourself (and your friends) a well-earned drink and enjoy. Cheers! CUSTOMIZE YOUR BAR Wood buring (pyrography) is a unique way to add rustic personalization to your…

PRODUCED: CHINA TIME TO DISASSEMBLE: 2 HOURS, 45 MINUTES NOTES:E-bikes are booming: The U.S. imported at least 215,000 electric bicyles in 2017, up from 64,000 in 2012, according to industry experts Ed Benjamin and Frank E. Jamerson, PhD. But brand-new rides are expensive. Instead, you can buy a conversion kit, and electrify any pushbike for around $1,000. We’d start with the G310: The motor employs decades of hub motor development to pack up to 500 watts of power into a lightweight and silent package—a first for geared hub motors. “As soon as you experience a motor that’s totally silent under assist, you never want to go back to one that makes a buzzing sound,” says Justin Lemire-Elmore, founder and owner of Grin Technologies, a Vancouver-based engineering company that specializes in…

1 FOR LEAKS For low-pressure water leaks, like a hole in your rain gutter, first scrub the area around the hole with a piece of steel wool to clean away any debris. When thoroughly dry, stick a wad of already-chewed gum on the inside of the hole so the pressure of the liquid will push it against the hole instead of away from it. Adhesives in general, gum included, tend to improve over time—the longer they stay there, the more permanent the bond. 2 FOR A HOLE IN YOUR TIRE If you put already-chewed gum on the inside of the hole—provided it’s a fairly small hole — the gum will probably be quite effective, maybe even permanent. The gum sticks because as you chew it, you’re warming up and softening…

T’S 1987 IN SOVIET MOSCOW. On this snowy November evening, Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow State University, exits his train off of Red Square. He cuts behind the looming Intourist Hotel, climbs to the third floor of his university’s psychology department, and meets the club of high school students he’s tutoring. Tonight he’s brought something unusual for his pupils. To get the club members talking and thinking, Davidoff is going to make them play a game—one where two students are set apart and given secret information. “Back then I wasn’t trying to create a game per se,” says Davidoff. Instead, he was just running a fun experiment to test and explore the psychology of his pupils’ minds. But as the game threw the club into riotous conversation, and—after…

BACK IN DECEMBER 2017, reports surfaced that Quent in Tarant ino had pitched a Star Trek movie. The very proposition of unleashing the mind behind Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction on the Star Trek universe tickled a part of my Trekkie brain that I didn’t know existed. But there was a second part to the rumor, something that anyone who knows Tarantino’s work could have expected: the film would be R-rated. But does the series really need that? Star Trek always possessed an optimism that made it an outlier in the world of science fiction. Star Wars has “war” in the name, a conflict still ongoing 40 years later. Alien shows space as a place filled with inaudible screams. Even in Wall-E, humans live in a dystopia. But the Star…

AUTUMN IS THE TIME TO prepare your home for the cold weather. It’s an easy way to save money and aggravation. While the weather is still relatively warm and the ground is not yet covered with snow, take advantage of this time to complete some around-the-house projects. These six tasks don’t require a lot of time or money, and you can complete them all in a morning or less. 1 DON’T JUST CLEAN THE GUTTERS—UPGRADE THEM/ Most homeowners know they need to clean leaves and other debris out of their gutters in the fall. This ensures that water flows correctly to the downspouts and doesn’t spill over, freeze, and turn your front steps and sidewalk into an ice rink. Overflowing gutters can also result in water running back toward the…

3M Foam Earplug 3M’s earplug couldn’t be simpler. Gently roll and compress the plug and insert it in your ear. When it expands, it produces a noise-reducing seal. $12 for a 50-piece jar Elvex Quattro For the price, the Elvex Quattro is about as comfortable, durable and compact as hearing protection gets. These also clean easily in warm, soapy water. $6 Stihl Dynamic BT Headphone Protect your hearing and listen to your favorite music. Stihl’s Dynamic BT connects to your phone via Bluetooth while reducing power-equipment sound by 25 decibels. $120 Pyramex Fortress A small vent at the top of each lens reduces fogging, because you can’t clear leaves if you can’t see them. $7…

FOR THE MOST PART, THE FILM IS THREE and a half minutes of grainy horseback riders and jerky pans, but it’s been scrutinized for decades amid every major Bigfoot debate. Because two and a half minutes in, the lens of the 16mm Cine-Kodak catches something strange. “We were just riding alongside the creek enjoying the warm sunshine day,” says Bob Gimlin, who shot the film. “Then, across the creek, there was one standing. Everything happened so fast.” Gimlin’s camera sees a large ape-like figure lumbering on its hind legs across a clearing. For a brief moment, the animal appears to look at the camera, and then it’s gone. This is the famed Patterson-Gimlin film, reportedly shot in October 1967 in the forests of Northern California. It is one of the…

Quintessential Pieces That Will Stand Up to (Almost) Anything I WAS CONCERNED THAT my first hunting trip would be my last. I used to be vegan. But tofu isn’t local to Tennessee. Hoping to source more protein locally, three Decembers ago my husband and I headed into the woods to try to stock our freezer. In preparation, Chris splurged on Filson’s $350 Double Hunting Bibs. I gawked at the receipt, squawking: How could you spend so much money on a hobby we may not even like? The joke was on me. We brought down a doe with a clean shot. Hauling her a mile home through thick brush, my hiking pants snagged on every burr and branch. Chris slid through like he’d sprayed his pants with PAM. Halfway home, frustrated…

DARREN ORF Deputy Editor Would rather go on a dungeon crawl than a bar crawl. The Best Thing POP Ever Taught Me All things planes. Coming to work at Popular Mechanics I’ve learned the finer differences between the AC-130U Spooky and the AC-130J Ghostrider, and I’m all the better for it. Favori te app and why Marvel Unlimited—I’ve purchased A LOT of comics in my lifetime. For $70 a year, I get access to Marvel’s whole library (at a six-month delay). That saves me tons of money—and tons of space. PETS I have a cat named Laser (who we call Li). She doesn’t really know how to meow… she kind of just coos loudly. She’s a strange one. The Best Money I Ever Spent Every time I buy flowers for…

WALK INTO A brewery taproom today and it’s no surprise the menu is littered with IPAs. The hop bombs keep the lights on. But look to the corner of the beer list and you’ll likely see a humble lager. Order it. It’s the most carefully brewed beer on tap. While loud and bold IPAs are brewed for the consumer, subtle and highly drinkable lagers are brewed for the brewer. All beers in this great sudsy world trickle down from two streams: ales and lagers. Craft breweries mostly mess around with ales. Meanwhile, lagers—by far the favored type of beer in the non-craft world—are mainly turned out by megabrewers. The defining difference between these two families of beer is yeast. Ale yeast ferments faster, at warmer temperatures, and adds more flavor.…

COUP In a cyberpunk dystopia, only the most cutthroat survive as players lie their way to victory. If the lie isn’t convincing enough, another player can catch you in the act. SECRET HITLER This game plays like Avalon, but with a lot more fascists to go around. Your gang of liberals team up to squash the Third Reich in its infancy. AVALON Join Merlin and a group of knights to complete epic quests in medieval Europe. But be wary, minions of Mordred are lurking in the shadows to thwart your victory. SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM Become sheriff as players try to sneak in contraband. Call out suspected criminals, without accusing the innocent. DECEPTION: MUR-DER IN HONG KONG Someone is a murderer. Work with the Forensic Scientist and other investigators to discover…

1 / BioLite Headlamp 330 / $50 Comfortable headband and rechargeable battery. Can alternate between red and white light to help you spot anything out there in the dark. 2 / F8HP Two-Way Radio / $63 Twenty hours of battery life to stay in touch with your hunting party and a built-in flashlight in case things become, uh, hairy. 3 / DR-05X Audio Recorder / $100 Omnidirectional pickup and an auto-record function that flips on for sounds above a preset level. 4 / Milwaukee 25 ft. Compact Auto-Lock Tape Measure / $10 Find prints? The auto-lock feature makes it easy to measure from any angle. Twenty-five feet should be long enough…right? 5 / FLIR C2 Thermal Camera / $400 The preferred thermal cam of Bigfoot hunters, the FLIR boasts a…

Like most e-bikes, the Creo uses a brushless motor mounted around the cranks. Instead of using a throttle or trigger, like you would to control the motor of a cordless drill or battery-powered chainsaw, it has torque and rpm sensors to determine power output. The sensors measure how hard you’re pedaling and relay that to the motor, which delivers extra watts (in the Creo’s case, up to 240 of them) based on your effort. The Creo has three standard power settings. In the lowest, it matches your power up to 30 percent of its maximum output; in the middle mode, that figure increases to 60 percent; and in the highest setting, it matches up to 240 watts. You can even customize the settings through an app. Almost all motors operate…

ONCE EVERY FEW MONTHS, I take my iPhone and go to Settings-> General-> Reset-> Erase All Content and Settings. I skip the offer to use a backup, or transfer data, and build from the factory settings. My friends think I’m masochistic. But hear me out. Clearing out old apps or files, even if it’s just to re-download them, will help almost any device. But deleting is tedious. The trick is to do it all at once, with a clean wipe. Your vital stuff will still be there. Modern cloud systems, as long as you have your password, will keep the stuff most of us really care about—your SIM card is your phone number, and as long as you have iCloud or Google Photos, copies of your photos and videos are…

THE STEAM-DRIVEN locomotive might seem like a relic of bygone days. But tell that to the people who cheered as Union Pacific’s Big Boy 4014—the largest operational steam locomotive ever—pulled into Ogden, Utah. Its arrival last spring marked the 150-year anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Big Boy’s roaring up the ceremonial rails seemed improbable, considering that all eight existing units of the Big Boy–class steam engines had been decommissioned long ago. The 4014, built in 1941, went to bed in 1961, and spent the next 52 years resting at RailGiants Train Museum in Pomona, California. At 132 feet long, the Big Boys’ frames had to be hinged so they could navigate curves. They weighed 1.2 million pounds, meaning any long-term forward motion necessitated that their 56,000-pound…

CHEWING GUM IS A GRAND human tradit ion, as archaeologists have discovered. A study from the journal Communications Biology shows that the first people to settle in Scandinavia over 10,000 years ago left traces of themselves behind in ancient gum—the oldest Scandinavian DNA on record. They didn’t have Wrigley’s, but ancient Scandinavian and Nordic cultures were big fans of chewing on tree bark. In 2007, a boy in Finland found gum made from birch bark that was 5,000 years old. But at 10,000 years old, this gum—found by scientists in Sweden this May—also birch-based, offers scientists a chance to study ancient hunter-gatherer societies. DNA from these ancient chewing gums has an enormous potential not only for tracing the origin and movement of peoples a long time ago, but also for…

CONTROL THE TEMP Unless you have access to a 50-degree Fahrenheit cave, clean out an old fridge or chest freezer and plug it into a digital temperature control unit (starts at $40). A probe from the controller will tell the unit when the temperature is too high, and turn on the compressor to cool your fermenter. PITCH DOUBLE, PITCH COLD Because of the cold, relatively sluggish fermentation, double the amount of yeast you’d normally pitch for a similar ale, to compensate for the cold. Also, hold off on pitching all that yeast until the wort has cooled to its fermentation temp to avoid unwelcome flavors from too-hot fermentation. TAKE A DIACETYL REST Lager yeast often needs an assist in scrubbing the dia-cetyl (butter aroma) from new beer. Near the end…

TIP 1: IGNORE THE EYES, BUT MIND THE EYELIDS If someone won’t hold your gaze, they’re hiding something, right? Guess again. According to Meyer, a good liar can easily maintain eye contact, while the average conversing pair only lock eyes about 30 to 60 percent of the time. But during a lie, blink rate either slows down or increases—which can be a highly illustrative tell. TIP 2: LOOK FOR RESPONSE INERTIA “That’s when a player has to think an extra millisecond before responding to what an honest player would answer immediately. It’s one of the great tells of the game,” says Davidoff. According to Meyer, great liars are often able to hide this response lag with conversational gimmicks that buy them precious seconds to get their story in order. So…

Our test focused on two important metrics: how quickly the stoves boiled water, and how well we could use them to sauté mushrooms. One requires intense power. The other requires consistent, low-temperature control. For the boil test, we used water directly from a single campsite’s potable water pump, just as you would on your own adventure. We used a half liter for all our backpacking stoves, and a liter for our car-camping stoves. We considered the test completed when water hit a rolling boil. For integrated systems, we used the included pot. For stand-alone stoves, we used an MSR Trail Mini Duo cook set 1.2-liter pot with lid. For sautéing, we put half a cup of fresh, sliced white mushrooms and a spoonful of butter into a Primus Campfire frying…

LET ME EXPLAIN 1) My middle name is Luna, so I might be biased. (2) Unpopular opinion: I’ve never really watched a lot of Star Wars. But I do really like WALL-E. (3) Preferably, I’d like mine converted into a pickup truck. (4) I gotta have an eraser. I make a lot of mistakes. (5) I have so many reusable mugs that I’m cursed to drink coffee for the next 250 years to use them all. (6) Who the heck likes wires? I’m worried that the 15-pound cord ball under my desk is about to become sentient. (7) I was raised metric and have been dragged kicking and screaming into imperial. (8) But I keep a Leatherman multitool in my back pocket. (9) Glue only when you’re ready to commit.…