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 C O N T E N T S

18
100 Ask Roy

Designated
Self-Drivers

26

Motorcycle Headsets

80

Survival Gear

84

Build a
One-of-a-
Kind Guitar
92

Tool Test:
Locking Pliers 50

Life on
a Wind
Farm

30

My Mitsubishi,
My Home

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Hollywood Special Effects

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Vintage Keyboards
24
Road Tested:
Honda, GMC,
Range Rover

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
 THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE ORIGINAL
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 M E ON I N S TA G R A M

What Helps You Survive

IN 2012, MY WIFE AND I MOVED our young family out of the big city to a small, old farm-
house that had a barn, a stream, and lots of character. Three weeks later, Superstorm
Sandy blew down trees, flooded the stream, and knocked out our power for 11 days. rhdagostino On New Year’s Eve,
Welcome to life in the country. throwing back to an amazing day
with the NYPD Air Sea Rescue
In the city, we had lived in an eighth-floor apartment where uniformed crews fixed, team. Thanks to them and the entire
cleaned, and maintained everything for us. Now we had a well for water and an aging force, including the world-class
Counterterrorism Bureau, always
boiler in the basement. (“Character.”) In the aftermath of Sandy, we slept on the living- and especially tonight. @nypd
room floor by the fireplace. We had just moved, knew no one, still got lost on the way to #counterterrorism #nypd #police
#newyearseve #helicopter #thanks
the gas station. We felt alone.
And then:
Our new neighbors, Susan and Richard, brought over a Coleman camp stove, on which
we heated soup and water for coffee. Some friends of theirs invited our two boys over for
trick-or-treating. (The storm struck just before Halloween, which was largely canceled
that year.) The town supervisor, Warren, whose parents lived across the street from us,
stopped by to tell us there was food, warmth,
and Wi-Fi at the local ambulance corps, to
One of the most which he also gave us directions.
Small kindnesses, which are no small
essential tools for thing at all, got us through that. Of course,
survival has our little plight was nothing compared
with those so many people faced last year rhdagostino My dad’s basement
nothing to do with in what seemed like an unusually cruel slew workroom, Christmas 2017, same
as ever. #diy #workshop #tools
waterproof of natural disasters. Hurricanes, fires, and #likefatherlikeson #projects

flashlights or hand- earthquakes tore up Houston, Southern Cal-

ifornia, Puerto Rico, Florida, the U.S. Virgin
crank radios. Islands, Mexico City, Iran, and other places.
We had to wait 11 days before we could cook
on a stove or watch TV, but as I write this, an
unconscionable four months have passed since Hurricane Maria killed electricity for
something like three million people in Puerto Rico, and it’s still out.
As part of our regular coverage of how to survive in the physical world, we sent Pop-
ular Mechanics field editor James Lynch to St. Thomas, a United States territory that
was ripped apart by Hurricane Irma. We wanted to explore one of the most essential
tools for survival, one that has nothing to do with waterproof flashlights or hand-crank
radios: help from others.
rhdagostino Found this after like
You can buy batteries, food, and the kinds of essential gear and supplies we found, a year. Thank god. Never will it leave
tested, and feature starting on page 80. But there are some things only other people can my belt loop again. @leathermantools
#diy #tools #leatherman
do for you, and there are some people in this world who jump to do those things. In send-
ing Lynch to a ravaged island, we wanted to explore that instinct. We wanted to talk to
people who, after the hurricane, didn’t ask what they could do but instead bought plane
tickets and showed up. The convergence of strangers on chaos can yield moments that
are messy and awkward. But then, once the T-shirts are handed out and the bunks are
assigned and the shovels distributed, real work gets done. Cleanup happens. Rebuilding
starts. People don’t feel so alone. Survival is a process that doesn’t end when the rains
stop or the fires die out. For many, that’s when it begins.

rhdagostino Father-son dinner.

RYAN D’AGOSTINO #supper #burgers #broccoli
Editor in Chief #tvdinner #castironskillet
@rhdagostino

4 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 Discover what lies beyond.

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"|Ѵbv_7-m1;7"or_bvঞ1-|;7$_;m; oѴ7)bm]® is rebuilt from the road up, nearly
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powersports.honda.com ALWAYS WEAR A HELMET, EYE PROTECTION AND PROTECTIVE CLOTHING. NEVER RIDE AFTER CONSUMING DRUGS OR ALCOHOL, AND NEVER USE THE STREET AS A RACETRACK. OBEY THE LAW AND READ
THE OWNER’S MANUAL THOROUGHLY. For rider training information or to locate a rider training course near you, call the Motorcycle Safety Foundation at 800-446-9227. *For using Apple CarPlay, connection to a commercially available
Bluetooth® headset is necessary. Apple CarPlay™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. Bluetooth® is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG, Inc. Gold Wing® is a registered trademark of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. ©2018 American Honda Motor Co., Inc.
 WHAT WE’RE UP
TO BEYOND THESE ONLINE
PAGES
On POPUL ARMECHANICS.COM we’re
celebrating Monster Machines Week,
where we take a look into how the big-
gest machines in the world are built,
maintained, and operated. Head to
popularmechanics.com/monster-
machines to find this exclusive content:
• How the crawler-transporters, a pair
of massive vehicles used to move NASA
space shuttles, are being updated to carry
NASA’s forthcoming Space Launch Sys-
tem, the world’s most powerful rocket.
• Up-close video of the Bagger 288
bucket-wheel excavator, the 27-million-
pound mining machine that’s one of the
largest land vehicles in the world.
• How giant space telescopes such as the
Giant Magellan Telescope (above) and
the Extremely Large Telescope are
constructed and used.

SNA PCH AT

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6 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

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 W E’VE SEEN W H AT North Korea can do, and
even though it hasn’t been in the news lately, the
experts we consulted say that terrorists are still
trying to get dirty bombs into the country. The
threat of a nuclear attack on the United States is higher than
it’s been since Berlin had a wall down its center and Weird Al
had a movie career. But what would that attack entail? What
NOT THAT IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN, kind of damage would a nuclear bomb cause, and what, if any-
BUT BECAUSE IT COULD. thing, could we do to get ready for it?

1
2

1 The fireball 2 The blast sends 3 If the bomb 4 The initial 5 With a 10-
created by a a shock wave is detonated shock wave kiloton bomb,
nuclear bomb that would in the air, as lessens after everyone
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY S I N E L A B

can reach tens destroy nearly opposed to on the first ring, within this
of millions of everyone and the ground, but will still ring would
degrees. everything 50% to 90% of demolish receive third-
within this first people in this most residen- degree burns
ring. area will die tial buildings from thermal
from radiation and cause radiation.
exposure with- widespread
out medical casualties.
treatment.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 9

VOCABULARY
THERMO - AIRBURST: A nuclear weapon
NUCLEAR detonated in the air to maximize
WEAPON: destructive capabilities. Since the
See “hydrogen blast comes from above, it is less
bomb.” contained by buildings around it.
1 2
Who
Would
Do It
TERRORISTS
According to Jeff
Schlegelmilch,
deputy director of
the National Center for
Disaster Preparedness at
Columbia University, the
most likely nuclear weapon
will be trucked in and
exploded on the ground. He
estimates its yield at 10 to
15 kilotons—the same as
Hiroshima. “This type of
threat is very survivable,” he
says. “It would be bad, but
the republic would survive.”
NORTH KOREA
For a long time,
North Korea’s
nuclear threat
was capped in the 10- to
15-kiloton range. But earlier
this year, says Michael
Elleman, senior fellow for
missile defense at the
International Institute for
Strategic Studies and an
analyst for 38 North, a
North Korea–tracking site,
“North Korea detonated a
thermonuclear weapon with
a yield ranging between 150
kilotons and 250 kilotons.
The tested weapon very
likely could be fit on the
HS-15,” the ICBM the
country tested in November,
“which could reach most, if
not all, of the U.S.
mainland.”
10 MARCH _ 2018
FALLOUT: When a nuclear explosion occurs
at ground level, the blast blows bits of dirt
and debris into the air, where they become
radioactive and are carried by the winds
before falling back down to earth.
What
Would
Happen
FIREBALL
Whether the nuke is det-
onated in the air or on the
ground, the initial threat is
the fireball, which can reach
tens of millions of degrees.
“If you’re within that, you’re
dead,” Schlegelmilch says.
According to an online sim-
ulation created by Alex
Wellerstein at the Stevens
Institute of Technology (it’s
interactive, scary, and fun;
go to nuclearsecrecy.com/
nukemap/), a 10-kiloton
bomb would produce a fire-
ball with a radius of 500 to
650 feet.
S H O C K WAV E
After the fireball comes
the shock wave, or air blast.
If detonated in the air, that
same 10-kiloton bomb
would destroy most build-
ings and kill nearly everyone
within 0.38 miles of ground
zero. The effect is reduced by
23 percent if the detonation
occurs on the ground. The
shock wave weakens from
there, but can still take out
residential buildings and
cause mass casualties two
to two and a half times the
initial spread of the shock
wave, according to Weller-
stein’s projections.
R A D I AT I O N
If you survive the fire-
YIELD: The ATOMIC BOMB: A bomb powered
destruc- by nuclear fission, the splitting of
tive power atoms. Most atomic bombs are rated
of a nuclear in kilotons—each of which is the
weapon. equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.
A nuclear explosion that
occurs on the ground
creates a smaller shock
wave than an airburst,
but also sends a mush-
room cloud of radioactive 6
material into the air,
where it is carried for
miles by the wind.
5
4
3
1
1 Fireball
2 Initial
shock wave
3 Weakened
shock wave
4 Radiation
radius
5 Thermal
radiation
radius
6 Fallout
direction
ball and shock wave, now FA LLO UT
you have to avoid the radia- If the attack comes from
tion. Exposure within three the ground, dirt and debris
quarters of a mile of that are irradiated and shot into
10-kiloton bomb, Weller- the air by the explosion,
stein shows, will kill up to forming the classic mush-
90 percent of people with- room cloud. Winds can
out medical treatment. For carry the radiation, called
a quarter-mile past that, nuclear fallout, from that
your chances of survival cloud tens or hundreds of
increase, but you’ll get third- miles away, depending on
degree burns, which you the size of the bomb and the
probably won’t feel, because strength of the wind. As it
the radiation also kills your falls back to earth, it sickens
pain receptors. more people.
TIP!
BUY YOUR HOME UPWIND OF
THE PREVAILING WINDS.
You probably shouldn’t choose real estate based on the
chances of a nuclear attack, but if it comes down to two
places and you can’t decide? Go with the one in the area that’s
less likely to have nuclear fallout carried to it by prevailing
winds. In the New York City area, that’s New Jersey. You can
find a map of the prevailing winds in your area at hint.fm.
They’re strangely beautiful.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
GROUND BURST: A nuclear
weapon detonated on the
ground. It causes less wide-
spread destruction than an
airburst, but releases fallout.
ICBM: A missile that can travel thousands
of miles by exiting Earth’s atmosphere, hit-
ting suborbital space, and reentering the
atmosphere. Most commonly used in the
delivery of nuclear weapons.
HYDROGEN BOMB: Also called a thermonuclear weapon, this PREVAILING
type of bomb is much more powerful than an atomic bomb. It’s WINDS: Air currents
actually set off by an atomic bomb, and gets its power from the over a particular area
resulting nuclear fusion, the combining of atoms. Most hydrogen that typically flow in
bombs are rated in megatons, the equivalent of 1,000 kilotons. the same direction.

3
“The good news is, if you make it through the blast and shock wave, you are
now in a survivable situation,” Schlegelmilch says. If you’re close to the blast
you need to get to a shelter. “At best, you have 15 to 20 minutes before the fall-
out starts to come back down,” he says. “If you’re farther out, you could have
more time, but the reality is, you aren’t going to have time to evaluate the sit-
uation. If you see a nuclear flash, the first thing to do is get behind a barrier TIP!
in case the shock wave comes. Then get to the inner part of a building. Ideally THICKNESS OF
you’d be protected by thick concrete, underground if possible. Glass and most MATERIALS
NEEDED TO
What metals won’t provide you much protection.” (See right.) If the explosion was
ground based, you can also protect yourself by getting above the blast—usu- PROTECT
You ally higher than the ninth floor of a building. Be sure to stay near the center of YOURSELF
FROM
the building in a room with substantial walls. (See below.)
Should If you somehow get stuck outside and think fallout is falling around you,
99 PERCENT
OF RADIATION
Do cover your nose and mouth with a rag and close your eyes. Get to shelter
immediately, where you should remove your outer layer of clothing, includ- Steel: 5 inches
ing that rag you just held over your face, and double seal it in plastic bags. Brick: 16 inches
Take a shower as soon as possible.
The danger of fallout is relatively short-lived. The Department of Home- Packed
earth: 2 feet
land Security says that radioactivity is reduced by 90 percent after seven
hours. Two days later, only 1 percent of the original radiation remains. Still, Water: 3 feet
maybe stay in that shelter for one more day. Just to be safe.

Protection This graphic, based on information from by the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, shows
Factor how protected you’d be from radiation in different
Excellent parts of different types of buildings. 9 250
> 500
Very Good 8 1400
100–500
Good
40–99
Adequate
10–39 7 750
Marginal
4–9 8 21
Poor
1–3 36 28
4
26
5 7 29 3 125

30 50 475 1000
1800

S I N G LE 3 -STO RY 3 -STO RY 12-STO RY

FAM I LY H O M E APARTM E NT O FFI CE/SCH OO L APARTMENT

How Radiation Causes Cancer

TIP!
WEAR Roughly 15 percent of the make up the cells in your body. it hits the wrong places in your
WHITE energy released in the initial That radiation randomly dam- genome, the genes that control
Brighter colors blast and fallout of an atomic ages the DNA in your cells—as if cell growth can start to function
reflect more bomb is high-frequency ionizing you’ve been shot with millions of abnormally. Certain cells divide
radiation. Not so radiation. Unlike other forms of tiny pins. (UV rays are border- out of control, causing tumors,
much more that radiation, such as visible light line ionizing, which is why you leukemias, or other cancers. The
it’ll really mat- and microwaves, ionizing radia- can get skin cancer from tan- risk is particularly high for chil-
ter, but it might tion is fast and energetic enough ning.) If ionizing radiation strips dren, whose cells have divided
make you feel a
little better.
to strip electrons from mole- enough electrons from your less often and are more likely to
cules, including the ones that DNA, or if you’re unlucky and run amok if damaged.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 11

 MODEL
Thor Trucks
ET-One
PROJECTED RANGE
300 miles
EXPECTED
DELIVERY
2019
THE GOODS
CEO and founder
Dakota Semler
previously oper-
ated his own fleet
of heavy-duty
vehicles that did
freight hauling,
giving him an
insider’s perspec-
tive on design
and operational
concerns.

The Trucks

MODEL
Nikola Two
PROJECTED RANGE
800 to 1,200
miles

and
stop to recharge.
the

Truck
Since the Tesla Semi truck was
unveiled in November, every week
has brought a new announcement
of investors: PepsiCo preordered 100. Sysco
ordered 50. Anheuser-Busch ordered 40.
WHY ARE FOOD AND BEVERAGE Canadian grocery chain Loblaw’s ordered
25. It’s a remarkable display of confidence
COMPANIES SO INTERESTED IN in electric trucking by a single industry—
ELECTRIC SEMIS? not to mention a huge investment. The
reasons behind this surprising confluence
BY L ARA SOROK AN ICH
turn out to be not surprising at all.
Who’s preordering Tesla trucks?
PepsiCo Sysco Anheuser-Busch Loblaw’s Supermarket Walmart Meijer Supercenter
10 0 50 40 25 15 4

Industry-Specific DRIVER
SATISFACTION
One of the biggest
areas of headache
for trucking companies
is retaining drivers, and
these trucks have a very
innovative design. It is a
more comfortable experi- TRAVEL DISTANCE
ence for the driver: They’re When you look at bev-
surrounded by windows erage companies and
RESTRICTIONS and there are other features EMISSIONS grocery chains, a lot of what
With diesel trucks, that we think can help Our PepsiCo vehicle they’re moving is going to
there are all sorts of make a very tough job a bet- fleet is currently com- be on a short-haul basis, like
restrictions on idling rules, ter job. So we view that as a prised of several different trucking product from a bev-
and those engines actually potential source of return, fuel-efficient models, includ- erage distribution plant to
have to be on to power sup- less turnover in the drivers ing electric-vehicle box regional distributors. From
porting systems like lift that drive our products to trucks, compressed-natural- an electronic standpoint
gates and refrigeration. market.” gas tractors, and advanced that’s a fantastic setup. You
Electric vehicles are great —JAM E S S E M B ROT diesel technology from some don’t have to deal with die-
because you don’t have to Senior director of of the leading manufactur- sel fuel, and you’d be able to
have an engine idling for an strategy and logistics, ers around the world. The have that dedicated infra-
hour or two hours while you Anheuser-Busch Tesla Semi truck represents structure set up for charging
unload the vehicle. You can one part of our broader strat- stations along the way while
draw directly from the bat- egy, offering us a unique you go back and forth.”
tery pack of the vehicle.” opportunity for us to explore —J O N SAM SO N
— DAKOTA S E M LE R electrification across our Executive director,
Founder and CEO, Thor Trucks Class Seven and Eight fleet.” Agricultural and Food
— B ROO KE VAN E Transporters Conference,
COMMUNITY IMPACT Company representative, American Trucking
Food and beverage PepsiCo Associations
companies are a really
unique space; often they
have a hub model where
their inbound product will
come into the distribution
center through one fleet, Case Study
and then their delivery fleet
will deliver it to regional Anheuser-Busch preordered 40 Tesla electric Semis for use in short-
stores, like a grocery store. distance deliveries from the brewery to wholesalers and has partnered
A lot of these delivery fleets with Nikola to develop hydrogen-powered long-haul technology.
support businesses in res-
idential neighborhoods,
which creates conflict for Anheuser- Each year, The 40 Tesla On any given According to
residents who don’t want Busch spends trucks trans- tractors will be day, if you Tesla’s estimates,
about $120 porting part of a 750- took each of Anheuser-
loud, dirty diesel trucks
million on Anheuser-Busch truck fleet Anheuser- Busch could
driving through their neigh- fuel each year, product travel that transports Busch’s tractor expect to save
borhood. With electric, you which includes enough miles beer from trailers en $8 million on
can have a fleet that oper- fuel for its ded- to circle the Anheuser- route to cus- fuel by using
ates without anyone ever icated fleets Earth 18,000 Busch’s tomers and the 40 Tesla
hearing them. They create and long-haul times. breweries lined them up electric Semis.
less road noise than a con- transportation directly to one directly
by private car- wholesalers. in front of the
ventional gas passenger car. riers that move other, the
That’s really impactful for beer between line would
quality of life.” breweries and stretch 50
— DAKOTA SEMLER wholesalers. miles.
WHY WE HAVE FLOODING WITHOUT RAIN
Sunny-day floods—surges caused by high tides, not heavy rains—are ten
times more frequent today than 50 years ago. William Sweet, an oceanog-
rapher at NOAA, explains what they are, and why they’re getting worse.
Popular sea level is also rising. mass, its gravitational
Mechanics: Where PM: But sea-level rise attraction is less. This
are sunny-day floods is the main factor. redistribution means
happening? WS: Yes, it increases the U.S. feels an addi-
William Sweet: It’s the reach of high tides. tional rise.
more low-lying East Melt from ice sheets PM: How are cities
Coast and Gulf Coast and glaciers—plus preparing?
cities like Houston, thermal expansion— WS: They’re investing
Atlantic City, Miami. put the current global in pumps and inflow-
It’ll be sunny out, but sea-level rise at one preventer storm
suddenly streets are inch every eight years. drains. It’s analogous
under water. It doesn’t But gravity is also to snow in the North-
help that the land is working against us: east: Cities just have
sinking there, while As Antarctica loses to budget for it.

PROTECT The next Equifax-type breach is unavoidable, but installing a

virtual private network (VPN) on your computer can thwart any
YOUR DATA Latvian teens trying to assume your identity and order a run of Air
WITH A VPN Jordans. They can get login information from whichever institu-
tion gets caught with its digital pants down next, but a VPN will
shield the additional data needed to confirm and exploit your identity. Think of the data
your computer sends and receives (emails, bank login, FaceTime) as a letter. Whenever
you’re using public Wi-Fi, you’re sending out that letter without an envelope. People can
read it. Using a VPN, your data goes straight to your VPN provider, which encrypts your
data to outsiders before sending it on. It’s like putting that letter in an envelope, then a
locked briefcase. The good news is that new VPNs are crazy simple to use—open an app,
click “Connect.” The downsides: They can slow your connection, cause errors in apps like
Netflix that need location data, and the only VPNs worth using cost money. We like
Private Internet Access ($40 for 12 months) and PureVPN ($59 for 24 months).

FORD’S
Ford Motor Company introduced assembly exo-
skeletons to its Michigan Assembly Plant outside
EXOSKELETON Detroit last summer, giving workers in the pilot

FOR AUTO program a strength boost for overhead assembly.

The electronics-free, spring-powered EksoVest is
WORKERS worn like a hiking pack—over the shoulder, across
the chest, around the waist—with additional
attachments around the biceps. Autoworkers then set the power and assisted
range of motion. The trial isn’t the first step toward a hyperproductive UAW
cyborg, but a matter of reducing fatigue and injury, says Marty Smets, a
Ford technical expert who managed the program. Ford partnered with Ekso
Bionics, maker of the Ekso GT exoskeleton for stroke and spinal rehabilita-
tion, on a smaller and lighter device that didn’t slow workers. Paul “Woody”
Collins, an assembly worker Ford made available, spends four hours of his
ten-hour shift installing canisters on the bottom of Ford Focuses, and was one
of four workers in the pilot program. “It engages once I lift my arm above my
stomach,” he says. “I still have to control the canister, but I can relax my mus-
cles.” Collins adds that he doesn’t feel as tired at the end of the week. Ford is
still reviewing the program before making the EksoVest widely available.

14 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

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 HOW TO PROTECT Literally.
OUR DEMOCRACY B Y J A M E S LY N C H

frames seal
glass

document

base
pockets
base platform
ball and
socket
diagnostic
windows
optics

T H E F R A M E S A R O U N D the cases that protect might be easier to simply lock the documents away,
the original versions of the Constitution, the Bill says Janice Stagnitto Ellis, senior paper conservator
of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence at the National Museum of American History, but
are made of pure titanium coated with gold that displaying the Charters of Freedom—as those three
matches the Rotunda of the National Archives documents are collectively called—and other found-
Building. Inside the cases, each document sits on an ing texts, is essential. “We keep artifacts because
individually machined they are like witnesses
aluminum platform, to the past. We want to
OTHER PLACES perforated so that mois- share in that experi-
THE DECLARATION ture can reach the back ence, and they allow us
OF INDEPENDENCE of the parchment, keep- to have those difficult
HAS BEEN KEPT ing it supple. Tempered conversations.”
and laminated glass, Inert argon, kept at
calibrated to a thick- about 40 percent hu-
ness of three-eighths of midity and 67 degrees
An abandoned an inch, closes the doc- Fahrenheit, replaces
gristmill outside uments in and blocks air to avoid oxidation of
Washington, D.C.
(1814) out harmful high-fre- parchment or ink. An
quency wavelengths of O-ring made of nickel
The wall of the U.S.
Patent Office the light spectrum. The and tin deforms beneath
I L LU S T R AT I O N BY A N N A F R O H M A N N

(1841) glass is anti-glare, for the pressure of 70 bolts

Atop sacks of mail the viewing pleasure of the more than one million
on the way to the people who pay nothing to view the documents
Library of Congress
(1921) each year.
The cases were part of a five-year, $5 million proj-
ect to study and conserve the documents, which
was completed in 2003, five presidential admin-
istrations ago. Today, different people mean very
different things when they talk about protecting
the Constitution, but those charged with preserving
the parchments are unwavering in their mission. It
on each encasement to lock in the documents with
a seal pressure of more than 300 pounds per lin-
ear inch that should hold for more than 100 years.
Archivists even created two small synthetic sapphire
windows in each encasement to track metrics like
humidity and gas content without opening the case.
Beyond that, the government won’t reveal the
secrets of document security, other than to assure
us that a building could collapse around the encase-
ments and they would survive.

16 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

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What’s better, a GFCI outlet
or a GFCI circuit breaker?
BILL H., CASPER, WYOMING
B O T H A R E E Q UA L LY lifesaving devices
that have contributed to the steady drop in
electrocutions from consumer products—
down from 481 in 1968 to 30 in 2015,
according to the Electrical Safety Foun-
dation International. Outlets
and breakers with GFCI, which
stands for ground fault circuit
interrupter, monitor current
flow on the ungrounded (the
hot) and the grounded conduc-
tor (the neutral). When a tiny
discrepancy occurs between
the two conductors, that indi-
cates an electrical leak or
“fault” to ground. This trips
the device and current flow stops. A per-
son may receive a small shock but
not a deadly electrical jolt.
One big advantage of a GFCI
outlet is that it’s simple to test
and reset, since the buttons are
right there on the outlet. You
don’t have to go to the
service panel. Also,
the receptacle can
be installed nearly
anywhere—like, say,
an old bathroom. This
immediately provides safety benefits,
since the presence of water in that room
increases the risk of electrocution. But
if you have an old house, you often have
small and crowded electrical boxes. A
GFCI is slightly larger than a standard
outlet, sometimes making it a tough fit.
That’s when you’re better off with the cir-
cuit breaker. Whichever you use, I would
advise leaving the installation of either
GFCI to a licensed electrician.
18 _ P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
How crazy would it be to
use a concrete chainsaw
to enlarge the opening in
my house’s foundation for
better crawl-space access?
YARAN N., HUDSON,
MASSACHUSETTS
F O R T H O S E W H O have never seen
a concrete-cutting chainsaw, it’s
like its wood-cutting counterpart,
except that it uses water fed
to diamond-tipped teeth.
It’s ideal for the work you
propose since it makes
neat plunge cuts and you
don’t have to overcut the
corners to get the waste
piece to drop out, as you
would when using a saw
with a circular blade.
Hav ing said that,
I have several concerns
when a homeowner tackles
something this ambitious. First,
removing a piece of the foundation
means the house above is no longer com-
pletely supported. You have to deal with
that with both a temporary support and
a permanent one, like a header over the
enlarged opening. Second, a concrete-
cutting chainsaw requires a lot of water.
So picture this: You dig an access hole
down to the footing, then you begin saw-
ing out the side of the foundation. The
water from the saw is going to go into
the crawl space and into the hole you’re
standing in. Be ready to pump or bail as
you work. Finally, physical exertion is no
small matter when you’re talking about
a couple of hours or more with a saw that
weighs more than 20 pounds, and that’s
POPULAR MECHANICS’
SENIOR HOME EDITOR
S O LV E S YO U R M O S T
PRESSING PROBLEMS.
B Y R OY B E R E N D S O H N
askroy@popularmechanics.com
@askroypm
not counting the drag exerted by the water
hose attached to it. You should also think
carefully about the extremely heavy waste
piece of masonry that you will produce.
You don’t want that tipping back at you
while you’re knee-deep in muck running
a chainsaw.
Is it me, or has the quality
of lumber gone downhill in
recent years?
LIZ B., MT. PLEASANT, SOUTH CAROLINA
P E O P L E H AV E B E E N talking about this
since I was a kid. There’s some evidence
to support this view: Some building codes
have been tightened to account for the
reduction in strength of framing lumber
cut from trees that mature quickly
and are harvested when they are
quite young and of small diame-
ter. But I remain very pro-wood.
I find it remarkable that four
centuries after Europeans
arrived here, there is still plenty
of wood to harvest. To me, that’s
an under-told tribute to the forest-
products industry. I’m not saying that
good wood is abundant—or cheap. Like
it was when I started working with it 40
years ago, good lumber is expensive. And
still worth it.
 Int
r
LOoduct
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 A F R I E N D LY
GUIDE TO THE
D I G I TA L A G E .
BY ALEX AN D E R
GEORGE

How to
ST EP
GET THEM IN Available
storage
ST EP
START
Available
storage

Organize 1 ONE PLACE 2 DELETING

I had to assemble everything from a
Your Zillion couple dusty hard drives, an old lap-
top, and my Google and Amazon
The big photo mountain was ugly.
Everything out of order, duplicates all
over the place. I asked Apple, Adobe,

Photos accounts into one place. I downloaded

EVER TALK TO someone who lost their phone and
didn’t have it backed up? The photos are the only
data they actually care about. Years of mindless
shooting and uploading had made my own photo
library an unmanageable mess—22,000 images
spread across multiple devices. So when Apple
and Adobe recently updated their photo apps, I
had an excuse to pare down to the ones I want for-
ever, the stuff that reminds me why photographs
matter. If you can relate, here’s how to do it.
Fig. 1
and transferred the photos into a folder
on my Macbook, then dumped them
into one unifying app. I chose Apple’s
Photos, which is newly fantastic. It
saves everything to iCloud at full res-
olution, including RAW photos I take
on my Olympus PEN-F. It’s easy to cor-
rect time stamps. And, as with almost
every Apple product I’ve owned, it
just works. I can open Photos on my
iPhone X, delete a few from last week-
end, and know that it will free up space
on my iCloud. Speaking of which, pay-
ing $2.99 per month for a bigger iCloud
plan (200 gigs), worth it.
and Google whether their software
could delete duplicates. “We’ve had a
lot of requests for that,” they all said.
But none has acted on it. That led me
to PhotoSweeper, a $10 app that scans
your library and shows a side-by-side
comparison of what it thinks are dupes
(Fig. 1), then you trash what you don’t
want. And unlike similar apps, Photo-
Sweeper can adjust. For example, you
can ask it to find photos burst-shot
within two seconds of each other, and
save only the one you like. (For Win-
dows, Duplicate Photo Cleaner comes
closest to PhotoSweeper.) I went from
22,000 to about 14,000. Progress.

DELETE ACTUALLY
ST EP Available ST EP Available

3 4
storage storage

SOME MORE ENJOY THEM

Google, Apple, and Adobe all have their
own versions of computer vision—soft-
Fig. 2 ware that analyzes your images so when
you type in “beach,” or “dog,” it finds
all instances of that object. The tech-
nology is fallible, but useful for this
project. I searched for “receipt” and
found dozens of restaurant checks from
old expense reports (Fig. 2). Photos
also has a Screen Shots section, where
I’d saved images of digital plane tick-
ets and text conversations that weren’t
as funny as I remembered. Same for the
Videos tab, which contained movies of
the inside of my pocket. Delete.
I was down to 12,300, about 46 giga-
bytes, just over half what I started with.
The change was unreasonably sat-
isfying, and not just because I could
downgrade my iCloud plan from $3
to $1 (50 gigs) a month. With a clean
work space, I’ve been teaching myself
to edit. I’m favoriting the ones to send to
Nations Photo Lab (less than $60 for a
framed 8x10). I got back on Instagram.
And having fewer files is liberating.
Because, unless tech companies find
a profitable way to lighten your digital
load, you’ll have to take care of it your-
self. Photos are the best place to start.

A N U N R E L AT E D Q U E S T I O N
How do I send a huge file
to someone? Or to my
laptop? I don’t want to
upgrade my Cloud plan.
The app is called Send Anywhere. To go from a phone to a computer: Download
the (free) app, pick the file, and hit Send. Within ten minutes, tell the intended
recipient to open a browser and punch in the six-digit code. You don’t need to
create an account or anything. The size limit is a generous 4 gigabytes. Brilliant.

20 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

ADVANCED
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 A
PHOTOGRAPH
BY
TODD
McLELLAN

D I S A S S E M B LY R E P O R T

C E I L I N G FA N
MODEL: HAIKU H
SERIES TIME TO NUMBER
DISASSEMBLE: OF PARTS:

PRODUCED:
LEXINGTON,
68 MINUTES,
48 SECONDS 149
KENTUCKY

NOTES: A ceiling fan can’t make the air in a room cooler like an air conditioner can. But it can make it feel like the air
is cooler. Here’s the basic idea: As you sit in your stifling living room, sipping an iced coffee, trying to keep sweat and
condensation from smearing the pages of your magazine, your body—which is pretty hot—is off-loading heat to the
air around it. That means that in a still room without a fan you’ll quickly become engulfed in a hot cloud, and as that
cloud gets closer to the temperature of your body, you can’t pass off as much heat to it. In a room with a fan, the cloud
blows away. The new air circulated around your body is cooler, which allows your body to give more heat to it, which
makes you cooler. Pretty clever, and it takes a lot less energy than a refrigerant loop. Especially if it’s one of Haiku’s
H Series fans, which feature a more refined blade design than the slats on your average ceiling fan and integrate
sensing technology so they run only when you need them, at the exact speed you require.

THE MECHANICS
The fan attaches to a mount-
ing bracket (2) so that it hangs
about a foot below the ceiling, and
seven to nine feet above the floor
(that’s ideal, according to the
Department of Energy). A rub-
ber bushing (4) connects the fan
to the bracket, damping vibrations
from its motion. Wiring from the
home’s electrical system passes
through the ceiling, through the
fan’s mounting braces (3), and
into the center of the fan, where
it connects to the fan’s own sys-
tem of wires and its power supply
(5). The wiring cover (6) and trim
(7) keep the installation looking
neat from the outside. DC electric-
ity from the power supply operates
a brushless motor (15). The motor
directly drives the fan’s airfoils (1)
(commonly known as fan blades).
An increase or decrease in speed
is accomplished by changing the
amount of voltage and current sent
to the motor, which is controlled by
the motor driver board (12). The
fan has seven speed settings in the
range from 49 to 201 rpm. To avoid
running at high rpm, which would
use a lot of electricity, the airfoils
are shaped and positioned to opti-
mize the efficiency with which they
move air, similar to the way a kay-
aker positions the face of his oar
to push as much water as possible
without tiring himself out.
THE SMARTS
You can use the remote control (8)
to turn the fan on and off and select
a speed through the IR receiver (9).
Alternatively, the fan’s microcon-
troller (11) accepts sensor inputs
to make the fan programmable
and automatable. At its simplest,
the fan uses a motion sensor (13)
to turn itself on and off when you
enter and leave the room. But more
importantly, the fan has ambient-
temperature (10) and humidity
sensors (14) to determine the per-
ceived temperature in the room.
(What the weather report often
calls the “feels like” temperature:
Since we use sweat to transfer heat
to the air, when the air already has
a lot of moisture in it, making the
technique less effective, it feels hot-
ter.) When you tell the fan to hold
at a specific temperature, it mon-
itors the perceived temperature
and automatically adjusts its speed
to reach the temperature you’ve
requested. (On this setting, the fan
is not limited to the seven manual
speed settings, but can adjust by as
little as one-tenth of an rpm.) An
air conditioner would accomplish
this by pulling moisture out of the
air and cooling the air itself, which
costs a lot of electricity and makes
a ton of noise. With a ceiling fan,
it’s more like that perfect summer
occurrence: a soft breeze kicks up
and offers relief from a muggy day.
—Kevin Dupzyk

22 MARCH_ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 1

3
6

15

10 9

11

12

14 13

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 23

 Base price: $34,990
Zero to 60: Five
seconds
Cargo space: 26
cubic feet. Practical
hatchback!

CIVIC T YPE R VS.

FORD FOCUS RS
Of the two most desir-
able hot hatches, we’d
get the Civic based on
the ride alone. The Ford
is choppy, fatiguing to
drive long distances
in, and all-wheel drive

NISSAN
PLATINUM NISMO 370Z
Still exists, The rare
still satisfyingly genuine
huge. sports car.

24 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 QUESTION OF THE MONTH:
CA N CROSSOVERS TOW TR AILERS?
A NSWER:
YES!

Base price: $25,970

Since the Terrain’s introduction in 2009, If you can afford
GMC has moved more than 700,000 of the it: Get the Denali

little SUV-lets in North America. Imagine, they

package ($38,515)
Also great, slightly
2018 GMC Terrain
must have thought, how many we could sell if bigger sibling: What happens when GM brings
Chevrolet Equinox
we tried harder! There was always a disjunction its A game.
between the Terrain’s wannabe-Yukon machismo
and its actual goals as a crossover. The new Ter-
rain, completely redesigned for 2018, embraces sleek styling
and its crossover mission. With the optional 252-hp turbo four-
cylinder, the Terrain is genuinely quick (and makes excellent
breathy turbo sighs when it dumps boost). You won’t mind
throwing it into a corner, either. Yet it can tow up to 3,500
pounds, making it more than qualified for your weekend utility-
trailer chores. The $26,000 base model gets a turbocharged
1.5-liter and there’s an optional diesel that’s rated as high as
39 mpg highway. It doesn’t seem like you can go wrong with
any of those choices.
The cabin is handsome but includes one confounding design
decision: the splatter of dashboard buttons and “pull triggers”
that serve as your shifter. (Lacking any obvious shifter, I once
reflexively grabbed the windshield-wiper stalk and attempted

rain’s cousin, the Chevy Equinox, delivers the same excellent

driving experience as this GMC. And it has a normal shifter.

Base price: $50,895

Interior material:
Wool-polyester
blend. It’s awesome. 2018 Range
Rover Velar
Family wagon,
concept-car style.
WHO’S VELAR?
In 1969, “Velar” was the name for the first
prototype Range Rovers—from velare in Ital-
ian, meaning “to veil,” which is what Land
Rover engineers were doing before publicly
announcing the car. The word stuck as a kind
of code name for what would become the
first Range Rover.

flush in the dash, is what appears to be a lava flow of

I’ll admit that when I heard about
the Velar, it didn’t seem like that
big of a deal. A Jaguar F-Pace with a
Range Rover grille, right? Then I saw it
in front of me and turned into a 1950s
cartoon character. My tongue hung out
and my eyes turned into hearts and the
full transcript of my remarks reads,
“Ooga ooga!” This is a stunning car, a
complicated design that looks simple.
Perhaps Rover stole the flush retractable
door handle conceit from Tesla, but that
trick confers futurism here as well as it
does on a Model S.
The interior, too, is high concept.
Below the ten-inch hi-def touchscreen,
black glass with only two silver knobs protruding.
When you start the car, that stack comes alive with
backlit HVAC controls and the shift dial motors
up from the console: taa daa. Adding to the visual
drama is an optional textile interior, which uses
suede cloth and gray wool in lieu of leather. While
the Velar can off-road in requisite Range Rover
fashion, I might feel bad about tossing a muddy tow
strap on my dapple-gray Kvadrat trim.
So, Velar, I was wrong. You’re not an F-Pace.
You’re like Range Rover accidentally released a
2028 model ten years early.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 25

The Connected
Road Trip
On a group ride, the right communication
system can keep you safe—and help you
spot wild turkeys.
BY DAV I D C U R C U R I TO

NIGEL: BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! BEAR!

DA N N Y: Oh yeah, two babies and a
momma bear on the side of the road.
DAVID: The babies just climbed a tree!
NIGEL: So cool! And this within our first
30 minutes. We still have 300 miles to
go today.

▶ When you’re trying to spot road haz-

ards, six eyes are better than two on
motorcycles. Communication is key
when you’re traveling at high speeds with
extreme turns, cops, debris, lunatic car
drivers, and the occasional bear family
getting in your way. That’s why, when my
friends Nigel and Danny and I went for a
weeklong adventure from New York to
Tennessee and back, we used a commu-
nication system: the Sena 10R low-profile
headset and intercoms ($239). If we were
going to ride the entire Blue Ridge Park-
way, including the infamous Tail of the
Dragon, we needed to talk about it.

NIGEL: Crap in the road. Watch out!

DAVID: Flagman up ahead.
NIGEL: We’re stopping.
DANNY: Is that one of those Cool Hand
Luke crews?
NIGEL: That sign says inmates!
DAVID: What we have here is a failure to
communicate!

▶ The headset comes with headphones

and a regular mic or an optional boom
mic, all of which tucks easily into your
helmet. There’s a small battery pack
and control area that are slim and unob-
structive. They affix to the outside of your
helmet. The 10R has Bluetooth 4.1—it
can take calls and play music—and can
hold a range up to 980 yards. Which is
great if someone falls a little behind, like

26 MARCH _ 2018
 The author, left, and
his friend Danny take
a break in Maryland on
the way to the start of
the Blue Ridge Park-
way in Virginia.

P H OTO G R A P H BY N I G E L PA R R Y
I did more than once. Hey, better to ride
in your comfort zone than take unneces-
sary chances—especially on tight turns
where delusions of grandeur will throw
you over a 100-foot cliff.
NIGEL: Tight bend coming up here fel-
las. Had to pick my foot up for that one.
DAVID: Hey watch that cliff there!
NIGEL: Oh, my God, another! Wooooo
hoooo!
DAVID: Did you drop down to second
gear for that?
NIGEL: Nah, same gear, man. You’ve
got plenty of pull off on the bend. Whoa,
real tight turn, and there’s a tighter one
coming up!
DANNY: Just scraped a peg!
NIGEL: Watch out, there’s some sort of
metal on that corner coming up. It just
took my front wheel.
DANNY: It was a stick or twig, Dave.
DAVID: Got it. Look to the side, it’s just a
cliff. There’s nothing there.
NIGEL: Cops! Cops! Cops! Brake! Brake!
Brake!
DANNY: Heavy brake!
DAVID: He’s continuing on. We’re good.
▶ The battery lasts up to ten hours. We
would fully charge them overnight and
then plug them into a mobile power
source for the last two hours of a 12-hour
day. You can connect with up to four peo-
ple—including people with systems not
made by Sena. And why would you want
to connect to any more? It would slow
your pace.
NIGEL: Watch out for the wet area in
the next turn, and a squirrel! Oh jeez,
28 MARCH _ 2018
I got him.
DAVID: He survived, but not for long.
NIGEL: I missed him with my front and
hit him with the back.
DANNY: Let’s pull over and check the
map.
NIGEL: I need to pee.
DAVID: I’m too hot to stop. I’ll meet you at How to Ride the Tail
the T-junction at the Blue Ridge Parkway.
of the Dragon
▶ The controls are easy and intuitive,
all operated with one hand, either on This famous stretch of highway
the helmet itself or on an optional han- straddles the North Carolina–
dlebar remote. God knows you want to
Tennessee border. It has 318 turns in
keep both hands on the grips.
11 miles and is bordered with rock
DANNY: I’d like to overtake this jerk that walls, sheer cliffs, and dense forest.
just pulled out in front of me. A few tips to ride it safely:
NIGEL: There’s a straight bit that you
can pass around the next corner and no
cars at all. Catch up to me and then let’s
1 ▶ To get a sense of how serious
this ride is, start at The Tree of
Shame, at Deals Gap Motorcycle
catch David. Resort at mile marker zero on
DANNY: He’s really keeping up ahead, I the Tail. It’s littered with mangled
thought we’d catch him already. pieces of bike and protective gear
DAVID: Who me? accompanied by handwritten notes
to dead loved ones and friends.
DANNY: Yeah, we saw you and now we
can’t catch you!
DAVID: Well, I’m going pretty fast.
NIGEL: So are we!
2 ▶ Ride in the very early morning
when there isn’t much traffic. Peak
times can see 1,200 vehicles per
DAV I D : Oh man, my heart is in my day—Corvettes, Mustangs, Vipers,
throat. Heavy left hairpin going uphill assorted Porsches, and other
guys. European machines that could veer
into your lane at any moment. But
NIGEL: This turn keeps on going!
watch out for a damp dewy road.
DAVID: Tunnel coming up, Rattlesnake
Mountain.
NIGEL: We’ve got a bump in the very mid-
dle of the next curve, and a slow Harley.
3 ▶ There’s nothing worse than get-
ting caught behind a rider who is
slowing you down, unless it’s feel-
DAVID: Turkeys on the left! Wet leaves ing pressure from a faster rider
behind you. Share the road. The
in the corner, take it nice and easy boys.
pull-off areas are tight, so avoid
NIGEL: Ugh, I’ve got an insect in my entering them at high speeds or
earhole. you could end up riding over a cliff.
▶ If there’s one drawback to the Sena 10R, it’s that the wires,
headphones, microphone, and control surface are all fastened
with Velcro. Installation is a pain in the butt, especially if you
have fat fingers like my friend Danny. Sena’s solution is the new
Momentum helmet (starting at $399). The three versions of
—D.C.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
 I BUILT THAT BED, which folds over the middle

1991 seats. Last fall, I noticed that heat was escaping, so

I covered the cab’s metal bottom and windows with

Mitsubishi insulation. Now, it’s toasty warm in the morning, even down
to my feet. It’s converted into a home really well. After Colo-

Montero rado, I’m driving it to Arizona and California to visit friends,

then to the Sierras for a few weeks while I take a Wilderness
First Responder course. After that, either Canada or Alaska
to extend the ski season. Whenever I’m on mountain roads,
OWNER:
people give me the nod of approval because it’s an awe-
some four-wheel-drive truck. It really crawls. But some give
Jackie Kearney me this annoying stare, like they’re asking, “What are you
doing driving that big truck, little girl?” That makes me even
LO C AT I O N : Ridgway, Colorado
more attached to it. I was talking about getting the brakes
FOUND ON: PURCHASE YEARS
replaced and someone asked, “Do you think it’s worth it?”
Craigslist PRICE: OWNED: And I said, “What do you mean? Of course it’s worth it!” It’s
$2,000 One only going to get cooler the older it gets.

P H OTO G R A P H S BY M O R G A N L E V Y

30 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 The elusive
buckling-spring
key switch came
standard with
1981’s IBM PCs.
Now they’re all
but impossible
to find.

THE HUNT FOR THE MODERN

DEEP IN THE RECESSES OF THE

INTERNET, AN OBSESSIVE SEARCHES
P H OTO G R A P H S BY B E N G O L D S T E I N

FOR THE PERFECT KEYBOARD.

BY DAV I D OW E N

32 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M


I
B O U G H T O N E O F the first IBM PCs in
1982. It cost almost $5,000, yet had less
random-access memory than the fitness
tracker I usually forget to wear. I ordered
it in the most expensive disk configura-
tion, with two five-and-a-quarter-inch
360-kilobyte floppy drives—one for
whichever prehistoric software appli-
cation I was running (I owned two),
and one for my working files. There
was no hard drive. The monitor was an
11.5-inch monochrome CRT that dis-
played glowing green ASCII characters
on a convex black background and was
annoyingly prone to glare.
The only element of that machine that
doesn’t seem laughable in retrospect is
its keyboard. The keys had sculpted tops,
and when I pressed them they resisted
my fingers and made a confirmatory
clack—sensations that were intended
to replicate the tactile and aural feed-
back that typists were accustomed to.
The entire keyboard was satisfyingly
substantial—it weighed several times as
much as an entire Apple MacBook—and
I could adjust the angle at which it rested
on my desk. I’ve always loved typing,
probably because it’s the closest I’ll ever
come to playing a musical instrument,
but I especially loved typing on that
machine. And I wasn’t alone. A reviewer
for Byte in 1982 wrote that the original
PC’s keyboard, called the Model F, was
“a delight to use” and was, “bar none, the
best keyboard on any microcomputer.”
That judgment still holds, in the
opinion of surprisingly many keyboard
obsessives—of whom there are sur-
prisingly many. From the early ’80s
onward, personal computers and their
keyboards largely evolved in opposite
directions: Computers rapidly became
almost unimaginably more powerful,
while keyboards increasingly stank, a
@PopularMechanics
trend that reached its reverse apotheosis in the virtually useless virtual
keyboard of the iPad. The principal distinguishing feature of the Model F,
by comparison with the vast majority of keyboards today, was that pressing
a key actuated a spring-loaded mechanical switch rather than flattening
a squishy silicone pillow. Nowadays, even supposedly high-end keyboards
often seem to have been designed more for how they look than for how they
function: They’re skinny shingles covered with flat, Scrabble-tile-shaped
keys, which have so little “travel” that when you type you feel almost as
though you’re drumming your fingers on your desk. If you are of the faith,
the difference between one of those and a Model F is as great as the differ-
ence between a toy piano and a Steinway
concert grand.
Luckily for the obsessed, high-qual-
ity keyboards have made a comeback,
driven by gamers, programmers, coders, A POSSESSED BUSINESS
and other power users. Small and small- ANALYST IN GARDEN
ish manufacturers now sell keyboards
with mechanical key switches, program-
CITY, NEW YORK,
mable layouts, ergonomic shapes, and TRIES TO RESURRECT
other tantalizing features. Members of THE REAL MODEL F.
online forums (pimpmykeyboard.com,
The technological heart of the IBM
for example) endlessly debate the mer-
Model F was its “buckling-spring” key
its of competing keyboard designs, and switches: When you tapped a key, you
they discuss their own collections with compressed a metal spring, forcing a
the lunatic intensity of car nuts. tiny hammer into contact with a printed
Although the Model F is no longer circuit board and causing the spring
on the market, there are dozens, if not to buckle and strike the cylinder that
enclosed it. It was all that internal com-
thousands, of possibilities for its replace-
motion that generated both the clack and
ment. Here are a few I’ve used and loved. the resistance. A couple of years ago, Joe
Strandberg—whose day job is at an equity
research firm in New York City—decided
to try to bring it all back.
When Strandberg began redevelop-
ing the Model F, he knew that one of his
SteelSeries biggest challenges would be replicating
the springs themselves. (Unicomp, which
Apex, three
models acquired the rights to IBM’s technology
in 1996, still makes keyboards, but their
$100 to $140 innards are different from the Model F’s.)
M Y F I RST P O ST-I B M mechanical key- “I had to cancel an agreement to have
the springs made in China,” Strandberg
board was from SteelSeries, a Danish
told me recently, “because even after six
company that makes accessories for months of trying they couldn’t meet IBM’s
gamers. Gamers like mechanical key- 1980s tolerances—which is crazy.” When
boards not only because typing on them we spoke, he was looking for another
feels good but also because they usually supplier. “These keyboards are something
have a feature known as anti-ghosting, or that you can’t make for cheap,” he con-
N-key rollover, which has to do with what tinued. “Each one of the molds is like the
cost of a car.” Nevertheless, at press time
happens when you press multiple keys he had received roughly 1,000 preorders,
at the same time. Using my SteelSeries at between $325 and $400 apiece, and
the day it arrived was like kissing an was hoping to begin shipping soon. —D.O.
old girlfriend at a high-school reunion.
It brought back an entire vanished era,
and sold me permanently on the wisdom
of buying electronic gear favored by peo-
ple who never go outside.
SteelSeries doesn’t sell my exact model anymore, but it does offer three
mechanical keyboards with backlit, programmable keys. SteelSeries makes
awesome mice, too—one of which has 15 buttons—and they come in a vari-
ety of shapes and configurations. Even if you’re not a gamer, you should
MARCH _ 2018 33

consider using a gaming mouse. (My cur-
rent one is a Razer DeathAdder Chroma,
$70.) And forget about wireless. Key-
boards and mice work better with cords.
Matias
Ergo Pro
$200
I ABANDONED my SteelSeries a few
years ago and replaced it with a Matias
Ergo Pro, after waiting more than a year
for the finished product to emerge from a
factory in China. The keys have mechan-
ical switches, and the board is divided
into two discrete units, one for the right
hand and one for the left. The units are
connected by a retractable cable, and
can be placed far apart and oriented at a
variety of angles and inclinations. Typ-
ing with your hands separated by the
width of your shoulders feels funny at
first, but once I’d done it for 15 minutes
I was determined never to go back. Using
a conventional keyboard—or, worse,
using the keyboard on any notebook—
forces your hands, wrists, elbows, and
forearms into awkward positions, pro-
moting fatigue and, potentially, causing
repetitive-stress injuries. (Ergo is short
for “ergonomic.”) With a split keyboard,
you drop your hands naturally onto your
desk, then position the keys where your
fingers want to find them.
34 MARCH _ 2018
ErgoDox EZ
$270 to $355
T H I S PA S T Y E A R , I switched to a fan-
cier ergonomic keyboard, the ErgoDox
EZ. The original ErgoDox was invented
by (and named for) Dominic “Dox” Beau-
champ, a slightly mysterious Quebecois.
His goal was to retain the tactile elegance
of keyboards like the Model F while ratio-
nalizing the layout and incorporating
both firmware-based programmability
and improved ergonomics—principles
espoused by a group of enthusiasts who
called themselves the Key64 project.
Original purchasers received a discour-
agingly large jumble of pieces, which
they had to assemble themselves with
a soldering iron. One early fan, Israeli
software developer Erez Zukerman, later
began selling (with Beauchamp’s bless-
ing) a fully assembled, improved version,
the ErgoDox EZ—which is what I’m typ-
ing on right now.
The most conspicuous difference
between an ErgoDox and a conven-
tional keyboard (aside from the fact that
the halves are shaped like upside-down
Oklahomas) is that the arrangement of
the character keys is “ortholinear”: the
keys are aligned in straight columns,
rather than staggered by half a key.
This takes getting used to, but after an
hour or so I was fully converted. The off-
set alignment on traditional keyboards
is an artifact of the era of manual type-
writers, whose metal “key bars” had to be
prevented from banging into one other
The Model F
keyboard.
and becoming jammed. Once the offset
is gone you realize that it forced your fin-
gers to make awkward lateral stretches
to reach keys in other rows.
The most powerful ErgoDox feature
is programmability. You can change
the output of any key press to almost
anything you like, and you can combine
commands in time-saving ways. You can
create as many as 32 different layouts, or
“layers,” then toggle swiftly among them
and store them all in the keyboard’s
firmware. I’ve experimented with more
than a dozen combinations so far and
have found that I enjoy the challenge of
teaching my fingers new skills—and also
that I like owning a keyboard that other
people think is weird.
Kinesis
Freestyle Edge
$220
I R E C E N T LY B O U G H T my wife a less
challenging split keyboard, the Kinesis
Freestyle2 ($140, including ergonomic
accessory kit). She’s also a writer. She
has had carpal-tunnel surgery on both
wrists, and she worries about injuring
herself again. She loves the Freestyle2,
even though she was happy with its
predecessor, a Microsoft Natural Key-
board—which was introduced in 1994.
The Freestyle2 doesn’t have mechan-
ical keys and isn’t programmable, but
Kinesis recently introduced the Free-
style Edge, with both of those features.
The first run, through Kickstarter, sold
out almost immediately, but more should
be available by the time you read this.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
THE FIRST TOOL YOU The Fein Multimaster is
my right hand on most
NEED FOR REMODELING remodeling jobs—fit-
ting flooring, removing
hardware, installing doors. A German import, the Multimaster gained
a following here over the last 20 years as tradespeople and accomplished
amateurs recognized its outsize ability and durability. Imitators have come
to market, but the Fein still sets the standard for grinding, sanding, and
cutting smoothness and power under load. If it had a weak link, it was that
its blades and accessories were suited to wood and soft materials. That’s
corrected with its new circular-saw blade made from high-speed steel. It’s
rated for mild steel up to 1⁄16 inch thick. That may not sound like much, but
it’s a lot thicker than the steel sheet you would normally find at your local
home center. Now the Fein handles pipe, tube, and any metal cuts in repair
and remodeling, even auto-body work. At $25 for the blade, it’s expensive,
but high-quality parts always are. —Roy Berendsohn

FIGHTER-PILOT OPTICS FOR CYCLISTS

The new Everysight Raptor AR Smartglasses give cyclists (and runners)
GPS directions as well as metrics, maps, and workout prompts without
obscuring, distracting, or blocking their field of vision. The augmented-
reality sunglasses rely on the same technology that parent company
Elbit Systems uses in its helmet displays for fighter pilots. Instead of
placing a small screen in front of one eye, like the similarly marketed
Recon Jet, the Raptor projects onto the lens. When you’re focused on
the road ahead, the data disappears out of focus until you flick your eyes
over for a quick check of your mileage or next
turn. At $500, it’s on par with a do-it-all
sports GPS but also includes a 13-mega-
pixel video camera and connects via
Bluetooth to your phone to display texts,
take calls, and play music.

GOOGLE’S NEW This will make you feel better about the
inevitable A.I. armageddon: Research by
COMPUTER

PROGRAMMING computer scientist Saket Navlakha and

WIZARD: A FRUIT FLY his colleagues at California’s Salk Insti-
tute for Biological Studies found that
sophisticated computer search algorithms can’t spot some similar items as well as
a fruit fly’s nose can. Most search algorithms start by sorting inputs, like images or
songs, into categories before finding connections. The fruit fly’s olfactory system
does the opposite, blowing out the dimensions of each odor from its 50 receptors to
2,000 higher receptors and using the increased resolution to zero in on similarities.
FLY
If you applied both strategies to a group of photos, a computer might start by say-
ing “these photos contain white,” and “these photos contain yellow,” and go from
there. The fly’s method, in contrast, would zoom in on texture, context, size, and
color before determining that the photos are of fruits, flowers, or insects. This con-
ceptual shift—from simplifying first to sharpening first—makes searches so much
more efficient that Google is already working with Navlakha’s lab to compare fruit-
fly-based systems to its current products. “If it works well, I think we could see this
used within a year,” Navlakha says.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 43

A

AIR, LA ND, A ND SEA

G
The New
In the York Police
Department’s
Garage with 9,000 vehicles
take a beating.
NYPD’s Fleet Meet the
people who

Mechanics keep them

running.

THE NYPD’S FLEET GARAGE is too complex to call it that. It’s more like
a small city, complete with a body shop, where old vehicles are stripped
for parts while new ones are fitted with lights and decals, and a resident
insurance adjuster to handle warranty paperwork. The mix of cars, side-by-sides,
and scooters that get repaired here changes with the seasons. “We’re going to all-
wheel drive where we can, because that improves our response capability during
winter storms,” says deputy commissioner for support services Robert Martinez,
who oversees the land-based fleet. In summer, 24-hour posts call for hybrids, which
can idle all day without overheating. And when the next Hurricane Sandy hits, it’s
jacked-up Ford pickups carrying rigid-hull inflatable boats. Of course, the Har-
bor Unit’s garage in Brooklyn has some bigger boats. The biggest: two 71-footers,
with huge diesels producing 3,900 horsepower. And out east is the Aviation Unit,
where technicians work on twin-engine helicopters outfitted with infrared cam-
eras and spotlights. Visit all three garages and you see that maintaining thousands
of machines, from mopeds to jet turbines, is a constant feat of skilled labor and
efficiency. Meet the people who keep the country’s biggest police force running.

Photographs by David Williams

44 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 B
A. Marootnandan Nar- NYPD 24 years ago and
aine (right) delivers a is the go-to guy for the
wrecked Ford Fusion department’s motor-
patrol car to supervisor cycles, scooters, and
and auto-body worker specialty vehicles such
Carmelo Martinez. For as this side-by-side. He
jobs like this, the shop also handles fabrica-
has its own insurance tion, sometimes using a
adjuster, so repairs— small blast furnace for

C including warranty
work—can be handled
blacksmithing.

entirely in-house. E. George Pirpinias puts

an NYPD cruiser on the
B. Deputy commissioner lift for service. Cars
for support services stay in the fleet for 42
Robert Martinez, who months, trucks for 60—
oversees the NYPD’s if they last that long.
Fleet Services Divi-
sion and its 9,000-plus F. A bulletproof window
vehicles. panel used for test-
ing. Door and window
C. Patrick McGreevy armor is external and is
works in the salvage swapped between cars
cage, where stripped as new vehicles cycle into
parts are stockpiled for the fleet.
reuse. The NYPD’s indus-
triousness even extends G. Auto-body worker
to the “salvage sound Hubert King welds and
system” that enlivens fabricates parts for the
the shop with tunes. It’s ground fleet’s biggest
made of cardboard boxes trucks, like the Ford
and old car speakers. Super Duties used during
floods.
D. Auto mechanic Santos
Font started with the
D

A CCOR DING Best police-car driver’s seat ever: Plymouth Gran Fury
T O O F F ICE R S Worst police-car driver’s seat ever: Chevy Caprice “bubble,” which needed a milk crate to prop up the wobbly seat back

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 45

 A

46 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 A. Officer George B. Officer Phil Shahin, C. The Harbor Unit, D. Officer Tom Denicker
Wright services a jet a 31-year veteran of located on the south- sits in the bridge of one
drive on one of the Har- the force, specializes in west edge of Brooklyn, of the NYPD’s 29 boats.
bor Unit’s patrol boats. electronics, including has 29 vessels, ranging He handles all the
Note the sidearm: Blue Force tracking, from 31-footers with Harbor Unit’s welding
Harbor Unit techni- which monitors the 300-hp outboards to and is trained to work
B cians are also on-duty
police, ready to respond
locations of the Harbor
Unit’s vessels.
71-footers with jet
drives powered by
on everything from
Yamaha outboards to
should the need arise. 3,900 total horsepower. the patrol boats’ mam-
moth diesels.

D
P H OTO G R A P H / I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T E E K AY N A M E

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 47

 A. The NYPD Aviation Unit has
A been based at Floyd Bennett
Field in Brooklyn since 1929.
Back then, fixed-wing aircraft
were used for patrol.

B. Officer Joseph Daigneault,

a pilot, refuels “Finest 19,” one
of four Bell 429 GlobalRanger
helicopters. The Aviation Unit
has been an all-helicopter
fleet since 1954.

C. N917 is pulled from the han-

gar. The NYPD helicopters are
always ready for specific tasks.
Scuba divers, for air-sea res-
cues, are on-call 24 hours a day.

D. A technician services one of

the unit’s seven helicopters.

E. Lt. John Biscarri (bottom),

Detective Craig Coogan (top
left), and Detective Mario
Inguaggiato (top right) have
all been with the Aviation Unit
for at least 12 years. Qualifi-
cations among them include:
heavy weapons, instrument
pilot certification, emergency
medical technician.

B C

48 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 E

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 49

Adam Crawford
and Andrea Nesbitt
complete a tower
inspection during
a November 2017
snowstorm.
 The W i ld Hor s e W i nd Fa r m

i n Wa sh i ng t on

prot e c t s 11,0 0 0 a cr e s a nd

p ower s 63,0 0 0 home s.

A nd m a n , t he y love wh a t t he y do.

B Y M AT T A L LY N

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KYLE JOHNSON

PAGE 51
 A B

D E
A. Crawford exits one
of the tower nacelle’s
two roof hatches. B.
There are four land-
ings to stop and rest, if
needed, on the climb up
a tower. C. Nesbitt and
Ron Potter examine
a spare gearbox. This
turbine transmission
requires a 250-foot
crane to be replaced in
the nacelle. D. Potter
checks a control panel
for signs of overheat-
ing. E. Shane Alberg
attaches his Lad-Saf,
a fall-arrest system,
to the cable ladder.
F. “The main hazard is
falling objects; make
sure you’re tied off
so you don’t become
one,” says Nesbitt.
The rings behind her
measure wind speed
and direction.

52 MARCH _ 2018 FOR A SHOPPABLE LIST OF WHAT OUR SUBJECTS ARE WEARING, SEE PAGE 56.
S t a nd u nde r a
t owe r a nd yo u
he a r t he o ce a n ,
but faster. The gentle swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of the blades rolls
over you like up-tempo waves lapping on a beach. Only there is
no water here. Wild Horse Wind Farm is in central Washington
State, arid sagebrush steppe in every direction. On a clear day,
you can see the heavy hitters of the Cascades—Adams, Hood,
Rainier—in the distance.
The only sign of civilization is the towers and their ocean
sounds. Wild Horse has 149 of the towers, enough to power
63,000 Washington homes that reach from nearby Ellensburg
to the actual ocean, about four hours away.
Wild Horse is an unusual wind farm. For one thing, it has a
visitor’s center that welcomes 15,000 people a year and main-
tains a (nearly) five-star rating on TripAdvisor. (What utility
company gets a five-star rating for anything?) The energy
facility is also a nature preserve whose 11,000 acres connect
neighboring government-managed wildlife areas. You can
stand inside a turbine tower, learn how wind could power your
flat screen, and then step outside to encounter a herd of elk.
The attraction to Wild Horse is thick with its small staff. Take
Andrea Nesbitt, manager and all-around utility woman at the
visitor’s center. She scored an internship at Wild Horse dur-
ing her senior year at a nearby college, then turned
that into a two-year part-time stint, stepped up to
a contractor position for seven years, and finally,
last March, accepted a staff gig. “I kept hanging
around,” she says.
Her colleague Ron Potter maintained the
34 miles of access roads at Wild Horse—filling, grading, plow-
ing—as a contractor for ten years while he waited for a permanent
position. One finally opened last year, after someone retired,
and Potter felt lucky to fill it. “It’s one of the prettiest places you
could ever work,” he says.
The Wild Horse land sprawls over and around Whiskey
Dick Mountain. The name sounds less off-color when you con-
sider nearby Whiskey Jim Creek. And the acreage covers steep
ridgelines and valleys with Dick being more of a bump and inci-
dental high point. Deer, elk, bear, and bighorn sheep roam the
sage-dotted hillsides; the air is a mix of songbirds and raptors.
It seems an odd place for a power plant, amid all this beauty.
But environmental protection was a selling point when the util-
ity company Puget Sound Energy proposed building Wild Horse
in 2004. PSE replaced an absentee landowner and planted
sage plugs to restore the steppe habitat that has been shrink-
ing as neighboring farmland expands. The company keeps
its footprint small, and consistently passes its environmen-
tal compliance checks by the state. Wild Horse also opened the
land to the community. Sunup to sundown, the roads and trails
are open for hiking, mountain biking, and seasonal hunting.
F

A
B transformer inside the nacelle steps it up from 690
A. Ellensburg’s Iron Horse Brewery is the local favorite for a post-work pint. B. Nesbitt looks for
weather damage—discoloration, cracks, and pitting—on turbine blades. C. The turbine founda-
tions are buried 25 to 32 feet deep with 28-foot anchor bolts. Inspections include checking the
base for erosion. D. Because of their work with electrical components, the team relies on flame-
resistant workwear. E. The six miles of trail at Wild Horse are a mix of steep technical sections
and ridgelines. F. The tower’s chain hoist lifts tool bags and smaller replacement components.
54 MARCH _ 2018
Nesbitt leads wildflower tours every spring, and
bikes and hikes over the dirt in her free time. Potter,
a hunter, bushwhacks off-trail and spots animals
with the same binoculars he uses to check turbine
blades for damage.
S cattered from northwest to southeast across
two ridges, the Vestas V80 turbines stand 351 feet
tall from foundation to blade tip. The blades resem-
ble airplane wings and work on the same principle of
lift. As wind passes around the blade, its curve cre-
ates a pressure differential that pushes it toward the
low-pressure side. At peak efficiency, about 31 mph,
the blades spin at a lazy 17 rpm. By itself, a poor power
source. But an 18-ton gearbox in each nacelle (the
mechanical room at the top of the tower) connects
the driveshaft to two sets of planetary gears (cogs
within a cog) and a helical gearset, like what most
cars use, to wind up to 1,900 rpm at the generator.
The generators grind out as much as 2.0 mega-
watts. And before the electricity leaves the tower, a
volts to 34.5 kilovolts. A higher voltage prevents sig-
nificant power loss to the resistance of transmission
lines, so it’s also sent to Wild Horse’s substation for
another step up before it hits PSE’s grid.
Nesbitt and her team run the tower inspections,
climbing as many as four a day to check repair work
from contractors and spot new trouble. Climbing
the towers, they say, is reason enough to work at
Wild Horse.
To climb a tower, says Nesbitt, you start with a
full-body harness and APE self-rescue kit on which
you could rappel down in an emergency. At the base
of the ladder you clip into the Lad-Saf fall arrest and
the climb assist, a personal winch that provides 125
pounds of lift and feels like a tow rope, says Adam
Crawford, one of Wild Horse’s four tower inspec-
tors. You sit back into the harness for a boost as
you pull the rest of your weight up the rungs. A fast
ascent takes around three minutes. Without the
assist, it could be 15.
The ladder you’re climbing, by the way, is
attached to the inside of the tower by neodym-
ium magnets. Not a single bolt or weld, just metal
blocks with 88 pounds of magnetic force. The design
feature improves the strength of the tower by elimi-
nating potential weak points from drill holes or the
heat of welding. This climb is also the equivalent to
scaling an 18-story building, but oddly, says Potter,
there isn’t a feeling of being up off the ground. No
fear of heights will trigger. As you climb the narrow-
ing tube—just 7.6 feet across at the top—you’ll feel
a subtle sway, but never the height. On particularly
windy days, the top rocks back and forth like a boat
atop the 221-foot steel pole. The only feeling you
might have is seasickness, if you’re up too long.  
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
 C

F
At the top of the ladder you reach the
nacelle, a 10-by-50-foot box packed with
the generator, transformer, and gearbox,
which keeps a constant growl as it tries to
match the wind speed. But then there’s the
top of the turbine, too. Through two hatches,
you can pull yourself onto the top deck of
the nacelle and—after attaching your-
self to both anchor rails—stand up for that
100-mile view into the mountains. “You’re
looking down on God’s country from up on
this great hill,” says Potter. “Everything
looks so small. Our big construction equip-
ment below looks like toys.” You can see
these towers from down on Interstate 90, but
from there, you can’t appreciate the scale.
Up here, you feel it—the breadth of the land,
the light on your face, the power of the wind.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 55

Th e

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56 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

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We get sucked into
movies for the plot or
the acting, but what
keeps us enthralled are
the effects. Everything
around the actors has
to be perfect—to feel
real, or at least realis-
tic—or we stop thinking
we’re in their world and
remember we’re just in
a movie theater. That’s
why, for the last four
years, we’ve celebrated
the people responsible
for the camerawork, the
stunts, the model build-
ing, the makeup, the sets,
the explosions, and the
insane drone-captured
footage that makes us
love going to the movies.
Our awards are just like
the Oscars, only there are
no musical performances
or commercials, and you
can get through them in
under ten minutes. Over
the next seven pages
you can read the stories
behind the most innova-
tive features of 13 great
movies, including our
first-ever pick for movie
of the year, Blade Runner
2049 (pictured).
 To create the enor-
mous holographic
advertisement that
seems to point at Ryan
Gosling’s charac-
ter in Blade Runner
2049 (top), director
Denis Villeneuve first
recorded actress Ana
de Armas in front of
a green screen with a
small stick standing in
for Gosling, for scale.

P O PU L A R
M ECH A N I C S
PR E S EN T S
T H E FO U R T H
A N N UA L

Honoring the most impressive

driving rigs, drones, stunts,
holograms—and very
smart humans—behind the
movies of 2017.
BY TIM GRIERSON

MARCH 2 018
PAGE 59
INCREDIBLY SPECIAL EFFECTS AWARDS

AWARD

Movie of More like Mexico City. The

crew shot aerial plates of
that city and supplemented
the Year them with digital build-
ings. The police station is a
B

FILM
BLADE RUNNER
2049
THE SETTING
The film’s grim, boxy cities
drew from Brutalist archi-
tecture, a 20th-century
movement that preferred
austerity to beauty. Plus:
a winter-glum Montreal.
“Director Denis Villeneuve
is from Montreal,” visual
effects supervisor John Nel-
son says. “He wanted the
cities to feel like Montreal
on a bad day in February.
I’m from Detroit, so I knew
exactly what he meant.”
For the future Los Ange-
les, Villeneuve figured it
would be even smoggier, and
a lot less sunlit than it is now.
A ture rig that captured both
12-foot-tall miniature (A)
adorned with holograms,
fake weather, and other digi-
tal embellishments.
To keep the city plausi-
ble, Nelson’s team spoke to
futurists to speculate on
how it might have evolved.
“Cities are the product of
billions of decisions made by
millions of people over thou-
sands of years,” Nelson says.
“One architect might have
built a building 100 years
later than the architect who
built the one next to it.”
THE HOLOGRAMS
For the hologram charac-
ter of Joi, played by Ana de
Armas, “We didn’t want her
to look like what a hologram
is now,” Nelson says. “We
wanted to make a leap”—to
what a hologram might be in
2049. Nelson’s team thought
up the idea of a digital back-
face—like looking through
the backside of a bottle,
and you can see the writ-
ing on the label in reverse.
“We photographed Ana and
projected her onto a digital
model of Joi,” Nelson says.
“You see through the front
to the back. She feels real
because she’s photographed,
and like a shell, because you
can see through her.”
THE UNAGING PROCESS
Harrison Ford’s character is
reunited with his long-dead
love, Rachael (played by
Sean Young), who returns as
a clone—and looks exactly
the same age she did in
the first film, 35 years ago.
They couldn’t go fully dig-
ital. “Digital humans are
really hard to do,” Nelson
says. “Not only do they need
to look real, they need to act
and perform real.” Instead,
they started by casting
an actress, Loren Peta, as
Young’s stand-in. “Sean was
onstage as we shot Loren
in full hair and makeup,
with dots on her face. We
had a facial-motion cap-
Sean and Loren. We even
captured Sean’s 19-year-
old son, who was working
as a PA. He looks a lot like
his mother, and I wanted
to see how 19-year-old skin
really moved, since Rachael
was 19 and Loren was actu-
ally 27.” So now Nelson had
Sean’s mannerisms and
Loren’s general movement.
He supplemented that with
images from the original
movie and built a digital
model of Young (B). And
then he tested the fake. “I
took several scenes from the
original and replaced one
shot with the digital double.
Then I showed it to Denis
and the producers, and they
said, ‘Why are we looking at
this? This isn’t our movie.
This is the original.’ That’s
when we knew that the
model was right.”

POPULAR EVERY YEAR, the Visual Effects Society gathers to

MECHANICS celebrate its members’ greatest achievements. For
16 years VES has recognized the geniuses who make
AND THE our favorite movies convincing, explosive, and fun.
VISUAL Last year the awards were hosted by comedian Pat-
EFFECTS ton Oswalt. Just as important, the official cocktail
SOCIETY party was hosted by Popular Mechanics. And it will
be again this year, after the awards ceremony in Bev-
erly Hills on February 13. You’re welcome to stop by.
But we can’t promise it’ll be easy to get in.

60 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

AWARD
Best Amalgamated Island
FILM
WONDER WOMAN
To create Wonder Woman’s
legendary island home of
Themyscira (A), two-time
Oscar-winning visual effects
supervisor Bill Westenhofer
and director Patty Jenkins
didn’t want to simply copy
what was in the comic books.
“We know that their island is
Mediterraneanesque. Apart
from that, it’s a novel cre-
ation,” Westenhofer says. One
that came about thanks to a
helicopter, some high-tech
photographic analysis, and a
few other things.
Most of the spectacular
terrain and beautiful beaches
are from Italy’s Amalfi Coast
(B). For the city itself, Jenkins
chose Matera, Italy’s oldest
town. “People have been liv-
ing there for close to 10,000
years,” Westenhofer says. “For
a while they lived in limestone
caves, and at some point they
started building structures on
top of those caves. You climb
up the hill, and the roof of one
Robin Wright (center).
@PopularMechanics
structure becomes the road.
Everything in the foreground
was practical. We added the
background digitally to create
the cliffs and extensions of the
A
buildings (C).”
“The mountains are from
stills taken in various locations
in Asia—Vietnam, China, and
others. The limestone arches
are from China. They’re gigan-
tic, and they look like they defy
gravity,” Westenhofer says.
This composite effect was
achieved by a process called
photogrammetry: “Basically,
we take a helicopter pass and
shoot still photographs, every
second or so. We have soft-
ware that analyzes that series
of images from each location
and lines them all up to form a
3D model. Then you re-project
the photography back onto
your original location. It’s as B
photo-real as one can possibly
get, because it really is based
upon what we’re capturing in
the camera.”
MARCH _ 2018 61
INCREDIBLY SPECIAL EFFECTS AWARDS
Actual Spitfire
planes were
combined with
RC miniatures.
AWARD
Most Realistic
Fake Dogfights
FILM
D U N K I R K
Director Christopher Nolan
doesn’t like visual effects, says
Oscar-nominated visual effects
supervisor Andrew Jackson. “It’s
about filming as much as possible.
So the starting point is, What can
we shoot, what can we build, and
how real can we make it?”
In Nolan’s World War II drama
Dunkirk, Jackson and his crew
were able to make things very
real. Especially in the case of
the dogfights. In those aerial
sequences, Jackson incorpo-
rated actual Spitfire aircraft with
large-scale remote-control min-
iatures with wingspans ranging
from six to 18 feet. The smoke
and spark effects in the fight were
coordinated from the ground—
which is where the remote pilots
were supposed to be as well. But
the range was too far, and they
couldn’t operate the miniatures
from land, which meant Jackson
had to take them up in the air. “In
order to capture one shot with
62 MONTH _ 2017
MARCH 2018
Pilots for the
remote-controlled
planes had to
be taken up in
helicopters when the
range was too far
from the ground.
Tom Hardy.
two radio-controlled planes, we
had to get the two pilots into a
helicopter, and the helicopter had
to have the camera mounted on
the nose.” The camera presented
its own problems: “We were
working with IMAX cameras
that were very old and not very
reliable. We were pushing them
quite hard, with all the vibra-
tions from being mounted on
helicopters. We had to take mul-
tiple breaks. The whole caravan
of planes and helicopters would
have to land to fix the cameras.”
For shots inside the cockpit,
the creative team used two-seat
planes. They dressed the front
to look like a Spitfire and then
positioned the actual pilot in
the backseat. Background shots
came from a separate piece of
equipment—a cockpit mounted
on a gimbal and set on the edge
of a cliff just south of L.A. “That’s
the real ocean and sky and hori-
zon behind them,” Jackson says.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
 AWARD

Production
Design Most
Worthy of an
Exclamation
Point
FILM
MOTHER!

Mother! director Darren Aronofsky’s

hallucinatory nightmare about a young,
imperiled wife (Jennifer Lawrence)
cycles through several metaphors,
including Biblical allegories and some
blunt commentary on environmen-
tal destruction. Her house cycles right
along with the movie, inexplicably mor-
phing into the setting for a riot, a rave,
and a ground war.
“We called this last part of the
movie the fever dream,” says produc-
tion designer Philip Messina. It takes
place in an actual house, not on a green
screen, so that the surreal environ-
ments would feel real to Lawrence. The
crew used the same house built on an
80-by-120-foot stage in Montreal for
many of the night scenes, which meant
they had to turn it over for each scene
as quickly as possible. “We worked in a
spiral,” Messina says. “As Aronofsky’s
team was shooting, we came in behind
them and redressed for the next thing.
By the time they got back to us, they had
a whole new backdrop to shoot in.”

AWARD Making a low-budget ghost costume for a movie is not as easy

as just throwing old bedding over an actor. Costume designer
Most Annell Brodeur found that out the first time she tested the king-
size sheet Casey Affleck wore for A Ghost Story, about a man
Convincing whose spirit is trapped on earth after he dies in a car crash. “If
you put your arms out straight, a king-size bed sheet doesn’t

Ghost cover an adult man,” says Brodeur. “Director David Lowery didn’t
want to see the person underneath. He wanted it to feel like an
abyss, so I had to figure out how to make it look like there was
Helmet
FILM
just a smooth head underneath, and then...vacancy.” So she
made a ghost helmet (right). The soft-foam helmet has black eye
inserts shaped like eggs and tilted out so that the bottoms splay
A GHOST STORY outward to keep the eyeholes from falling in on themselves
when the sheet is on top. The only other addition was a couple
of tiny stitches over the eyes. Even ghosts can use eyebrows.

@PopularMechanics MARCH
MONTH _ 2018
2017 63
INCREDIBLY SPECIAL EFFECTS AWARDS

sor Dennis Berardi

chose not to film in
water at all. Instead jectors around the
he used a technique space played an
called “dry for wet,” animated loop to
AWARD in which the actors mimic the reflection
act in fog. That of sunlight through
Foggiest way, Berardi says,
they could be “fully
water. Finally, the
actors were filmed
Water clothed, articulate,
and very expres-
at a higher speed—
between 36 to 48
FILM
sive. Plus, there’s a frames per sec-
THE SHAPE safety concern: If we ond instead of
O F WAT E R shot this underwa- 24—so that their
ter, we’d have had to movements would
have respirators and appear to be slowed
When you fall in divers standing by.” down. “We talked
love with a fish man, In an empty studio about having them
as a mute clean- space, Berardi and act in slow motion,
ing woman does in his team attached but that didn’t work
Guillermo del Toro’s rigs to actors Sally at all,” Berardi says.
AWARD The Shape of Water, Hawkins and Doug “They couldn’t really

Best Use some of your court-

ship will probably
Jones, pumping in
smoke to help cre-
approximate the
resistance that water
take place under- ate the murky view would have on their
of Paint water. How to shoot
those scenes, how-
you get when you
open your eyes
limbs.” The last step
was the hair, which
FILM ever, is a little less underwater. Pro- fog doesn’t lift or
LOVING VINCENT obvious. For most wave around the way
of the underwater water would. A hair-
moments, visual simulation animation
In Loving Vincent, a film about the final effects supervi- software took care
days of Vincent van Gogh, every scene of that.
was painted—not digitally painted,
but actually painted, with brushes
and easels in the style of the one-eared
Dutch master. The movie has 65,000
individual paintings and took seven
years and 125 painters to create.
“It’s probably the slowest form of ani-
mation that anyone’s managed to come
up with yet,” says co-director Hugh
Welchman. He and co-director Dorota
Kobiela spent four weeks shooting tra-
ditional actors in green-screen studios
while recruiting potential animators.
“The production was conceived and
based in Poland, and our original idea
was that we would just have painters
from Poland, but we only got 65. So we
started advertising around the world to
find more,” Welchman says. Five thou-
sand applications came in.
Loving Vincent utilized a technique
similar to what Richard Linklater used
in Waking Life. The difference is that
Linklater’s artists traced their images.
Loving Vincent artists took live-action
footage, which appeared on a monitor
over their canvas, then painted it free-
hand. For every scene.

64 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M


AWARD
Best Driving, Baby
or Otherwise
FILM
BABY DRIVER
To pump up the authenticity in a movie that
glamorizes getaway driving, there’s one easy
trick: Have the actor do the driving. Some of it,
at least. Baby Driver stunt coordinator Jeremy
Fry shared some insight.
MOVIE SECRETS!
No matter how good the actors might get at
driving, there are always moments they hand
over to the professionals. For the most chal-
lenging scenes, Fry and his team would use
what’s called a pod car (above)—an appara-
tus attached to the top of a vehicle that allows
a stunt driver to control the car from above.
“The steering wheel in the car is a dummy,”
Fry says. “Usually the pedals aren’t hooked
up to anything either.” Although it took some
pushing to get him to shatter the illusion of
the film, Fry did admit that there were a lot
@PopularMechanics
OTHER GREAT
EFFECTS IN
FILM
LONGEST FIGHT
The seven-minute stairwell
battle performed by Charlize
Theron in Atomic Blonde
B I G G E ST D I S A ST E R ( t i e)
The firestorms, hailstorms, and
lightning storms that devastate
the world after the satellite
system that controls the weather
is weaponized in Geostorm
B I G G E ST D I S A ST E R ( t i e)
Geostorm
LEAST TRADITIONAL
USE OF A CAMERA
The flash that momentarily
of scenes that used the pod car. “Unless it’s a
awakens the consciousness of
the people who’ve had their
brains replaced in Get Out
wider shot showing the whole car, it’s probably
not [the actor] driving.”
DRIVING TIP YOU CAN USE!
Most drivers are not close enough to the steer-
ing wheel. To have more control, Fry says,
“you don’t want to be right on top of it, with
B E S T O LY M P I C R O U T I N E
the wheel in your chest, but I like to sit a little
B Y A N O N - O LY M P I A N
closer than most people.” Margot Robbie, who
performed the first minute
AND ONE YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN’T! of Tonya Harding’s 1994
Getting a vehicle to spin 180 degrees requires routine in I, Tonya
coaching, but it’s not that hard to teach. “You
can show someone how to lock the wheels, how
not to do it, and different ways to move the
steering wheel to get different results from
the car,” Fry says. Head into your turn, then
yank the E brake. Turning the wheel even the
slightest bit will cause the car to rotate, but if
BIGGEST
you turn it too far the car won’t come all the
MERCHANDIZING PLOY
way around. The toughest part is having the The introduction of porgs in
confidence to trust yourself. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
MARCH _ 2018 65
When hurricanes Irma
and Maria destroyed
hundreds of homes and
displaced thousands of
people in the U.S. Virgin
Islands last fall, some
people sent money and
supplies. A smaller group
showed up. They left
their lives and families,
P H OTO G R A P H / I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T E E K AY N A M E

dealt with occasional

awkwardness and teta-
nus shots, to see what
they could do to help.
This is their story.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
DREW ALSTON

PAGE 66
P H OTO G R A P H / I L LU S T R AT I O N BY T E E K AY N A M E

Across the
islands on Novem-
ber 9, 2017, blue
FEMA tarps serve
as temporary cov-
erage for roofs
blown off by the
hurricanes’ wind.
A DISEMBODIED VOICE blasts through tinny speakers in every
room of the seven-hundred-foot-long ship. “Hey everyone, this
is your cruise director, Mr. Chicago!—a.k.a. Christian—here to
tell you all about tonight’s big happenings!” The men and women
around me sigh—they hear this every night. I just got here. Mr.
Chicago reads through a list of activities, and he’s really putting
some va-voom into it: a cornhole tournament! bingo! half-price
spa sessions! The ship, the Grand Celebration, owned and oper-
ated by the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line, is docked in Little
Krum Bay, on the island of St. Thomas, United States terri-
tory, under a sky that’s even bluer than on those travel-agent
pamphlets.
It’s 4 p.m. Passengers wander the decks. After Mr. Chi-
cago is done, incongruous, anonymous electronic dance music
pulses through the ship. The staff wears pressed white jackets.
They smile. A woman pushes a cart of cleaning supplies from
room to room. A waiter carries a plate of hamburger buns.
To look at them, this could be any family-friendly cruise that
stopped by St. Thomas so Mom and Dad could sneak away for
some rum.
Overheating in my khakis, reasonable for New England in
November, I walk down hallways covered with plastic sheeting
and up cardboard-covered stairs, protected from the dirt and
grime of work boots and unwashed hands. I walk past the pol-
ished brass sconces and railings, and into my room. The two twin
beds are pushed close together beneath an overworked air-condi-
tioning vent—too close together, is my first thought—their sheets
and blankets pulled taut. A tiny TV in the corner plays Avatar,
the James Cameron movie, with no sound, beside a porthole that
affords a view of the concrete dock below. Down there, National
Guardsmen stand with rifles hanging off their shoulders.
In the far bed, a middle-aged man rolls over to face the door
as I walk in.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” I say.
My new roommate works for FEMA, and he’s been down
here long enough that his scruff has moved firmly into beard
territory—forty days of his forty-five-day stint. He tells me that
he and the rest of his crew arrived in St. Thomas from Loui-
siana and some other southeastern states thinking they’d be
swinging hammers. Instead they sit behind desks helping
locals get funding to clean and rebuild. I set my small pack
in the corner. There’s a meeting coming up for the volunteers
who are here with All Hands, the organization I’ll be working
with. They have teams all over the world to help communities
rebuild. They help homeowners clear wreckage from the dark
corners of destroyed houses. They’re one of many such organiz-
ers of work—groups that try to coordinate and impose order on
the chaos of good intentions that hurricanes tend to produce.
By the time I leave they’ll formally combine with another one
68 MARCH _ 2018
of these groups to become All Hands and Hearts.
I’ll have to grab something to eat before the meeting, so I
change into a shirt that I think will give off the “chill guy” and
“hard worker” vibe all at once, something that doesn’t reveal
how weirded out I am by the fact that I was at JFK six hours ago
and now I’m on the Grand Celebration watching Avatar with a
stranger who works for FEMA while, all over this island, people
are apparently eating canned food and have no power.
I go with threadbare and floral, then walk out as my room-
mate rolls back over.
Like animals to the watering hole, through the dining hall
roam packs of workers wearing the same cargo shorts, graphic
tees, and goatees: Army National Guard, Conservation Corps,
World Bank, Department of Energy, FEMA, electrical line-
men, and people like me, who have no special skills but thought
they might be able to help. I sidestep the darting waiters and
check out the salad bar and the individually plated squares of
blueberry cheesecake. There’s a Pepsi machine and a roast
station, where a chef in a white coat and an unreasonably tall
toque smiles at me. I linger at the all-you-can-eat chicken teri-
yaki. The dance music throbs.
It’s all as inspiring as it is strange. About eight weeks ago, in
September, two Category 5 hurricanes ripped through the U.S.
Virgin Islands within two weeks—Irma, then Maria. They tore
the trees off the sides of mountains, washed the foundations
out from beneath steep roads, threw small boats and massive
yachts alike high up on the shore, and blasted the everyday
belongings of people’s lives into the backyards, into the streets,
and into the water. The storms also knocked out most of the
hotels, so when the people from faraway places like Miami and
Oklahoma and Vermont and Alaska bought plane tickets and
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

Volunteers demol-
ish the remains
of a condemned
preschool, sort-
ing recyclable
metal, wood, build-
ing supplies, and
children’s toys.
showed up at the airport at Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St.
Thomas, carrying duffel bags of work clothes, there weren’t
many beds. So FEMA rented a cruise ship. A floating hotel.
The help reflex is powerful. There was no formal request
from the people of St. Thomas for strangers to fly down and
clean up their island so they could try to put their lives back
together; who would even know how to ask for help like that? But
people flew down anyway. We got ourselves here, to this cruise
ship with seven bars and an all-you-can-eat buffet, so we could
work. The question is, now what?
A FEW OF THE PEOPLE I talked with before leaving home were
surprised I was going to the Virgin Islands. They had mostly
heard about the trouble in Puerto Rico. Some didn’t even real-
ize the islands are part of the United States, which St. Croix,
St. John, and St. Thomas have been since 1917 when the U.S.,
concerned with naval positions in the years leading up to World
War I, bought what were then known as the Danish West Indies
for $25 million.
The USVI have a nonvoting member in the House of Rep-
resentatives. The more than a hundred thousand residents
are Americans. They fight in American wars and pay Amer-
ican taxes in American dollars. Once a major stopping point
in the slave trade and a center for sugarcane and rum produc-
tion, the islands’ main industry now is tourism. Year-round,
people arrive on cruise ships and planes for the beautiful water,
the beaches, the national park, the drinks served in coconuts.
The All Hands volunteers meet every night to talk about
the day’s work and get their assignments for the coming day.
On the Grand Celebration, we meet in the Regal Room, a bar
on the ninth deck.
From the height of the ship, the damage on shore doesn’t
look so bad. A few overturned sailboats, some blue tarps on
roofs. From the Regal Room, it’s different. Some of my fifty
new coworkers showered in time for the meeting and sit in the
clustered leather chairs wearing Chacos and Birkenstocks,
T-shirts advertising the locations of other disaster-response
projects. Others hadn’t had time. They come covered in dry-
@PopularMechanics
wall dust, dark mud speckling their fronts, streaking past
the hem of worn-out shirts to the legs of ripped jeans, tan
November skin peering through holes. I listen to the names
of homeowners whose ruined houses we’ll work on tomorrow.
We’ll be muck-and-gutting.
As the meeting breaks up, I walk one level up to an outdoor
bar and order a beer from a bartender in a reflective rayon
Hawaiian shirt. As I sip from the cold can, I try to remember
the six rules of volunteering, which I just learned: 1. Don’t
die. 2. Never. Ever. Open the fridge. 3. Be flexible. 4. When in
doubt, smash it out. 5. Don’t lose the keys. 6. Don’t be a dick.
SINCE THE STORMS, there are no traffic lights on St. Thomas.
Wires and brackets swing from drooping lines like stems of
plucked apples over the bedlam of intersections. Cars move past
one another, their drivers leaning out open windows or staring
through improvised windshields of Saran Wrap and duct tape,
punctuating their movements with short friendly blats of the
car horn. It’s neighborly, even elegant. What should be a road-
block operates more like a square roundabout of unstopping
traffic, waves, thumbs-ups, and shouts of “Good afternoon!”
Power lines lay limp along the narrow shoulder. Pedes-
trians step on them as they try to squeeze by on the tight
mountain roads. There hasn’t been power on most of the
island for about two months now, and even in early November
the rumors are that it won’t really be back until Christmas at
the earliest. (As of early January, more than 90 percent of the
islands had power.) Our fifteen-passenger van slows down to
squeeze beneath a fallen power pole that crosses over the road
at a steep angle. Its underside is splintered where vehicles have
scraped past. We make it by, only banging into it lightly. The
taxi sign that once topped the van was knocked off weeks ago.
As we drive up a slope, our van’s engine sings a song of dis-
content. Bright blue tarps cover the seats. Long strips of duct
tape meant to keep those tarps in place peel off and stick to
our clothing. Around the tight corner of one narrow neigh-
borhood road, we pull up to the house of the day. It sits atop
spindly legs of cinder block, a loose pile of drywall and wood
trim in the front yard. We pour out, carrying hammers and
pry bars. I watch my coworkers, looking for the most confi-
dent one. I follow her into the house.
From the front door I can see straight through to the back
wall of the house. Twisted metal studs, floating electrical
boxes. Yesterday’s crew pulled out much of the drywall, its sur-
face a Jackson Pollock of dark-green mold. They had marked
six feet up from the ground and dragged a box cutter across
the sheets, hoping the water hadn’t damaged any higher.
Beneath that line, with hammers, fists, and crowbars, they
tore through the walls and chipped the drywall to the ground.
Dust hangs in the air like a haze, settling on arm hair like con-
struction-grade dandruff.
Our crew picks up where they left off. People climb ladders to
hack at drywall wedged behind door frames, pull screws from
studs, and push brooms to try to control the constant shower
of debris. I stand in the middle of the room, covered in protec-
tive gear, trying to figure out what to do. About fifteen feet up
the wall of the living room, a foot from the arch of the ceiling,
I see a piece of mail stuck to the wall, its envelope high on the
MARCH _ 2018 69
opposite wall. The water definitely went higher than six feet.
An hour into our work, Ashley Midgette, the All Hands proj-
ect coordinator in charge of the five muck-and-gut crews, strides
through the front door. Her long blond hair is pulled into a messy
bun behind her expressionless face. Volunteers pause mid-swing,
hammers poised above crumbling drywall, when she enters.
She greets the homeowner, and the two walk through the house.
Ashley flashes a light between the sheets of plasterboard on
each wall, hoping for good news where there hasn’t been much.
It’s worse than she thought. Mold. She cuts a few small holes
in previously untouched walls to look behind the boards, hoping
they might have escaped. But nothing did. Mold is what does
in so many of the houses. It can look innocent, a white powder
speckling all the way up the inside of the drywall, but you can’t
get it off. Every single wall has to come down, floor to ceiling.
The bathrooms will have to be ripped out.
The homeowner stands in the living room, eyes wide, not
saying much. She goes back outside, sits on the porch and looks
at the growing pile in her front yard, a house turned inside out
like a salted slug. She pulls her Iowa ball cap down over her eyes.
Barbra, a mother from Santa Fe, starts pulling out drawers in
the bathroom, dumping the contents into a black trash bag:
brushes, soaps, toiletries. Suddenly a muffled scream whumps
through her respirator. A rat lunges toward her from a bag of
clothespins. It’s bigger than a squirrel. It bounces off the floor
beside her and scampers into a darker corner of the bathroom.
The homeowner turns toward the door as Barbra rushes
out. Another volunteer carries the drawer
behind her. The mother rat left a nest of
babies, each no bigger than a thumb, tan-
In 2017, All
gled together. “Rats?” the owner says. Hands sent 4,300
She sounds horrified and mortified. volunteers to
communities around
the world.
AM E RI CO RPS (nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps): Along with organizing regional Con-
servation Corps and Disaster Response Teams, AmeriCorps also offers long-term service programs
around the country. Volunteering comes with a housing stipend and, because it’s a government
group, you can defer your student loans and apply for education grants while in the program.
70 MARCH _ 2018
She’s never had rats in her house. Her house never looked like
this, never had holes in the floor, blown-out windows, doors
that don’t close. She looks toward the neat pile of things she’s
trying to save on the kitchen counter—a stack of plates, trash
bags full of dry clothing, their patterns pressing through the
overstretched white plastic, kitchen appliances packed away
in their cardboard boxes. Then she looks over the tip of her
nose at the squirming pile of flesh, leans away, and murmurs,
“Rats.” She doesn’t want them to come back.
I step forward, tightening the work gloves around my wrists,
and carefully lift the baby rats out of the drawer. I pile them
together in a small plastic cup, and walk out to the driveway with
one of our shovels, wishing I had ear plugs.
AFTERNOON. A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY lifts a sledge ham-
mer over his head again and again and again, letting its heavy
head fall upon the things that once made up his life. His name
is Tyreek. His white T-shirt hangs off his broad shoulders, his
cheeks are thick with the last of the baby fat that he’ll shed in his
next growth spurt. He’s in eighth grade. We smash everything
into pieces small enough to stack in a corner of his front yard.
Tyreek takes a swing with all he’s got, and the hammer
bounces off the corner of a living room end table. His palms sting
and he rubs his hands together, the sledge handle leaning against
his hip. Another volunteer walks over to hand Tyreek a pair of
leather work gloves, which he pulls on and raises the sledge over
his head again. The corner of the table crumples beneath its fall.
In the small front yard, volunteers zip thick white Tyvek suits
over their shoulders so only a small moon of their face shows,
then squeeze their feet into rubber boots that look like they’re for
clamming. The house is full of standing water and whatever lies
beneath its surface. A litter of puppies runs around outside, dart-
ing between rubberized legs. The father dog gives
chase with a bum foot. Tyreek and I swing our ham-
mers at a pair of mold-covered barstools. He’s not
very talkative, but he smiles a little after a good hit.
His father stands on the driveway, a luckless
smile on his face. He’s tall and thin. His face is
gaunt, cheeks sunken in, a look that his wander-
ing unfocused eyes only intensify. Every so often
he takes a pull from the bottle in his hands, the
green glass just poking out of the spiral of brown
paper held tight by condensation and sweat. “I’m
getting sentimental. It’s hard to watch everything
you own ripped out of your house,” he says. He tries
to smile while he says this, a smile he must have
plastered on weeks ago, something to help him
survive and be strong in front of his son. But as he
speaks he looks at memory after memory dragged
out of his house, his head shakes side to side. Tyreek
slams his hammer through a stack of four plastic
chairs. White shards fly through the air, pinging
off the hard hats of a pair of volunteers who wrestle
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

a rain-heavy mattress to the top of the pile. Tyreek smiles, big.
A few volunteers sit down for a break and unzip the front of
their suits, overexertion on their faces. You always hope you
don’t have to put on the suit. The first time you pour out the
sweat that collects in the bottom of the rubber boots is unnerv-
ing. Tyreek and I pull plastic water bottles from the bottom of
a cooler. He drinks his quickly, silently. Like all eighth grad-
ers, he gives only a few short replies when asked about school.
Dark clouds approach, running parallel to the ocean. It’ll be
a warm rain, but more rain nonetheless. We rush to load power
tools back into the van, unused saws and drills, then buckets
and buckets of hand tools scrubbed with bleach to kill those
things we didn’t bring with us. Tyreek tells me not to worry, the
real rains come up from the ocean. He walks under the eave of
the garage next to his father.
We’ve done all we can for the day. A few volunteers walk
over to Tyreek and shake his hand, then his father’s. The man
still smiles, because it looks like he doesn’t know what else to
do or say to these good people, who came from the mainland to
demolish and haul away the walls that used to surround him as
he awoke each morning, dressed, made breakfast, sent Tyreek
off to school. He looks at each of us, intensity in his eyes, search-
ing for words, saying none.
Then, as we turn to walk back toward the van, he says, “You
guys got to get back here sometime for a barbecue.”
YOU HAVE TO MEET EVERYONE T W ICE, once with all of the
work gear on, and again when everyone looks human. You
match each voice to the quarter of a face you interacted with
all day. These exchanges at the end of the day are initiated with
half nods and tentative smiles.
I am curious about these people. I am here on assignment,
as a writer who has come to see what happens when, after the
destruction of a storm, people show up and try to be useful. But
these people left their lives, spent their own money to come
down here to work eight hours a day, six days a week. Instead
of being content texting $10 to the Red Cross like the rest of
the country, they packed a bag. I wasn’t sure this much good-
will was left in the world. So I want to know them a little, and
right now, they’re all going to a bar.
The volunteers call it Yellow Bar, for its offensive paint,
the color of a banana right before it gets its first brown spots.
Reggaeton plays through a set of speakers, drowning out the
hum of the generator that powers them and the halogen lights
near the grill. There are battery-powered lanterns on the out-
HAB ITAT FO R H U MAN IT Y (habitat.org): You
can always volunteer locally, but Habitat also offers
home-building trips around the world. Just pay the set
donation amount.
@PopularMechanics
door bar, useful for visits to the dark bathroom.
A volunteer named Jeff, around fifty, sits
next to me on the high stools. He’s not wearing
the dark sunglasses and sleeveless shirt from
the worksite. I ask him how long he’s been here.
He’s not sure, he says. He counts time in houses,
not days, and he’s in the dozens. He’s big into
fishing and has the pulled, tawny skin of some-
one who spends his time in the sun. He finished
building his dream home on the Jersey Shore just before Hur-
ricane Sandy ripped it apart. He lived in FEMA housing for a
while. That’s why he’s here. He knows what it’s like, he says.
Locals dance between the wooden picnic tables, and a few of
them try to snag volunteers as they walk by. These are sweet and
awkward exchanges. The volunteers didn’t know how to help,
but they arrived anyway, and the residents don’t know how to
say thank you, so they invite them to future barbecues or grab
their elbows for a dance. There is gratitude on both sides. Thank
you for helping. Thank you for letting us help.
“Remember everybody, the food up here is free and for
everyone, so come up and get some,” the DJ says over the
heavy beat, pointing to a folding table covered in metal trays
of chicken wings. Then he stops the music. “Everyone, where
are the All Hands volunteers?” The volunteers around me
let out a shout. “Well, this gentleman here wants to put $100
toward your tab for the good work you’re doing here, thank you!”
Beside him stands an enormous man, thick in the chest, a well-
groomed beard pointing down to a pair of sunglasses hanging
at his collar. He shakes hands with a few volunteers. You can’t
hear what they’re saying, but everyone is smiling. Someone
walks by carrying six beers to the cheering table. It feels like a
neighborhood block party.
AFTER MY THREE DAYS on the Grand Celebration, All Hands
finds a new home for us, closer to our work. We leave Mr. Chi-
cago for the reception hall of the Holy Family Catholic Church
in Tutu, a neighborhood that winds its way up the top of the
mountain across from Little Krum Bay. The ship had its vir-
tues—the room-cleaners, the drink-deliverers—but this suits
us better. Forest-green Red Cross cots are lined up in neat rows,
each in the middle of a duct-tape square beneath the glass chan-
deliers on the high ceiling. Fifteen box fans hum throughout
the room. I hope they’ll drown out any snoring. A few volun-
teers pull out bundles of paracord and throw them over the
high rafters to make laundry lines.
We keep our tools in the church’s basement, next to photos
of priests in dark robes and silver crosses, on janky shelves
made from two-by-twos and pallets. Hammers, sledges, a few
different shovels, brooms, a pile of trash bags that reaches up
to my neck, box cutters, duct tape, reciprocating saws, circular
saws, drills, screwdrivers, chainsaws, a massive demo saw with
a great spinning wheel that looks like it came off a BattleBot.
Gumbs, a local police officer, patrols our campus all night,
CO NVOY O F H O PE (convoyofhope.org): The organization
sent groups of ten to 20 to help distribute goods and perform
cleanup in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, and continues to
offer a range of service opportunities.
MARCH _ 2018 71
 After assessing the
every night. He smiles as he does his rounds, a Yan- damage, volunteers Nathan stands out front beside bright purple
kees cap on his head, his handgun bulging out the begin collecting flowers that look too delicate to have withstood the
the wreckage of
side of a skin-tight T-shirt. The church feels safe, but homes into manage- storm. He points to the low houses that surround his
you have to be ready for everything. Outside on the able piles before father’s in the tight neighborhood. Some look bet-
carrying it all to
street, dark under the powerless streetlights, cars a waiting dumpster. ter than others. Some don’t even have tarps to cover
rattle past, rat rods and motorcycles barking out their open eaves. “They’re staying with that family
their exhaust, small cars with bass that cuts through over there,” he says. “And they’re staying with that
conversation. A group of kids, racing downhill on bicycles, family over there.” A car rolls by slowly, and the driver waves.
laughing and screaming, cutting between cars, leaves a wake “People are different here than on the mainland. They say
of long honks. Any street in any city. hello to each other, they don’t complain. You can complain all
you want, but the Home Depot isn’t going to get building sup-
D A R RY L I S T H E PA S T O R of another church, the Church of plies any faster.”
the Apostles’ Doctrine, in the neighborhood next to Tutu. He We save what we can. One volunteer walks toward Nathan
built this church. It took six years. After the storms, when the with a drawer full of dry papers, but before he gets to him Nathan
church was spared, he opened it up to other islanders, not just tells him to just throw it all away. In the wall-less back room, chil-
his parishioners. Everyone needs a place to stay. His wife cooks dren’s toys cover the bed and spill onto the floor beside it. I pick
for all the people—their son Nathan says she’s best at cook- up a small suitcase to take to the dumpster. Beneath it, I see a
ing in bulk. When her children came together, some from the single, undamaged, wallet-size photo. In it, a small boy leans
islands, others from the mainland, to help with the cleanup, against a young woman, unaware of the world in which they now
they decided to have Thanksgiving early. In addition to her find themselves. Their smiles are bright and easy. I carry it with
family, she fed the holiday dinner to most of the people staying care in open hands, like the Eucharist, across the yard, and offer
at the church, and some of the National Guard, too. She didn’t it to Darryl and Nathan. They hold it in their hands, together.
like seeing them eating MREs all the time.
At Darryl’s house, a giant truck tilts its bed upward and AT NIGHT, THE DAY’S EXHAUSTION spreads out onto the Holy
begins to slide a dumpster down onto the street. The dumpster Family’s balcony. Groups move and grow, loose cliques that flex
pauses midair, too big to be so high, and one of the workers runs and change. The volunteers are data analysts and students,
out to pull a power line out of the way. He grips it with both hands paralegals and retirees. One man says he was disgusted with
and leans back sharply, wrestling the unwieldy wires, thick as the government response to the hurricanes so he told his bosses
soup cans, out of the way. Dumpsters are hard to come by on that he was leaving for a couple of weeks. “Not asked, told,” he
the island, but Darryl has lived in the neighborhood for a long says. With a plastic cup of wine in his hand and Tevas on his
time, and he knows people. He waves as the truck drives away. feet, another volunteer complains about his job in insurance.
Darryl’s roof sits in his backyard. The back wall of his house He wonders how he can convince his wife to walk away from
is a hole. Wood veneer panels peel off the hallway walls like the the office with him. One woman says she knows the value of
husks of a giant coconut. We move into the house, Darryl walking life after seeing members of her family struggle with Hunting-
ahead of us with a white washcloth draped over his head against ton’s disease. All she wants is to leave a good mark on the world.
the light rain. As he makes his way gingerly down the hall, he Sherry Buresh leads the All Hands volunteers for all projects
points to a few things he hopes we can save—a pink bicycle, the in the U.S. She calls it the Traveling Disaster Circus, a circus
bed frame in the master bedroom, then a long pause followed she’s led for fifteen years. She sits on the balcony of the church,
by...nothing. By the end of the day the dumpster men will be smoking one long Virginia Slim after another. The mosqui-
back, twice, to take away a full dumpster and leave a new one. toes don’t bother her, even when she sleeps. When a disaster

NATI O NAL VO LU NTARY O RGAN I Z ATI O N S ACTIVE I N ALL HAN DS (hands.org): Pay for your flight, and
D I SASTE R (nvoad.org): Tell VOAD your skills and where you’d All Hands covers the rest. The organization looks for
like to go. The organization serves as a hub for other active vol- underserved individuals and communities and is flex-
unteer groups and can place you with one that needs help. ible with volunteer commitment lengths.

72 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M


hits, Sherry wants to be standing among the wreckage, near
the most underserved people, within twenty-four hours. In the
middle of chaos, she knows how to survey an area to figure out
what’s needed and how many people it’ll take. Then she finds
a place for them to stay and finds people who can teach them
the skills they’ll need.
Earlier in the day, a group of volunteers demolished a pre-
school that had been standing unconvincingly. They pulled
out bag after bag of children’s toys, a mush of crayon draw-
ings, and child-size furniture. They moved to the corners of
the roof, dumped out a spaghetti of yellow rope from a Home
Depot bucket and tied it from the roof to the rear bumper of a
van driven by a local cabbie named Sonny. One volunteer fell
and landed palm-first on an upturned nail. She had to go find
a National Guardsman for a tetanus shot and then kept going.
From beneath a Philadelphia Eagles hat that matched the fad-
ing bumper stickers all over his van, Sonny slowly pushed on the
gas, engine revving, as the building leaned even further before
lurching forward and collapsing. Dust rose up to take its place.
Later we tore into the pile of debris and timber, hoping to
sort the recyclable metal from the reusable wood. One of the
volunteers, a United pilot, stopped for a moment to point up at
passing planes, naming their make, model, the type of engines.
He has a nephew in preschool, he said. When he and I talk about
the work that night, his voice catches. You work at these sites and
you see yourself, your family, your parents, your kids.
“You can’t help everyone,” Sherry says under the darken-
ing sky. Long drag. “But you can help that one, and that one.”
Exhale. “Watching them go from tears of despair and not
knowing what they’re going to do, and knowing you’ve made
Chainsaw crews
work carefully to
untangle a fallen
tree from a resi-
dent’s otherwise
inaccessible home
and backyard.
SAMARITAN ’ S PU RSE
(samaritanspurse.org): This
Christian group responds to
disasters in the U.S. and abroad.
@PopularMechanics
even a little difference to make their life better—it’s what keeps
me going.” She lights another cigarette, pulls it in deep, looks
up, and wanders off toward her cot.
NOAH, AN ARBORIST AND VOLUNTEER from Maine, hands
a man named Gary a pole saw. He gives Judith, another team
member, an enormous chainsaw with “Big Willie” Sharpied
across its top. Judith and Gary are from the Texas Conserva-
tion Corps, a disaster-response team. They work in tandem
with All Hands. Noah picks up the smaller chainsaw, this one
scrawled “Short Stop.”
As we walk up the concrete steps to the back of the house,
Noah pulls out his vape, which smells like Cap’n Crunch. When
All Hands heard he wanted to come down and volunteer, they
tried to get him on the next flight, because there are far more
downed trees than there are volunteer chainsaw experts. He’s
quiet, with an often-expressionless face made even more so by
sunglasses that cover half of it. We step over the gable that lies
across the stairs of the house. Nails stick up toward our boots.
Gary moves nimbly through the mess of each worksite, his
black ponytail swinging behind him—he’s an avid rock climber
back home. Judith recently got her master’s in German studies
but signed up for a year of disaster response. A red bandanna
keeps her hair back under her orange Stihl hard hat—I can’t
decide if the look is more Rosie the Riveter or Tupac. Noah stands
in the backyard, saw at his side, a slight grimace on his face. The
wind cleaved off the highest and thickest branches of a thirty-foot
tree, leaving jagged wooden spires, like the rack of a giant deer,
pointing toward the sky. The massive branches, some as thick as
a man’s torso, didn’t fall far. Most rest on, or are tangled in, the
canopy of lower limbs, each no thicker than my wrist. Hundreds
of pounds, barely held in the air, jitter in the breeze.
I want to dive in, to grab a chainsaw and start ripping through
the green timber, which is probably why Noah, who wears bright
orange protective chaps, doesn’t give me one. “I like being more
scientist than cowboy,” he says. He steps toward the tangle,
shuffling small branches from beneath his feet until he finds
sure footing. He raises the chainsaw and begins trimming one
branch at a time, watching how the rest of the wood reacts to each
cut. The chain, sharpened by hand each night, whips around
the bar. The engine screams, shaking slightly, as the bar pulls
through the wood. Noah pauses and steps back to yank on one
of the branches. Then he steps forward to cut again. Satisfied,
he shuts off the chainsaw and directs the worksite like a field
MARCH _ 2018 73
commander, pausing occasionally to pull on his vape.
One of the biggest logs leans on the roof near the only unbro-
ken window. Noah moves around the backyard looking for any
angle that might give him insight into how it will fall once free.
He moves toward the tree, starts the chainsaw, and begins cut-
ting. The chain moves easily through the wood. The rest of us
are frozen, waiting for the great fall. When the log has only a few
inches left, Noah pauses to look over the branch. He puts the bar
back in for the last few inches and cleaves the branch in two. The
branch falls quickly, wood cracking beneath it, picking up speed,
until one end catches firmly on the overhanging eave and the
other slows to a halt, caught by the soft hands of viny branches.
Unlike the rest of the demolished roof, the eaves are strong.
The log is stuck. We have to go cowboy. The four of us arrange a
rope around the branches and use it to pull the log down off the
roof in a lopsided tug of war. The window doesn’t even break.
The chainsaw crews are often the first to arrive at a site.
Heads pop out of windows and doorways as the two-stroke
engines roar to life in each neighborhood. Near the end of our
job, there was a stir from the house next door, “Good afternoon!”
yelled a man in a white T-shirt on the second-floor balcony. We
waved up to him with our gloved hands. “Thanks for the work
you guys are doing!” We weren’t even working on his house, but
before we could reply, he disappeared through a screen door and
returned balancing four cold bottles in his hands. He tossed a
couple down to Judith and me, the other two up to the roof to
Gary and Noah, then disappeared back into his home.
ON MY L AST FULL DAY IN T U T U, I walk past a house like the
others: blue tarp over the roof, a car with smashed windows
parked out front. An American flag flutters on a pole at the cor-
ner of the house. The bottom three stripes have torn free from
the grommets. Each waves independently of the rest of the flag.
“Good afternoon!” comes a call from the porch. I hadn’t
seen the man sitting there—the owner, is my guess. It looks like
he is melting into his chair, only the crop of thinning bleach-
white hair atop his head differentiating him from the back and
arms of his seat. We both raise our hands in greeting before I
move on to find a bite to eat.
A folding tent on stilts, the kind you might find yourself
standing under at a tailgate, sits at the corner of the street.
Two folding tables beneath it overflow with bananas, plan-
tains, limes, a pile of gnarled ginger. “Good afternoon,” I say
to the woman sitting behind the tables.
“Are you from the cruise ship?” she asks.
I’m confused for a quick minute. I stammer, almost saying
yes, then no, before I understand: A few days before, the first
actual tourist-filled cruise ship since the storms pulled into
Havensight Pier near Charlotte Amalie. The return of the life-
blood. People to buy her plantains.
“No,” I tell her. “I’m staying with some friends.”
I’ve seen this first wave of tourists roaming about, here to see
the island, to buy rum and dig their feet in the sand, to see if the
beaches are still the same. To get stories and pictures of shock-
ing ruins to share with their friends. They buy gifts for the folks
back home, then rush back to the ship for cocktail hour, where
their own Mr. Chicago will announce the night’s activities.
That afternoon, the team stands in what’s left of a house
74 MARCH _ 2018
that straddles the high ridge of the island. Down either side,
the calm blue ocean meets the equally blue and cloudless sky at
the horizon. A pleasant breeze keeps us cool. Diana, the owner,
stands on top of her bedroom door, its honeycombed core ooz-
ing onto the floor of what used to be her kitchen. A blue FEMA
tarp stands in for the missing roof overhead. As the sun shines
through it a haze of blue falls upon everything, even the roaches
the size of Almond Joys that scatter out of the piles of debris.
Diana moves about the house, too short to grab the broken
things she sees atop her cupboards from across the room. Her
frilly shirt, tights, and shoes with the heels stamped down
are all black. She looks at everything over the top of her small
glasses. She and her roommate, Jane, painted the walls of
their house just a few months ago, covering up the “baby-poop”
brown that the previous owner had all over the house. The paint
flakes off now, great rubbery swatches falling, like everything
else, to the sludge-covered floor.
“It’s almost so much you want to pack up and go away. But
this is our home,” Diana says as we fill trash bags. With her
hands on her hips and a wisp of hair sticking to her face as
it pokes out from a short-brimmed black cap, she scans the
room: “Don’t go looking in the trash if you think you threw it
out already, but if you see a black Croc that looks like this”—
she raises a single shoe above her shoulder.
I had seen that Croc. I remembered kicking it out of my way
as I looked over my shoulder, walking backward down slicked
steps carrying a mildew-green couch out to a debris pile. I sneak
out of the kitchen and down to the trash heap. The Croc isn’t
near the couch anymore, so I start untying black trash bags,
digging through waterlogged books whose covers peel off and
stick to one another. Jane told me some of the books’ charac-
ters came to her in a dream, asking why she hadn’t saved them.
I finally see it, under some palm fronds. I walk back into
the kitchen, sidestepping another volunteer using a snow
shovel to scoop up broken glass and mud. Triumphantly, I
raise it overhead.
Diana jumps into the air clapping. She holds both shoes
together in front of her, not seeing anything else. She actu-
ally twirls around and says to no one and everyone, “I just feel
like there is a weight off my shoulders.” A long pause, and then:
“Before it seemed insurmountable, now it seems manageable.”
She places both shoes on a modest pile of potentially sal-
vageable things in the corner—a few barstools, plastic bins
that floated atop the rising water, a folded-up ab machine. She
walks into her bedroom and sits on the edge of her moldy bed
beside a few stretched-out dresses she hopes to save. She lets
out a long breath, one that’s been in there a while. She rises to
her feet, walks back out into the living room, picks up a fresh,
black trash bag, and shakes it open.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
 CLEAN WATER
The number of natural IS SCARCE .
disasters has steadily Even if sewage and water-
delivery systems are down,
increased since the there’s often plenty of water
available. Look in build-
1940s, and quadrupled ings’ plumbing systems,
since 1980. Here are Hobel says. Potable water
will be trapped in the pipes,
some of the best ways to so see if you can locate the
release valve. If you can’t
keep yourself safe in life- find safe water, Hobel sug-
threatening situations. gests making the following
simple filter:

Burn a fire. When the

ashes are cool, grind
YOU LIVE IN AN AREA PRONE TO
down the resulting
WILDFIRES AND HIGH WINDS. charcoal until it’s a
Before fire season, move combustibles powder. The grains
away from your house. Fences and dry vegeta- should feel like con-
tion give fires a place to grow, says Jonathan fectioners’ sugar.
Cox at Cal Fire, California’s Department of (Don’t use charcoal
from someone else’s
Forestry and Fire Protection. Hosing down
fire. You don’t know
your house won’t help much, either, he says: if they burned a poi-
“The way a lot of these homes burn is through sonous plant. They
something called ember cast, when embers also might have peed
from the fire fly over and drop little fires on it to put it out.)
everywhere. With a huge ember cast, hosing down your house doesn’t do much.”
If the fire is around you and you can’t escape, you don’t have many options, says Shane Find some sort of
Hobel of the Mountain Scout Survival School. If there’s a pool or a pond nearby, jump in and receptacle. An old
plastic water bottle
try to wait it out there. Otherwise, if you have time, dig a trench that’s two to three feet deep
will do. Cut off the
bottom of the bottle,
down in the trench. It’s risky, but at least you’ll have a chance. then use a nail to
poke a hole in the
cap and screw the
cap on the top of
the bottle. Turn the
YOUR FEET ARE COLD AND WET.
bottle upside down.
Take off your shoes, put a plastic bag on Add a few inches of
each foot, and then put powdered charcoal
to the bottle, then
shoes, Hobel says. The BUT YOU FORGOT add water.
plastic will capture the A CAN OPENER.
heat your body generates. Most canned goods consist of a 1⁄16-inch The water will slowly
piece of tin sealed over the top of a thicker can. filter through the
charcoal and drip
Find a brick and aggressively rub it back and
out of the cap. Put a
forth on the rim of a can, Hobel says. The brick bandanna or another
But they’ll be warm. works like sandpaper, and the top will open. cloth over the hole
to filter out any bits
of charcoal. (If you’re
experiencing intesti-
nal distress—and you
YOUR HOME WAS DESTROYED, AND EVACUATION IS NOT AN OPTION .
very well might be,
According to Hobel, shelter is your first priority. Lay down cardboard and other materials to since your body goes
insulate yourself from the ground. (Even in summer, the ground can have temperatures that into different kinds
lead to hypothermic conditions.) Use tarps, blankets, pillows—whatever you can find—to build of shock in these sit-
the shelter on that layer. It should be as low to the ground as possible, and you shouldn’t be able uations—eat a little
to sit up when you’re inside, Hobel says. Other than the airflow you need to breathe, block all bit of the charcoal.
openings to keep cold air from coming in. It’s a matter of conserving heat. A lot of people don’t It’ll help bind you
back up.)
realize that their bodies are heat sources, Hobel says. You’re almost 100 degrees. Trap that heat
around you instead of letting it rise in a tall shelter, and you won’t need a fire to stay warm.

76 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 Every other Friday, be entertained and enlightened
by the editors of your favorite magazine.
Hosts Jacqueline Detwiler and
Kevin Dupzyk explore ideas,
products, hacks, tricks, projects, and
techniques that are guaranteed to
make your life easier. (Jacqueline is a
neuroscientist! Kevin is a great guy!)
The Most Useful Podcast Ever is an
entirely original, 25-minute, biweekly
audio program that’s perfect to
listen to while doing yardwork,
driving, washing dishes, running,
jogging, walking . . .

H E RE ’S H OW TO G ET IT:

SUBSCRIBE

Go to the iTunes store Subscribe to Get automatic Enjoy

or popularmechanics. The Most downloads every time
com/podcast Useful Podcast Ever a new episode airs

Learn everything from lawn-care secrets to the best way to hang a TV

to the proper way to sear a steak. Also: On one episode, for reasons we now forget,
Jacqueline and Kevin had an on-air push-up contest. (She won.)
 The earthquake in Iran, Hurri-
cane Irma in Puerto Rico, California
wildfires. As vital as food and clean
water, catastrophe response means
getting aid workers and civilians
back online. But could the tools
used to create emergency internet
be used to connect remote places?
 FILSON NEOSHELL
RELIANCE JACKE T
It breathes, it
stretches, it keeps you
dry and warm. The
Reliance jacket applies
Filson’s rugged-as-hell
standards to the light
and packable Polar-
tec NeoShell material.
$395

5.11 APE X BOOT 8"

A waterproof mem-
brane lining protects
your skin from nas-
ties in the water, and
a Vibram sole keeps
your footing sure.
$250

YE T I PANGA
100 DUFFEL
Keep your life dry with
this rugged water-
proof duffel. Wear it
like a backpack when
you’re on the move, or
empty it and use it as
a last-resort flotation
device. $400

TOMMY JOHN
GO ANY WHERE
UNDERWE AR
Afford yourself basic
comfort when the
world goes sideways.
This boxer brief is
antibacterial and fast
country outdoorsmen, hurricane relief drying so you can
wash and then wear it
workers, former military, and, in one
again quickly.
case, all of the above. $25

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
B EN GOLDSTEIN KUIU CHUGACH NX
R AIN PAN T S
KUIU specializes in
WATERPROOF
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hunting clothes and
HOME EMERGENCY KIT
KEY

works with SEAL

Team Six. These
EVERYDAY CARRY
durable all-season
waterproof pants
TAKE CAMPING
stretch and vent.
$250

80 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

GOAL ZERO BOULDER
100 SOLAR PANEL and
YETI 1000 LITHIUM
POWER STATION
For reliable power, buy
Goal Zero, says former
Army Ranger Marty
Skovlund. “I took a
smaller unit to Afghani-
stan to stay charged
up.” This generator’s
1,045-watt-hour lithium
battery can charge your
phone 50 times, power
medical equipment, or
keep your refrigera-
tor running. Recharge it
with a 100-watt Boulder
panel. Get two for heavy
use. $250 and $1,300

GERBER
DOWNR ANGE
TOMAHAWK
It’s a hammer, pry
bar, and axe. Get into,
or out of, nearly any-
thing: cars, windows,
attics when there
are 20-foot flood
waters. Later, use it
to split firewood at
camp. $328

Block rain and sun—whichever is beat-

ing down—with this flexible ripstop
ENO FLE XFLY tarp. Collapsible poles are included to
make a lean-to and the set weighs just
U T IL I T Y TARP under three pounds. Before you pack
up, know how to tie the half-hitch, bow-
line, square, and slip knots so it doesn’t
collapse in the middle of a storm (learn
them at animatedknots.com). $135
 Loop
the par
through acord
this ho
and aro le
und
a stick
to make
your hu
nting
spear.
GOTENNA MESH ANTENNAS
Currently used across Puerto Rico.
Sync a goTenna to your phone to send
messages and your location to another
goTenna via UHF and VHF frequencies.
The new Mesh network turns every
unit into an encrypted relay station to
extend the range. $179
MIDL AND ER310 E+RE ADY
EMERGENCY CR ANK WE AT HER
R ADIO
This radio sold out last hurricane sea-
son. A crank provides backup manual
power (biceps not provided) for the
radio, flashlight, and USB outlets. $60
IN T H E A F T ER M AT H of natural disasters, contaminated drinking
water is one of the biggest dangers. “There’s a ton of pathogens in water
that cause moderate to life-threatening gastroenteritis,” says Bruce Gor-
don, coordinator of water, sanitation, hygiene, and health at the World
Health Organization. Areas with on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks,
are most likely to put fecal matter into circulation in post-hurricane or
-tsunami floods. But the breakdown of infrastructure is also a threat. An earthquake or tor-
nado can destroy a pipe system and cut off delivery altogether, and even minor cracks can allow
in contaminants. When quality is in question, Gordon recommends filtration and then chlo-
rine dioxide tablets. ¶ Microfilters are the easiest personal water treatments. Water passes
through an ultra-thin membrane, whose pores are small enough to keep out dirt, bacteria,
and protozoan cysts. Viruses are too small for most filters, says Gordon, but chlorine dioxide
will knock them out. The filters we tested and picked are sturdy, portable, and intuitive—as
useful on long backpacking trips as they are after a hurricane hits. —Eleanor Hildebrandt

M C KENNA SINGLE-BARREL
BOURBON
Aged ten years. Best served neat.
Good on cuts. $30

K ATADYN BEFREE SAW YER ONE-GALLON MSR GUARDIAN

G-SHOCK MUDMASTER WATCH SYS T EM GR AVI T Y FILT ER The Guardian’s
The BeFree’s 0.1-micron Hang the one-gallon bag 0.02-micron filter is
This shock-resistant watch can never among the only to block
get too dirty. It also measures baro- (0.0001mm) membrane and gravity forces the
catches all pathogens water down through tub- most viruses in addition
metric pressure to tell you if another to larger pathogens. The
storm is coming. If air pressure drops, except viruses. Sans water, ing and the Sawyer MINI
it’s a mere two ounces, filter, rated to 0.1 microns. floating prefilter and hand
head for shelter. $750 pump let you move more
and the bottle rolls up for The MINI filter can also be
compact storage between removed and screwed onto water, faster. And the self-
refills. $40 a standard-size disposable cleaning filter eliminates
CRK T T SR KNIFE water bottle. $40 maintenance. $350
“I always carry a fixed-blade knife,”
says Matthew Sanders, a retired Army
Ranger who worked the aftermath of
Irma and Harvey. “It’s good for a lot of
jobs, and I can tie it to a stick for a hunt-
ing spear.” His knife requirements are
simple: a stainless-steel blade around
four inches or less, to abide by most Disaster prep is a state of mind, so don’t lose yours.
state knife laws. The 4.4-inch TSR

has a compartment in the handle that
stores sewing needles, fishhooks, and
line. The sheath holds a magnesium rod
to spark a fire, a ceramic sharpening
edge, and a signaling mirror. $90
BL ACK DIAMOND S TORM
HE ADL AMP
Waterproof, dustproof, and shines
for 40 hours on the 350-lumen High
setting—half the brightness of a car
headlight. $50
FIVE T EN ACCESS KNI T SHOE
Your clothes should keep you dry or
dry fast, says Sanders. Built to move
over dry and wet land, this amphibious
shoe dries in as little as an hour on a
hot day. $130
W
hen I started putting together my
first survival kit, I just collected
whatever weird stuff I could find—
like tablets that would protect my thyroid from
nuclear fallout. My mindset changed when my
first daughter was born. I realized I needed a
more practical end-of-the-world plan, with
equipment that would be useful for things that
might actually happen. Nuclear war is probably
not in store for 2018, and if it is, I’ll just open a
window. I don’t want to live through that.
There are two scenarios everyone—prep-
per or not—should count on: losing power and
being stranded in your car. I’m a big believer
in backup power. I keep an emergency power
supply plugged into an outlet in my apart-
ment; it has a trickle charger so I can forget
about it until my block goes dark. In my car,
I keep extra blankets, a LifeStraw portable
water filter, lighters, and Millennium energy
bars. It’s not the Four Seasons, but at least my
family will be able to survive 48 hours in our
Honda Pilot.
One thing to consider: You need to be with
your gear when a disaster strikes. When Sandy
hit in 2012, our whole family was in Connect-
icut while all my gear was in Manhattan. My
wife had a good laugh. These days, my every-
day bag is a waterproof Showers Pass backpack
where I stash a small set of screwdrivers, mul-
titool, glass breaker, three flashlights that use
the same type of batteries, and a spool of Kev-
lar thread, all sorted in plastic bags. There’s a
spoon and fork in there, too, because if I have
to eat an MRE for dinner, I might as well look
civilized while I do it.
—Wylie Dufresne, Michelin-starred chef,
owner of Du’s Donuts, prepper

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 83

BUILD
YOUR
OWN
GUITAR
BY H EN RY ROBERTSON

Although I’ve
played guitar for
decades, and I
can spend hours
admiring the
craftsmanship of
a Fender, I’d never
considered building
one. I didn’t even
know I could try.
Until I met Jeff.

P H OTO G R A P H BY A L L I E H O L LO WAY

84 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

“Please work,” I mutter.
Over the last three months senior home editor Roy Berendsohn and
I have been building a guitar in the Popular Mechanics workshop.
With so many roadblocks behind us, we can’t wait to finish this Fig. 1

damn thing. Now, perched against my knee are two halves of our
guitar body—a worn-down clarinet case—connected by a dangling BODY AND BRIDGE
PLACEMENT
wire. Despite the ragged appearance, the parts are all assembled,

J
eff uses clarinet cases because
the guitar is strung, and it’s time for a sound check. With sweaty
they’re roughly the same size as a
hands I connect a quarter-inch cable from the guitar’s output jack guitar body. But not just any clarinet
to my amp, flip the on switch, wait a minute for the amp’s tubes to case will do. Many aren’t long and wide
heat up, and flick the standby. I strum out a big open G chord, Pete enough to span our scale length and
hold the frame, or short and narrow
Townshend–style, throwing my whole arm into it. enough that they would be comfortable
to play. I found a decrepit 1970s clari-
Nothing. Just the muffled scratch guitars, a 1960 Gibson ES-125 and a net case, shipped from France, for $41.
of strings resonating against synthetic 1963 Gibson LG-0, were gone. Rather The first thing we did was gut the velvet
leather. Did we solder to the wrong than wallow in his loss, or buy expen- interior with a crowbar, and then we
post? We couldn’t have. We consulted sive replacements, Jeff tinkered with a added 2x3 support beams on the top
experts, watched videos, sent pictures junk guitar for a couple of weeks before and bottom of the case (Fig. 1).
to the pickup manufacturer. Was our getting the courage to build his own. For a guitar to function, the strings
humbucker too low to pick up an audio Jeff doesn’t really work from a plan. need to be the proper length, called the
signal? We’ll have to check everything. Since these aren’t standard guitars, scale length, and the distance from the
Again. there’s no blueprint to follow. Even on inner edge of the nut (where the strings
Guitar has been my passion since his tenth guitar build, he says, he still start to run down the neck below the
I was 12 years old. As part of my quest made mistakes. “It’s a lot of trial and a tuning pegs) to the center of the 12th
to grow as a musician, I’ve analyzed whole shitload of error,” he says. fret has to be the same as the distance
and broken down pieces of music on My first step was to enlist help. I between the center of the 12th fret
a molecular level, exploring note for don’t have much woodworking experi- and where the strings meet the sad-
note why something sounds good, how ence, but I do have Roy. And although dles in the bridge. Using my Gibson
musicians choose the notes they do, he’s never built a guitar, he has built ES-339 as a reference, we cut an open-
and how they achieve desired tones nearly everything else. ing in the body with an oscillating tool
and textures. Why not break a physi- For a week, all we did was plan. We and joined the neck to the body near
cal guitar down the same way? While drew diagrams, only to spot an issue, the 17th fret. That gave us enough over-
I’ve developed a deep appreciation start over, and draw more diagrams. lap for the neck to grip the body, but
for guitar craftsmanship, I had never I scoured eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy not so much that we ran out of room to
even done any of my own repairs. I was for suitable guitar bodies. Everything mount the bridge when we accounted
too afraid I’d mess something up. But seemed to have a problem: too short, for scale length. After that, position-
then one of our writers, Chad Stokes, too narrow, too many huge cracks. ing the humbucker—a type of pickup,
mentioned a guy he knew named Jeff Each time I felt close to buying some- the part that converts string vibrations
Conley. Jeff’s a designer at Google and thing, we’d convince ourselves that it to an electrical signal—would be sim-
a singer-songwriter who, for the past wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t work. What ple. Specific placement affects timbre
ten years, has been building his own I eventually realized is that there is rather than functionality. Even if we
guitars—mostly out of clarinet cases a big difference between perfect and weren’t perfect, it would still work. The
but also salad bowls and Yeti bottles. I workable. We were never going to find closer you put the pickup to the bridge,
asked Jeff to teach me. the perfect pieces. If we kept looking the more trebly your tone will be.
Jeff’s foray into guitar building was for them, we’d be stuck in the plan- The guitar didn’t look like much
forced on him, in a way. After playing a ning phase forever. What we needed to at this point. After all that theorizing
club gig in Cape Cod he came out to his do was find something close. And then and planning I was starting to feel dis-
car to discover that his most precious make it work. We needed to start. heartened. Especially when people

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 85


Fig. 2
would ask me how things were coming.
Without something to show them, I felt
like we hadn’t accomplished much.
BRIDGE ATTACHMENT
AND PICKUP
A
round the office, we see Roy as
this infallible guru. But even
he gets frustrated. The differ-
ence is, he doesn’t let it stop him. When
I couldn’t see past the problem, Roy
didn’t just give the solution to me; he
led me to it, so it felt like I was building
the guitar with his help, instead of the
other way around.
With the upper support bar mounted
to the neck on the front of the body,
we had to deal with the airspace in the
back of the body, between the support
and the top of the case. Roy grabbed dif-
Fig. 4
Fig. 3
86 MARCH _ 2018
ferent pieces of scrap from the shop
until he found one that filled the gap,
then crosscut it to a length wider than
the support so that we could screw the
bridge through the case and into solid
wood (Fig. 2). On the pickup, though,
instead of the support bar being too low,
it was now too high. We had to cut out
a notch in the support with a circular
saw, then cut it again (and again) when
it wasn’t quite deep enough (Fig. 3). It
wasn’t until a couple days later that I
realized the pickup came with adjust-
able springs, allowing you to control
its height (Fig. 4). Like Jeff says, a lot of
trial, and even more error. If I ever want
to adjust my pickup height to alter the
loudness of the strings, I can’t do it with-
out significant work, but thankfully we
have it at a good spot.
If we had had a planer and bigger
pieces of lumber, I would have pre-
ferred to fill out the whole case with
wood. That would mean routing cav-
ities for our pickup and electronic
connection, but it would also have
improved the guitar’s sturdiness and
sustain. But I wasn’t so worried about
perfect anymore. I just wanted some-
thing that worked. I could adapt to the
imperfections.
WIRING
I J
was most anxious about the elec-
tronics. I’d never soldered and I
was scared I’d create a short, shock-
ing myself if I messed up. The first part
was easy enough: We drilled a hole
with a bit the size of the output jack
and screwed the jack in place from out-
side the case. Jeff doesn’t use volume
or tone pots—the little knobs on the
guitar body that give you precise con-
humbucker
metal-sheathed wire
stripped wire
soldering point grounding fins
post/contact
jack
guitar cable
trol—in his guitars, and we wanted to
follow his stripped-down model. But
I couldn’t find any wiring schematics
online that didn’t use at least a volume
pot. This made me nervous enough
that we stopped working for a few days
while I searched for an appropriate dia-
gram. When I found nothing, I called
Jeff. Like Roy, he doesn’t get hung up
for long. He also doesn’t complicate
things. All we had to do was solder one
point to connect the output jack to the
pickup, then create a ground path back
to the amplifier by crimping the wire to
the fitting post (above).
STRINGS
eff had warned me that you don’t
know what these guitars are going
to do until you string them up. The
neck could bend under the tension,
rendering it unplayable, or the intona-
tion could be off. So after we’d added
the tuning pegs and went to string the
guitar up, I was already a little nervous.
On top of that, despite Jeff’s advice
to use a floating bridge and tailpiece,
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
THE PLANS
nut
2x3 upper
support
neck
strap
fitting
support
block
2x3 lower
support
I’d opted for a Fender hardtail. With
a floating setup, nothing is screwed
down. The tension of the strings keeps
the bridge in place. This lets you adjust
intonation at any time. But I wanted a
hardtail bridge because I’m typically a
lead guitarist, and I wanted something
that could take the tension of intense
I
string bends and aggressive picking.
Of course the intonation was off. At
the 12th fret every note was too sharp.
Apparently we’d placed the bridge too
far back on the body. You do have about
a half-inch of wiggle room to change the
scale length if you adjust the saddles,
but even after screwing them as far for-
ward as they could go, the notes were
still sharp. When we measured the
scale length, I’d mistakenly measured
from the front of the saddle instead of
the middle. Even so, the intonation is
not horrendous, so I decided to keep it
as is. At some point, I’d like to fix it. I’ll
have to unscrew the bridge, fill the holes
with wood glue, bore new holes slightly
forward on the body, and, if the piece
of wood filling the gap under the case
isn’t long enough, open up the case and
adjust it, too. It was an easy mistake,
but that doesn’t mean I’m not disap-
pointed in myself for making it.
Slightly sharp or not, I finally had
a playable instrument. I strummed
it a few times unplugged. I was pretty
pumped to find that it played at a com-
fortable action—the string height
@PopularMechanics
support
humbucker
block
bridge
support
block
upper
case
jack
lower
case
above the fret board—with minimal
fret buzz and surprisingly decent sus-
tain. It was time to plug in. And then,
well, you know. Nothing.
WIRING (AGAIN)
was crushed. Roy suggested check-
ing with his brother, Paul, who has
a background in electrical engi-
neering and has repaired a lot of amps
over the years. After looking at a few
pictures, Paul noticed that our solder
wasn’t sticking properly. He posited
that the contacts were plated with
chrome and nickel. Their surfaces
were too smooth and dense to bond. We
roughed them up a bit with sandpaper
and tried again. The solder stuck.
This time, the guitar worked. Elec-
trified myself, I hammered out the
intro to “Johnny B. Goode.” With only
one pickup and no tone controls, the
guitar isn’t super-versatile, but the
sound is rounder and less tinny than
I expected. It’s sturdy. I can wail on
it, holding out long notes, and pluck
out choppy percussive licks. I can play
it soft or hard. The synthetic leather
didn’t even deaden the dynamics the
way I thought it would. Obviously my
guitar doesn’t have the fat, rich sus-
tain of a Les Paul, but it does have a
raw, grainy dynamism, and that’s pure
rock ’n’ roll.
THE PARTS
I’m a tone snob, so the prospect of building
a guitar out of a clarinet case—not exactly a
coveted tone wood—was nerve-racking.
I made up for that by buying good parts.
PICK UP The Seymour Duncan SH-1b
’59 humbucker reduces
feedback and gives a little
oomph to the sound, com-
pared to a single-coil pickup.
It also retains a vintage flair
and dynamic response from
the guitar.
BR IDGE I like the Fender hardtail
Strat bridge because you
can adjust the saddles
about half an inch, giv-
ing you wiggle room to
ensure proper intonation.
It’s ruggedly constructed
from steel and nickel, really
anchors the strings, and
won’t fall apart on you.
T UNING Never skimp on tuners,
M ACHINE unless you want to go hor-
HE A DS ribly out of tune every five
minutes. I went for a set of
time-tested Grovers, which
have a 18:1 gear ratio for
precise control.
STRAP Dunlop Dual-Design Strap-
BU T T ONS loks come with locks so
your strap won’t fall off mid-
song—and you won’t break
the guitar you spent months
building.
Instead of a genuine
NECK Fender, which can run
more than $200, I bought
a Strat-esque neck. It’s
fine. The two-way truss
rod helps prevent warping
and can be adjusted with
an Allen wrench. I’m also a
fan of the bright, reso-
nant sound quality of the
maple fingerboard, and the
way the dimensions of the
22-fret neck feel similar
to a classic Strat. Plus, the
square heel made for an
easier connection between
the neck and body.
MARCH _ 2018 87
 E A S Y W AY S
TO DO
HARD THINGS

ON MEASURING
AND MARKING
Quality work starts with careful
measurement, accurately marked.
These tips will help, as will a No. 2
pencil, whose medium-hard lead
leaves a readily visible line.

To draw an accurate line with a

ruler, hold a freshly sharpened pen-
cil at an angle, so the point meets
the work surface precisely where
the ruler does.

The Multifarious
Usefulness of Sugru
Here are a few household chores I’ve accomplished with Sugru, the moldable silicone-
rubber glue: reinsulated an exposed low-voltage wire on a gadget charger, recoated a rusty
part in the dishwasher, created two “locking nuts” that keep a floor mat in my car from
sliding around, replaced a knob on my wife’s KitchenAid, plugged a hole in a rubber boot. Ensure the accuracy of a mea-
surement from an edge by abutting
Sugru comes in ten colors, in five-gram packets. It feels slightly tarry when you first roll the edge with a stop block, then
it around in your hands, but it’s easy to shape and it isn’t messy. It remains workable for holding the ruler against it.
half an hour, then hardens in a day, and once cured stays permanently stuck to whatever
you’ve stuck it to. (A knife can remove it, though.) The retail price works out to something
like $250 a pound, but it’s infinitely useful. And unused packets last for several years if you
store them in your refrigerator. But you’ll find uses long before that. —David Owen

Sandpaper Prevents
S U G R U : I L LU S T R AT I O N BY M O R N I N G B R E AT H

M
Level Slippage FRO Holding a ruler on edge, so its
graduations meet the work sur-
When you’re holding a long level
face, improves accuracy. With a
tape measure, hook the end over
one side of the workpiece, then roll
its blade to meet the surface.

EXPIRED CARDS ARE

PERFECT FLOATS

per in half and putting it—grain side don’t just throw them away. They’re perfect
out—between the level and the wall.
Friction keeps the level still.

88 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 STARTER
ARTER SET
10 CIGARS $
29.99
*

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cedar-lined humidor, this irresistible special offer allows
you to save a massive 85% off MSRP! Take home favorites
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*Plus 4.99 s/h. PA residents add 6% tax; taxes on orders shipped outside of
PA are the responsibility of purchaser. First-time purchasers only. One per
customer. No sales to anyone under the age of 21. For more information see
www.CIGAR.com/ageverify. Offer expires 4-15-18.

1911 Spillman Drive | Dept. #26 | Bethlehem, PA 18015

Belt Kits!
plete Timing
Com
 Learn woodworking
skills, basic electronics, OU R BU I LD E R
and soldering as you Eleven-year-old
Oliver Stifel from
build a machine Pennsylvania.
that draws on its
own using markers
and vibration.

D I F F I C U LT Y

EASY REASONABLE HARD

Time: 25 minutes Ages: 8+

MATERIALS

1 1-inch x 6-inch cedar

board
1 1-inch x 2-inch scrap
board
1 Uxcell mini-vibra-
tion vibrating motor
2,750 rpm DC
1.5-6V*
1 CR-2032 battery
holder*
1 CR-2032 battery*
Hot-melt glue
2 Rubber bands
Wood glue
120-grit sandpaper
Crayola Super Tips
washable markers
*Available on Amazon

T O OLS

Guide
• 3½-inch holesaw
the
• drill
scribbler with
• compass
your hand or
• miter saw, jigsaw, or
let it go and
handsaw and miter box
see what it
• clamps creates.
• 13⁄64-inch twist drill bit
• soldering iron
• hot-glue gun

90 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 paper
motor

battery
21⁄2" holder
31⁄2" disc

THE PLANS

11⁄2"

marker

Fig. A

rubber band

31⁄2" disc

Fig. B
DIRECTIONS

on the perimeter of the

2½-inch circle you drew.
KID PARENT PARENT
AND KID Space the marks about
13⁄16 inches apart, but there’s
no need to be exact.
Use a 3½-inch hole-
1 Use a drill with a
saw in a drill press or a 6
13⁄64-inch twist drill bit
P H OTO G R A P H S BY R E B E CC A M C A L P I N ; I L LU S T R AT I O N BY G E O R G E R E T S E C K

cordless drill to cut out two

to make a hole on each mark,
wood discs (Fig. A) from the
passing the bit through the
1x6 cedar.
upper and lower discs.
Draw a centered
2 Solder the leads from Fig. C
2½ -inch circle on each 7
the vibrating motor to
disc with a compass. This
the battery holder. Glue the
will help you align the holes
battery holder and motor to
for the markers.
the upper disc with hot glue
(Fig. C).
Sand the edges of the
3
cut discs smooth using
Install the battery, then
120-grit sandpaper. 8
slip a piece of paper
between the battery and
Using a miter saw, the contacts to break the
4
jigsaw, or a handsaw connection.
and miter box, crosscut the
scrap block to 1½ inches Insert colored markers
long. Spread wood glue on 9
in the holes and hold
the end-grain of the block, them in place by looping
center it between the two two rubber bands around Fig. D
discs, and clamp the pieces them (Fig. D). Remove the
together to dry (Fig. B). paper from under the bat- Start a child you know on a lifetime of projects
On the top disc, make
tery holder and set the bot G IV E ! with a gift subscription to Popular Mechanics.
5 down on a piece of paper to Go to popularmechanics.com/gift.
six equidistant marks create your masterpiece.

@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 91

 A / C.H. Hanson 10CJ

The clamp mechanism is a

marvel of design. A small
machine screw with very
fine threading allows for
minute adjustments. You
can get the exact amount of
pressure on whatever it is
you want to clamp. Even at
maximum force, these pliers
were the easiest to release
of the products we tested.
$16

B / Knipex 40 14 250

This beautifully made Ger-

man tool has a unique
pivoting lower jaw that
makes it much easier to
clamp around pipes and
nonstandard shapes. It’s
more expensive than
the competition, but
that’s because it’s made
of chrome vanadium,
an extremely tough and
fracture-resistant material.
$46

C / Milwaukee
48-22-3510

The Milwaukee has a hefty

eyebolt threaded into its
handle. Insert a screwdriver
and twist, and you can really
clamp down with some
force. The chrome molyb-
denum construction makes
it corrosion resistant.
$13

D / Irwin Vise-Grip
10WR
P H OTO G R A P H BY Z AC H A N D B U J

The original locking plier is

simple, well-built, and still
great in all respects. The
new model has built-in wire
cutters and a recess in its
adjusting knob to accept a
3⁄16-inch Allen wrench that
lets you more easily and
precisely adjust and release
the tightening force.
$14

92 MARCH _ 2018 P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M

 W H AT R O Y I S E X C I T E D A B O U T T H I S M O N T H

Famous Volcano
Has Strange Effect
On Women
Man and nature collaborate to
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guaranteed to rock her world!
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O n May 18, 1980, Mount St.

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This that chaos, something beautiful
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I R E G U L A R LY S AW wood, metal, and every so often concrete, so I was Our exclusive design highlights
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lar saw called the Super Sawsquatch ($700), a power tool that can slice a concave cut set in .925 sterling sil-
six-inch beam in a single pass. To accomplish this, Skilsaw equipped the ver loaded with brilliant white, lab-
saw with a 165⁄16-inch blade and a 15-amp motor powering a worm-gear drivetrain. created DiamondAura®.
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@PopularMechanics MARCH _ 2018 93 without your offer code.
 CREDITS

p. 6 sugaring: Getty Images; p. 13 truck

and store: Alamy; p. 16 viewing: Getty
Images; p. 18 Getty Images; p. 33 Getty
Images; pp. 50–55 styling by Kaija
Mistral; p. 56 Allie Holloway; styling
by Lola & Me; p. 76 iStock; pp. 80–82
styling by Miako Katoh; p. 100 Everett
Collection.

POPULAR MECHANICS (ISSN 0032-4558)

is published monthly except for combined
January/February and July/August, 10
times a year, by Hearst Communications,
Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY
10019 U.S.A. Steven R. Swartz, President &
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Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron,
Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division:
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Senior Vice President, Finance. ©2018
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©2018 MacNeil IP LLC
THE ROBOT
REVOLUTION
IS HERE.

B
rave new world . . . or source of fear? Ever since robots first appeared in science
fiction, they’ve inspired fascination, dread, and wonder. Popular Mechanics tells
the true story, examining the way we live with these sophisticated machines today—
in our cities, skies, military, medicine, and in space.

Available wherever books are sold.

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In the future, will self-driving cars
be our designated drivers?
O THOSE OF US who enjoy a spirited spin along
a twisty back road, an off-road adventure in a
4x4, or even a good old-fashioned stoplight drag
race, a self-driving car has all the appeal of a
self-eating cheeseburger or a self-kissing girl-
friend. Unless, of course, we’re able to throw a
rolling interstate cocktail party, simultane-
ously toasting the marvels of technology and lamenting the
obsolescence of the human race. Or at least peacefully sleep it
off on the way home from Cousin Jethro’s bachelor bash. Then,
maybe, you’re on to something.
All joking aside, Popular Mechan-
ics does not advocate, condone, or
encourage drinking and driving of
any kind, at any time. But will we one
day strap safely into diesel-powered
drunk tanks with backseat barstools?
Or legally crack a cold one to pass the
time during a traffic jam? “Long term,
you will be able to do everything in a
self-driving car that you could do as a
passenger in a car today,” says Bryant
Walker Smith, an assistant profes-
sor of law at the University of South
Carolina who specializes in emerging
technologies. “So just like if you were
sitting in the passenger seat of your
friend’s car, you probably won’t be able
to drink.” Meanwhile, Edmond Awad, a postdoctoral associate
at the MIT Media Lab who researches the ethics of artificial
intelligence, argues that “the answer hinges on whether the
person driving the car will be considered the driver or a pas-
senger. And this, basically, would depend on the type of car
we end up with.”
There are two basic types of self-driving car. There’s what
might be termed the “semi-autonomous” model, in which
the car more or less drives itself, but a sentient organism—
you—may be called upon to intervene. This is the type in cars
today, including Tesla’s Autopilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise
Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them.
Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email greatunknowns@popularmechanics.com.
100 MARCH _ 2018
BIG QUESTIONS.
A N S W E R S YO U
CAN’T FIND ON
T H E I N T E R N E T.
mode. “Do not drink and automated-drive your car right
now,” cautions Stanford Ph.D. candidate and self-driving-
car researcher David Miller. “That’s a very bad idea.” Tesla,
Cadillac, Mercedes, and Volvo declined to comment for this
article, but based on driving laws we think they’d agree. As
Miller explains, today’s automated vehicles are good when
they know where they’re going—but sometimes they don’t. “I
took a Tesla for a test drive and the road curved and the com-
puter was like ‘that curve’s too sharp for me, I’m just going to
go straight,’” Miller says. “If you don’t realize the car is driv-
ing into the bushes, you’re going to end
up in the bushes.” And likely in hand-
cuffs, if you’ve been indulging.
Google-spinoff Waymo’s technol-
ogy seeks to cut the need for human
input altogether. The startup has part-
nered with Mothers Against Drunk
Driving and other organizations to
advocate for safer driving through fully
autonomous cars. But that technology
has a way to go. While tests of driverless
Waymo cars are promising, the prov-
ing ground for the latest model was a
senior living community with pristine
roads and a preprogrammed map of
potential roadblocks—including, one
imagines, power-walking grannies,
wild-eyed oldsters chasing shuffle-
board pucks, and the occasional unfortunate who has fallen
and can’t get up. Try having the thing drive you to JFK at rush
hour and you’ll be SOL, beer or no beer.
Let’s suppose, however, that eventually the day arrives—
and it probably will—when cars will drive us around 100
percent autonomously. There won’t even be steering wheels.
Any human intervention will actually render your journey
less safe. What then? While you may or may not be able legally
to imbibe en route, considering you’ll still be riding around in
some kind of large, heavy, complicated computerized machine,
we’re going to go on the record advising against it.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S.CO M
Sources: Simmons Research, Multi-Media Engagement Study, Spring 2016; GfK MRI, Spring 2016.

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