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STATE OF THE
DONE
O HOW ITS
OR GENIUS?
O MADNESS
FACTORY
O THE IDEA
DRONES
HOMEGROWN MUSEUM
SAS DESIGN
[ BUILDING AN ALUMINIUM BAKKIE ]

FORDS F-150 LEAP OF FAITH
SKILLS
PM CHALLENGE
THE NAKED DRILL
YARD CLEAR-UP
DIY DASHBOARD
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS: Virtual reality + craft cider

TAKEOFF: CONQUERING THE FEAR OF FLYING SOLO
SMART TECHNOLOGY
SYNC with Bluetooth and voice control

Dual Zone Climate Control
Cruise Control
Steering Wheel Audio Controls
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JWT66155
CONTENTS
JUNE 2015
VOL 13, NO 11
71
16
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS

16
Virtual reality
Reusable rockets
Coolshack
Under an IndyCars bonnet
Craft cider
Great unknowns
UPGRADE
48
71
Inside South Africas maker movement

The king of the makers
3D printing: how its done
TESTED
52
Garmin VivoActive GPS smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge
Axa Pico projector
Braven 705 BT speaker
FEATURES
58
Takeoff
Overcoming the fear of flying solo
94
Smart home vision

Killer digital sound
SKILLS
Inspiration nation
TECHNOLOGY
34
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW
92
Removing the backyard colossus

Taken apart: drill driver
DIY Challenge: our winner
The smart mans guide to microwaving
Home Q&A
Repair a cracked dash
The DIY dashboard
Project: stilts
A Beautiful Thing
Africas funky footwear
MONTHLY
4
6
10
14
28
112
Credits
Editors notes
Letters
Time Machine
Great Stuff
Do it your way
28
The future adventure

Conquer the oceans! Explore the heavens!
96
How to get started in photo printing

Because you cant appreciate it if you never see it
WHEELS
64
86
2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S
Cars in the movies
The downside of LEDs
Volvos VR test drive
New in SA: Infiniti QX80, VW Polo GTI,
Ford Focus
PM Drive: Merc CLS, Impreza WRX STI
Somebody built an aluminium pickup truck

Fords F-150 goes lightweight, kind of.
34
www.popularmechanics.co.za _ JUNE 2015
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Cover caption: The Robobeast is just

one of the homegrown 3D printers
(and innovative ideas) to emerge
from South Africas ourishing
maker community. This page: drill
drivers are useful for putting things
together; we take one apart. See
Skills on page 71.
JUNE 2015 _ www.popularmechanics.co.za
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Total monthly sales: 38 871 (July-September 2014)

79
EDITOR'S NOTES
ESKOM,
CONSIDER
YOURSELVES
SHED.
LL RIGHT. THATS IT. I GIVE UP. ESKOM,
YOU WIN.
Call me nave or a hopeless optimistic, but I really,
really wanted to be simply able to flick the light
switch and have the lights come on.
Yes, over the past few years Popular Mechanics has
urged everyone to be more efficient and responsible about
using electricity. We offered alternatives and ideas about
renewables. You probably followed some of our advice. I
know I did.
We swaddled the geyser at home in a purpose-designed
blanket. Then we installed LED replacements for our
energy-hungry halogen downlighters. Similarly, LED
bulbs in the bedside and accent lights. Theyre surprisingly
well priced these days and they save lots of electricity.
You know, electricity. The stuff were being urged to
use less of, when its available.
Welcome to winter 2015. Were in for a hard winter of
load shedding. Followed by a hard spring of load shedding.
And more to follow. Much more.
In response, we need to use less, were told. Well, a
business that urges us to use less of what it produces is,
surely, doomed to go out of business.
Frankly, its become intolerable.
I realise now that the voice of apparent reason echoing
into the silent darkness was only me rationalising. In
among all this responsibility and efficiency, I suppressed
as long as I could the rising impulse to get our house all
generatored and inverted and solar powered and off the
grid. After all, we live in the industrial powerhouse of
Africa, I said. Our guys are doing their best to keep the
lights on. Weve rolled out electricity to many millions
who didnt have decent access before. Going off-grid
would be an admission of well, of defeat.
So I admit defeat. And helping to tip me over the
edge, reader Mike Mollatt this month writes that backup
generators are a great idea, but in crowded suburbia he
foresees generator rage sparked off by the unavoidable
racket. Whats needed, he writes, is authoritative guidance
on home battery back-up systems.
Sounds like a plan. By the time you read this, with any
luck I will have done the research, done the shopping
and done the installation.
Come to think of it, that might even make a good
story. We could use a few of those.
DIY CHALLENGE NO. 2
The number of entries for our DIY Challenge No. 2 suggests that putting
together a joint adult/child project was mildly taxing. In the end, we went
with a project whose complexity can range from Easy to Reasonable to
Insane, depending on your familiarity with Newton, Archimedes and a bunch
of other dead guys who knew about uid mechanics. What it may lack in
nesse, it more than makes up for in involvement and interesting stuff.
And DIY Challenge No. 3? See your July 2015 POPULAR MECHANICS for details.
As before, theres a great prize from Makita up for grabs.
COMPETITION WINNERS...
anthony@ramsaymedia.co.za
6
Details online at www.popularmechanics.co.za

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The new Mercedes-AMG C 63. Visit www.mercedes-amg.co.za
Vehicle specifications may vary for the South African market.
LETTERS / WHATS ON YOUR MIND?
BRIGHT IDEAS DEPT
WINNIN
G
LETTER
Firstly, for years now Ive been looking at flour and cement
trucks (the ones that look like a bent sausage, with
the bend in the middle showing up or down) and
thinking, what a lot of wasted space. Maybe the
solution is to install fluid tanks in the wasted
spaces. Cement can be transported with diesel,
and flour with vegetable oil. If the latter vehicle has
an accident, just add eggs and milk and bake a cake!
Secondly, I regularly see people failing to notice the
flashing green arrow when turning left or right at an intersection. Maybe the design should change to allow amber
and green lights to flash alternately (something like what
youd get at a railway crossing), which should catch the eye
better. In fact, has research been done to determine if the colours
used for traffic lights are the best suited for the human eye? The
green, amber and red have been with us since Pa fell off the bus.
Thirdly, I asked my friends on Facebook (Weskus Vriende) what amount of
power a ship could generate. A large ocean liner must be able to put out a
considerable amount, as these things are like small cities. I was thinking along
the lines of these ships, while in harbour, being coupled up to our grid to help
old Eskom a bit. One of the friends mentioned that there are purpose-built
nuclear ships that have the sole purpose of generating power. If we can get
3 or 4 of these babies docked in our key ports, they could supply enough
power until Eskom has sorted out its mess. It could be cheaper than importing
power from our neighbours.
Finally, has any other research been done in South Africa on the use of
wave/sea movement to generate electricity?
ANDR PIENAAR
BRACKENFELL
Write to us, engage us in debate and you could win a cool prize. This months best
letter will receive a HTSE watch developed by TITAN, valued at R3 750. HTSE,
or High Tech Self Energized, is a collection of futuristic, light-powered watches
developed by TITAN. These watches can be charged by any light upwards of 200
Lux. HTSEs design inspiration is from some of the most complex self-energising
bodies built by mankind: space ships, orbiting space stations and satellites.
HTSE watches impressive array of features includes End of Life (an indicator of
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out more, contact Luxco on 011 448 2210 or www.luxco.co.za
Send your letter to: POPULAR MECHANICS, PO Box 180, Howard Place 7450, or
e-mail popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za Please keep it short and to the
point. Regrettably, prizes can be awarded only to South African residents.
LIGHT ON LOADSHEDDING
I am sure many of your readers will resonate
with Steve Caulleys letter (Load-shedding
how-to, March 2015). I would strongly
support his plea for authoritative guidance
on home battery back-up systems.
Over the years PM has covered a wide
range of subjects on energy efficiency and
renewable energy options, and there is no
doubt you have grown awareness among
your readers of responsible usage of gridsupplied power and the benefits of (increasingly accessible) solar water heating and
photovoltaic alternatives. The advice con10
tained in these articles has, I am certain,

been applied by many concerned individuals
and their families countrywide. I am also
certain that most of those individuals,
having heeded your recommendations to
the letter, will be your strongest ambassadors; those who have taken shortcuts may
well have fallen at the start.
With the rolling blackouts we are beginning to experience, against a backdrop of
assurances from Eskom that things will get
worse before they get better and that the
time-scale is measured in years rather than
months, I see a pressing need for your
tutelage to focus more sharply on grid

independence. My opinion is based not
merely on serving the unthinking needs
of households who are not accustomed to
power outages, but perhaps more importantly on emphasising the need for us all
to contribute to conserving energy; to
understand the need to apply priority to
those consumers whose activities are clearly
beneficial to the country as a whole.
To emphasise this point, which is more
important: to use kWh brewing countless
cups of coffee at home or, with a thermos
flask, to store boiling water, to allow access
to power thus saved to commercial, industrial and emergency services?
I would like to suggest that there could
be parallel areas of interest, particularly
topical as we each consider practical ways
of overcoming grid power loss. For instance,
I picture many families identifying petrol/
diesel gensets as the solution to our woes.
Although that may be so, has any thought
been given to the urban community where
every household starts up a generator
when the power fails? The noise pollution
on smaller properties would be horrendous.
Think generator rage between neighbours.
So, articles on quietening small generators
without undue loss of power or cooling
would be good, in my view.
Other areas of interest:
OThe dangers associated with DC/AC
voltages and the legal issues surrounding
unqualified interference with domestic
mains distribution boards.
OAlternative energy systems/devices for
urban dwellers for instance, induction
cooking.
OThermal generation, particularly useful
in winter when heat from the family fireplace simply escapes unused up the flue.
OComparative efficacies of cold-wash vs
hot-wash detergents.
OAdvances in LED and other energy-efficiency technologies.
MIKE MOLLATT
BY EMAIL
MORE THAN JUST TEA

Further to the article on rooibos tea (April
2015), the amount of Rooibos that should
be consumed per day is not a scientifically
LETTERS / WHATS ON YOUR MIND?

measured 6 cups per day, but the amount of
Rooibos available concentration of the active
antioxidant ingredients. This is measured
by the oxygen radical absorbance capacity
(ORAC) value.
The human studies that showed the
health benefits were on standardised rooibos extract of plus/minus 8 400 to 8 500
ORAC per 6 cups. Commercial rooibos
varies from 400 to 1 200 ORAC per tea
bag. So, for a start, you would need at best
7 cups of good Rooibos to match the study,
but more likely 10-12 cups, based on the
average commercial Rooibos grades available
on the shelves.
The quality of the Rooibos harvested
may be attributed to many factors. Here
are a few:
OPlant genre
OGeophysical location: area and facing,
height above sea level, average temperature and rainfall
OSoil quality
OStresses on the plant that cause it to
produce more self-defence mechanism
(these are, 99% of the time, the molecule
of interest such as aspalathin)
OHarvest time (month and time of day
LEFT, RIGHT WRONG

If you drive Ford, Isuzu, Toyota, VW,
Kia, Jaguar or any other vehicle on
Earth, the clutch pedal is always left
foot, and the brake pedal on the
right, with the petrol on the far right.
No confusion.
If you drive the same makes and
need to dim your lights, unexpectedly
you squirt water on your windscreen
and the wipers go on! Why cant all
car manufacturers be the same
indicators left, wipers right?
When you drive a lot, you dont
think. You drive subconsciously. This
can cause accidents.
GOMMIE PRINSLOO
BY EMAIL
12
as well as temperature and humidity)

OTime allowed for the rooibos to ferment
OFermentation methods and conditions.
Most important of all is the correct method
to halt the fermentation so no decay happens during any continued fermentation
OStorage conditions.
We have looked at food, cosmetics and
other products. There are many rooibos
teas and other products on the shelves
that we have found with greatly varying
qualities. Our company processes rooibos
(and other foods) using our DCD (Dynamic
Cell Disruptor) plant, which typically yields
5 times the normally available ORAC value.
If you and any member of your family is
purchasing a rooibos, aloe, or any other
product of this sort and there is no ORAC
value on the label, then, well what are
you buying?
LOUISE SPILKIN
BY EMAIL
WHY NOT BIOMASS?

It seems to me that, whenever I open a
publication or watch media on alternative
energy, it is usually all about solar, wind,
fuel cells or other expensive methods. Please
dont get me wrong. There is a time and
place for all of these methods of generating
power off the grid.
There is one method that seems to have
been bogged down, so to speak, beneath
the hype, to promote the more glamorous
alternative energy systems. I am referring
to biogas generation. In countries such as
China and India, this method is one of the
most widely used of all the alternative
energy generation systems.
The only substance on Planet Earth that
is steadily increasing is human and animal
waste. The principles behind biogas generation are decades old, tried and tested.
Biogas generators can be built from a JoJo
tank and some PVC piping. These systems
can be installed and maintained relatively
inexpensively, although they do require a
bit more attention than your solar panels.
The waste product from these generators
or digesters makes a great fertiliser. The
methane gas is used either directly as cooking and lighting gas, or to power electrical
generators. One is not restricted to bodily
waste products either. Any biodegradable
material can be used.
Sometimes, less is more.
DAVID KRUGER
BY EMAIL
POPULAR MECHANICS FTW*

I found it most astonishing that the question
of changing the name of your excellent
magazine should even breach the threshold

of consideration. Firstly, the use of this
name as a banner for the magazine has
put it on par with names such as Coca-Cola,
Washington Post and National Geographic,
to name some well-known titles. To change,
no matter how appropriate the new name
might be, would lose that standing built
up over the decades. As with many of the
well-known brand names, yours conjures
up the expectation of a consistently high
standard in the dissemination of knowledge
of how things work.
Secondly, I believe that in the broad
approach the meaning of the word mechanics has expanded over time to cover the
question of how all things work, whether
they be geared motors and machines, energy
systems, political and legal or many other
matters affecting our daily life. Researching
the meaning of the word mechanics and
associated phrases such as mechanics of
in dictionaries, Google or Wikipedia could
keep one absorbed for hours.
So, although change is a fact of life, I
believe we should rather be looking for the
expanding meaning and concepts covered
by the mechanics of things in this exciting
world of ours.
RICHARD TURNER
SANDTON
(*Yes, we speak geek editor.)
DONT BE HAPPY, WORRY?

The chilling article This man will save
you from the evils of the Internet (March
2015), warrants a response.
The hacking of global information systems, by major powers and institutions is
a matter of grave concern. If cyberspace
itself is now a weapon of mass destruction,
how can we protect ourselves from an
electronic Armageddon?
Cyber attacks against global corporations
have been widely reported. In July 2012,
450 000 user names and passwords were
compromised. There are a million new
viruses every year. Some advanced nations
report 1 000 attacks a minute.
If you want to devastate a countrys
industrial infrastructure, cyber technology
can do this without firing a single missile.
A full-scale global cyber war is now in
progress.
During 2010, breaches occurred in
many corporate firms that cost hundreds
of thousands of rand to repair. It took
more than a year for some of them to
recover their corporate image. A cyber
9/11 will strike one day, with staggering
consequences.
FAROUK ARAIE
JOHANNESBURG P M
Well give you

a Private Banker,
your Go-to Guy.
Isnt it funny how when we start making money, we stumble onto
new questions? Especially when its the kind of money that has
us asking: how can one access a concierge service, can credit
interest rates be personalised, what can make travelling overseas
simpler and what exactly is Priority Pass or Speed Pass?
These are the kinds of questions your kind of money asks.
Good thing you can ask your Private Banker your Go-to Guy.
Search FNB Private Clients or SMS Private to 48703 to switch.
Private Clients
Terms, conditions, rules and standard network rates apply.
First National Bank - a division of FirstRand Bank Limited. An Authorised Financial Services and Credit Provider (NCRCP20).
TIME MACHINE / IT MADE PERFECT SENSE AT THE TIME
1955
While researching our May 2015

cover story, Supertrains, we
thumbed through the archives for
inspiration and found plenty.
Back in 1955, it seems, trains were big news.
In September 1955, our cover declared: Ten
buses grow into a train. Suggesting that necessity was indeed the mother of invention, the idea
grew out of that age-old problem: how to turn a
sows ear into a silk purse. Or, on a less idiomatic
note, how to make your expensive, slow product
(trains) compete with alternatives that are fast
(planes) and cheap (buses) and, by the way,
use existing parts.
The result was the Aerotrain.
But the General Motors execs who brainstormed
the Aerotrain had overlooked a vital truism: buses
arent trains. Or planes.
The bus bodies on railway running gear were
cramped and rode badly compared with regular
trains. Yes, they were lightweight, which allowed
smaller, more economical engines to be used in
the space-age, streamlined locomotives but
the ultimately underpowered locos proved to be
false economy. Built in limited quantities, the
concept remained on the tracks for just 10 years
before being quietly retired.
Our January 1955 cover posed the question,
Is this the last stand of the Iron Horse?
The Iron Horse story detailed the workings
of the mighty Norfolk and Western No. 2300,
below. Imagine a power station on wheels: its
coal-fired boiler produced high-pressure steam
to drive a turbine that developed 3 350 kW at an
electric generator supplying power to 12 traction
motors one for each axle. It was designed
for the heavy work of hauling coal over the
Appalachian mountains of the US Northeast. At
the time, diesel power was in the ascendancy
and Norfolk and Western was the only big
railroad in the US that stuck to steam for all
freight and passenger operations. To answer our
question: Yes.
In the Popular Mechanics

Craftsman section of
January 1955, we found
takeaway trains, aka
Railroad In A Suitcase. The
brainchild of PM art director
and model-railway enthusiast Frank Beatty, this DIY
creation was a mini-railroad
that folded up into the
dimensions of an oversized
suitcase 1,2 metres square.
Encased in plywood, its
clever features included a
hollow mountain used for
storing rolling stock, screwin legs and fishplates or
jumper wires to maintain the
connection across the joint
in the plywood.
PM
14
HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS

VIRTUAL REALITY
REUSABLE ROCKETS
SHACK TECH
INDYCAR ENGINE
CIDER
G R E AT U N K N O W N S
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEVON JARVIS
Sensors in the 545-gram

Samsung Gear VR combine
with accelerometers in
your smartphone to make
virtual movement feel real.
MY WEEK IN
VIRTUAL REALITY
With the recent launch of Samsung Gear VR, virtual

reality can finally be brought home. But do you want it?
BY A L E X A N D E R G E O R G E
16
Stupid or
VIRTUAL REALITY
amazing?
< COOLPEDS BRIEFCASE ELECTRIC

SCOOTER: Luggage you can ride,
depending on your self-respect.
HE COCKPIT OF A JET FIGHTER, Angkor Wat, a Paul McCartney concert I visited
all of them without wearing pants. Those werent my first experiences with
virtual reality. Id tested the Oculus Rift at tech conventions, and recently I
explored a Volvo that wasnt on the road yet. (For Ezra Dyers take on VR in a
Volvo, turn to our Wheels section). But I never got to bring virtual reality home
and try it from my couch. Samsung Gear VR gave me that opportunity.
The device requires a Samsung Galaxy S6 or Galaxy Note 4 phone, headphones
and, if you want to take full advantage of the games, a controller costing about
R700. (Also important: a swivel chair.) The phone slides into a compartment of
the headset, where two lenses magnify its image to fill your field of view. You
control a cursor by moving your head, and click to access programs through a
touch panel over your right temple.
Although VR has been around for decades, mostly in arcades, the at-home
product is still nascent. All you can really watch is short content. But there is
some variety, and I was determined to experience everything VR could do.
Within the first few days Id been through all the safari videos and dune-buggy
ride-alongs in the Oculus Store (an app accessed through the headset), but the
sensation of all of them is so stunning that I wanted everyone I knew to try it.
VIRTUAL REALIT Y
A SPECTRUM OF
OPTIONS
VERSATI LE
Samsung
Gear VR
Price jumps by
several thousand
if you dont
already own a
Note 4 or an S6.
Widest variety
of content. Also:
one of the few
options that
actually exists.
Oculus Rift
PRICE TBD
The original.
Requires no
phone or other
hardware.
Mattel
View-Master
HTC Vive
ABOUT R300
Fastest refresh
rate. Out in
December. May
require a cord.
A VR version of
the classic.
PRICE TBD
LI M ITED
E X PENSIVE
INEXPENSIVE
ABOUT R2 000
Showing my mom a 360-degree photo of Petra,

Jordan, a city she visited decades ago, made her
want to travel again. One friend bemoaned a future
where everyone will wear these things. Another
asked about the Runtastic VR workout app and was
disappointed to discover that the headset didnt
stay fastened during a burpee.
I wanted to try creating my own experience, so I
found a panorama app (360Cities), photographed
the Popular Mechanics offices, and loaded it on
the Notes SD card. I was astounded when it actually
worked. I could look around our headquarters, albeit
with a warped ceiling and floor where the camera
stretched the photograph. It wasnt high-quality,
but strapping a VR-capable camera to my surfboard
and reliving a thrilling wave feels imminent.
Right now, however, where the technology really
shines is in movies. Plain old 2D movies. Netflix
doesnt work on the Gear VR, so finding a compatible
movie meant using a file converter of dubious legality. I ripped versions of Enter the Void, The Red Balloon,
and clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey, then had to
transfer them to the Note and the Oculus Cinema
app via the SD.
The app doesnt do much it adds a layer of
digitised seats in front of you and makes the movie
look like its projected on a huge screen. But thats
all I needed. Each movie stirred up everything I
love about being in a theatre. The trippy and exhilarating opening credits to Enter the Void made me
shiver, especially when I looked to the side and saw
the red velvet chairs reflecting the screens flicker.
The best part is that distractions arent an option. I
cant be tempted to catch up on Instagram or return
emails during a lull in the action. Inside the Gear
VR, youre forced to do nothing but watch the movie,
something many of us have forgotten how to do.
Its only going to get better from here. Oculus is
working with Pixar alums to produce immersive
films within the year an entirely new medium in
which youre not just watching a movie, but living
it. And with Jaunt and Bubl, two 360-degree-camera
makers, youll soon be able to make your own
immersive films, too. The only unsolvable issue is
how weird it will always feel to take the helmet off
a little like walking after running on a treadmill
or jumping on the ground after using a trampoline.
But coming back to reality has never been easy.
THE OTHER REALITY: augmented virtual reality completely immerses your
MICROSOFT
HOLOLENS
EPSON MOVERIO
BT-200
vision, whereas augmented reality overlays digital

images on it. Although Google Glass was discontinued, Microsofts new HoloLens
and other recent products are taking AR in a more useful direction. As part of a
trial, engineers at Lockheed Martin are using R8 000 glasses made by Epson to
perform maintenance on F-35 fighter jets with virtual assistance. Look at a brake
component and you see step-by-step animated instructions. No need to doublecheck the manual.
17
150
KILOMETRES
HIGH
HOW YOUR
WORLD WORKS
PAYLOAD
SPACEXS REUSABLE
ROCKETS
BY J O E PA P PA L A R D O
N THE VIDEO IT LOOKS LIKE A ROCKET LAUNCH played on
rewind: a slender, fourteen-storey aluminium-lithiumalloy tube, engines spouting fire, comes to Earth
instead of roaring into space. Then, calamity. The footage
from January shows the rocket veering at a too-sharp
45-degree angle, then exploding. That was the fiery end to
the initial attempt by Space Exploration Technologies
(SpaceX) to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket for reuse
on an unmanned ship floating in the Atlantic off the US east
coast. The day was technically not a failure. The second stage
of the Falcon 9 delivered its payload to the International
Space Station on behalf of NASA. But everyone was far more
interested in what happened afterward, with the autonomous
spaceport drone ship landing, because of what it could
mean for the space industry.
Todays launch systems drop spent stages into the sea, but
SpaceX and other private space companies want to fly them
down to Earth or a barge on the ocean and reuse them.
SpaceX officials say this could drive launch costs from about
R700 million down to R50 million, and thus change the way
the world industrialises and possibly colonises space.
That will lead to space travel being just as easy and inexpensive as travelling from New York to London is today, says
James Pura, director of the Space Frontier Foundation.
SpaceX determined that the crash was caused by an inadequate supply of hydraulic fluid during the flights last few
minutes. The fluid powers fins that help steer and stabilise
the rocket. Engineers set to work preparing to try again,
possibly at a newly rented location at Cape Canaveral. Heres
how the process will work.
ILLUSTRATION BY SINELAB
LAUNCH AND STAGE SEPARATION

A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket rises from its
launchpad, and at an altitude of 80 kilometres
the first-stage booster separates. The payload
continues into space, riding on the second
stage. The first stage coasts to about 150 kilometres in altitude, then begins to descend.
18
80
KILOMETRES
BOOST-BACK BURN
SUPERSONIC
RETRO-PROPULSION BURN
Three of nine engines from the first stage

reignite. The rocket has its own guidancecontrol system, which gimbals (orients) the
Merlin 1D engines to rotate the rocket
between 120 and 180 degrees. This aims the
rocket towards the drone ship. The booster is
travelling at nearly 5 000 kilometres per hour.
The centre engine ignites to slow the descent

and gimbals itself to help the booster become
fully vertical. Four grid fins extend to stabilise
and further brake the cylinder. Each moves
independently to control roll, pitch and yaw.
The rockets speed drops from 5 000 kilometres per hour to about 900.
HOW IT WORKS
3
HYPERSONIC
FINS
LANDING
LEGS
200 MILES
(JANUARY
2015
ATTEMPT)
6
LANDING BURN
The engines initiate a final burn to slow the
craft to about 8 kilometres per hour. Four
carbon-fibre-and-aluminium-honeycomb
landing legs unfold, powered by compressed
helium.
TOUCHDOWN AND RECOVERY

The booster lands on the floating pad.
Technicians on a vessel positioned kilometres
away head over to board the drone ship and
secure the rocket to the deck with metal
shoes and vent any leftover gases. The drone
ship ferries the first stage to shore, where it
can be processed, cleaned and reused. Flight
length: about nine minutes.
LOATING LANDING PAD

The drone ship is equipped with a dynamic
positioning system that uses azimuth-thruster
engines to keep it at a specific GPS point
hundreds of kilometres (in the case of the
January test, about 300 kilometres) away from
the launchpad, give or take three metres.
19
COOL TECH
HOW YOUR
WORLD WORKS
COOLSHACK
One mans collaboration with UCT
aims to improve the lot of shack
dwellers. BY S E A N W O O D S
EXT TIME YOU bitch about oppressive
summer temperatures while scuttling

between your climate-controlled
vehicle, office and home, spare a thought
for those living in tin shacks. To say the
occupants swelter is an understatement.
In fact, tests have shown that when
ambient temperatures reach 36 degrees,
temperatures inside conventional shacks
soar to a staggering 47 degrees plus
making life pretty much untenable.
Happily, a collaboration between electronic security expert Mark Algra and
Dr Kevin Winter from the University
of Cape Towns Environmental and
Geographical Science Department aims
to change all that.
The project part of Cape Towns
World Capital Design initiative kicked
off in November 2014 when Algra and
Winter constructed two typical 2 x 2,5
metre shacks on UCTs grounds. One was
left stock-standard as a control, while the
other was clad with experimental materials and incorporated various adaptations
to help bring internal temperatures and
humidity levels down. Both were rigged
with high-resolution monitoring sensors
to capture temperature and humidity data
every three minutes, allowing Winters
department to determine exactly how the
materials and designs performed in real
time.
Says Winter: Our aim was to find simple ways of reducing the temperature in
the experimental shack by 10 degrees
Mark Algra (left) and Dr Kevin Winter can

be contacted on markalgra5@gmail.com
and kevin.winter@uct.ac.za respectively.
20
Top: Two standard Cape-Flats shacks one left stock-standard and

the other incorporating various affordable low-tech adaptations were
set up on UCTs campus and rigged with high-resolution monitoring
sensors to capture temperature and humidity data every three minutes.
Above right: Dr Kevin Winter and Mark Algra experiment with re
retardant materials. Middle: Multiple adaptations, including an air
cross-ow system were incorporated to achieve the desired results.
Right: A basic plumbing system with an aerobic soakaway allows
residents to dispose of greywater safely at night.
compared with the conventional shack, and at least 2 degrees below ambient temperatures using low-cost materials that were readily accessible.
Simply glueing fabric derived from recycled PET bottles to the outside and painting it
with white PVA helped lower temperatures by 3 degrees. Adding a pitched roof brought
another 3 degree reduction. They then cut two small holes at the base of one wall and
placed two small containers with wet charcoal near them to suck cooler air into the
shack. On the opposite side they cut a few holes in the ceiling and placed an inverted
plastic basin fitted with a curved plate on top to create a venturi effect and suck hot air
out. Says Algra: Once we incorporated this cross-flow adaptation we immediately began
achieving our desired temperatures thats when we realised we were on the right track.
Other adaptations included smearing a paper cement mix on the inside walls to provide insulation in winter and remove the typical unhygienic cardboard cladding. Giving
the pitched roof wide enough eaves to channel water away from the walls and on to a
micro garden. Plumbing in a basin, allowing occupants to dispose of grey water into an
aerobic soakaway at night. And fitting a litres of light bottle (that is, a 2-litre cooldrink
bottle filled with water) to distribute light during the day.
Currently, Algra and Winter are busy experimenting with fire-retardant materials. They
are also planning to retrofit 10 shacks to see how their improvements perform for families in the real world. Says Algra: Ideally we would like to turn this initiative into jobs.
If people want to climb in and develop what weve achieved further it would be great.
NOW YOU KNOW: The real difference between IndyCar

and Formula One is that IndyCars race primarily in the
US and Formula One is global. Its like Premier League
and Major League Soccer: same basic thing, different
fanaticism. Also, only IndyCars race on oval tracks.
RACING
UNDER THE BONNET

OF AN INDYCAR
massive amount of fuel it

needs, his engine does both.
5. LUBRICATION
NDYCAR ENGINES MUST WEIGH at least 112 kilograms,
and the car at least 712. So thats exactly what teams

aim for and not a gram more. We spoke with two of
the men most responsible for the 2,2-litre twin-turbocharged Chevy V6 that 2014 IndyCar Series champion
Will Power will drive in the Indy 500 on 24 May: Chris
Berube (IndyCar Series Chevrolet program manager)
and Ron Ruzewski (technical director for Team Penske).
They explained how they get 500 kilowatts from a car
thats half the weight of a MiniCooper S. BY K E V I N
DUPZ YK
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN REGAN
1. STARTER
This is where it would be if
IndyCars had starters. The
pit crew uses an external
electric motor to crank the
engine. One downside: if the
car stalls, the driver cant
restart it.
of the chassis, with a loadbearing block and cam covers. It literally holds the car
together. The gearbox and
suspension bolt to the back
of the engine, and the driver
compartment bolts to the
front.
2. EXHAUST
4. FUEL INJECTION
To reduce weight, IndyCars

have short exhaust pipes,
no catalytic converters and
no silencers.
Most fuel-injected cars use

nozzles to spray fuel into
intake ports outside the
combustion chamber; some
performance cars inject fuel
straight into the chamber.
To give Powers IndyCar the
3. STRUCTURE
The engine is a component
Traditional cars collect oil in

the oil pan and pump it into
the engine, but a race car
moves fast enough that, with
that set-up, the oil would
slosh around, preventing it
from reaching the pump.
Instead, a dry-sump system
pumps oil to a separate
reservoir that keeps it constantly in reach.
6. PISTONS
The pistons are handmade
to exacting, highly confidential specifications. Because
racers look for every advantage they can get, Powers
team cant share more.
car sits for much longer than

the eight to ten seconds of
an average pitstop, it can
overheat.
ACCESSORIES
With so few accessories,
theres no accessory drivebelt. Things such as oil
pumps are powered directly
by the engine.
LIFESPAN
The league has stringent
regulations on engine use.
Drivers can go through a
maximum of four engines
per year. They can be
replaced at 4 000 kilometres
or if they will exceed 4 585
by the end of a race. A
whole new engine before
youd even need an oil
change.
7. COOLING
Scoops on the sides capture
air to cool the engine. If the
4
5
3
2
6
7
BACK OF CAR
22
FRONT OF CAR
HOW YOUR
WORLD WORKS
THE
REBIRTH
OF HARD
CIDER
Artisans and smaller regional
operations are adding their own
distinct flavour to a fruity favourite. This is your guide to enjoying it. BY F R A N C I N E M A R O U K I A N
T ITS CORE, HARD CIDER is an agricul-
PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL WINGELL
tural product, an alchemical alliance between the apple and the

land where it grows, shaped by the
makers skill. Unlike beer, cider is not
made from grain, so it does not require
brewing. Made with fruit, like wine, it
only ferments. And because it ferments,
craft ciders those made with local
orchard apples have terroir, or a
regional fingerprint reflecting variables
of climate, soil, terrain and tradition.
Early apples, cultivated from European
trees, were not meant for eating out of
hand. They were spitters, bitter tannic
apples intended for preservation, particularly in the form of fermented cider
the only safe, bacteria-free daily beverage at the time.
Because apples are heterozygotes,
their seeds do not breed true: an apple
that grows from a seed will be nothing
like the apple it came from. Instead,
stem grafting is typically used to reproduce apples. A budding apple-tree shoot
is inserted into the stock of another
tree already rooted in the soil.
That didnt stop the man who became
known as Johnny Apple-seed. Early
ecologist JohnChapman travelled to
the US west planting orchards with
seeds collected from cider mills. As a
member of the Swedenborgian Church,
Chapman believed that stem grafting
was unnatural, so he practised seed
propagation, with each seed producing
THE EXPERT
Max Kuller, wine
director, DoiMoi
and Estadio
restaurants,
Washington, DC.
BUY
IT
THE
CIDER
THE
MAKER
FIVE MUST-TRY CRAFT CIDERS

EVERSONS
6,0% alcohol
Grabouw,
Western
Cape
*by volume
24
a different variety that adapted to regional conditions, making

them distinctly different from Old World stock.
But, by the early nineteenth century, hard cider had lost its
importance, a trend intensified by the temperance movement as
farmers were pressured to clear their cider orchards in favour of
growing the table apples we know today. Practical inventions
also intervened. Sanitary waterworks and the bottle cap made
new drinks such as Coca-Cola possible. The pasteurisation process, the milking machine, and the refrigerated railroad wagon
made milk more readily available as well. In the USA specifically,
cultural changes such as industrialisation and urbanisation also
drew immigrants from other parts of Europe, including a significant German population who built breweries as the heart of
their neighbourhoods. It was simply the end of the cider era.
Besides wine,
the Eversons
make whats
described as
a pale dry,
natural apple
cider thats a
mix of 5 different
apples, fermented with a French
cider yeast and
aged in oak. Also
available on tap.
James
Mitchells
Gone Fishing
5,8% alcohol
The Drift
organic farm,
Overberg,
Western Cape
Based on a family
recipe, this secret
blend of apples is
pressed in a
restored Bucher
press, gravitysettled and then
cold fermented in
a combination of
oak barrels and
small tanks and
aged for six
months.
BEVERAGES
MAKE
IT
Ezra Sherman, co-owner of Eves Cidery

in Van Etten, NewYork, samples freshly
pressed apple juice from a traditional
rack-and-cloth press.
Over the past several decades,

renewed interest in Americas agricultural heritage and heirloom pome fruits
such as apples and pears have boosted
the taste for hard cider. In South Africa,
our agricultural heritage is unquestioned,
but even here cider never reached the
heights of popularity achieved by beer.
Garagista Beer
Company
Skunkworkx
Double Barrel
8,0% alcohol
RiebeekKasteel
Garagistas
Double Barrel won
second place in
the cider category
at the South
African National
Craft Brewer
Championship.
Also available is
pure apple and a
pomegranate
cider, both of
them 5,5 %.
THE BASICS OF MAKING HARD CIDER

There are endless variations, but, in general, the cider-making
process follows this formula.
THE APPLES
THE GRIND AND PRESS
THE FERMENTATION
Cider apples are divided

into categories according
to proportion of acidity and
bitter-tasting tannins:
sweet, bittersweet, sharp
and bitter-sharp. First
allowed to soften to develop flavours and increase
sugars, cider apples are
then washed, sorted and
processed whole. Some
are suited for single-varietal cider, mostly heirloom
apples with the ideal ratio
of tannins, acidity and
sugar. Other ciders require
blending apples to balance
flavours. This blending,
which can be done at any
stage, is the makers skill
at work.
The apples are milled or

ground into a fine pulp
called pomace, collected
into sieves such as mesh
envelopes or trays, and
stacked in a press. The
presses vary in construction, from historical handor horse-turned screw
presses all the way to
modern hydraulic versions.
After the free-flowing juice
is released, compression
continues to extract juice
until the pomace is dry.
Traditionally, this dry pomace cake was steeped in
water to make ciderkin, the
low-alcohol cider that colonial children drank.
The juice is transferred to a

container (often a doublejacket stainless-steel vat)
and fermented with yeast
(either occurring naturally
from the tannins in the
apple skins, or a cultivated
strain, such as wine yeast)
that converts the sugar into
ethanol and carbon dioxide,
which escapes via an airlock on the fermentation
container. The fermented
liquid is then filtered commercial cider is typically
pasteurised to remove
yeast and apple particulates. Finally, its transferred
to the bottling stage, which
varies from maker to maker.
A FEW NOTES ON TASTING

The natural fruitiness of hard
cider makes it a
good partner for
food that already marries
well with apples, but it also
enhances complex cuisine
that skews pungent and
spicy, such as many Thai
dishes. Because cider is
fermented from fruit, you
can deductively taste it like
wine. And like wine grapes,
fermented cider apples
give off the impression of a
multitude of other fruits as
well.
Red Stone
Pure Fruit
Ciders
4,5% alcohol
Clarens
Brewery,
KwaZuluNatal
Cider doesnt
have to be made
in traditional
apple country:
this one comes
from the Free
States Maluti
Mountains in the
Free State, part
of a range of fruit
ciders that
includes cherry
and pineapple.
TASTE
IT
Theres a line connecting the appearance and

the aroma of the cider to how it will present
itself on the palate. Not to say craft cider
cant surprise you, but, usually, if you can
smell it, you will taste it.
If the cider is clear, with the solids filtered
out, expect a more elegant taste and a fresh,
fruit-forward aroma with traces of citrus
(lemon, grapefruit) or even more aromatic
tropical fruits (pineapple).
If the cider is cloudy, with particulates left
from minimal processing, expect a more W
rustic experience, trading dominant fresh
fruit and floral notes for a funkier, earthier,
yeastier, organic aroma.
Windermere
Premium
7,5% alcohol
Windermere
Farm, Western
Cape
When launched in
1998, Windermere
initially had to go
into hibernation
through lack of
demand.
Fortunately, its back
to full-scale production with this
authentic Germanstyle apfelwein thats
matured in French
oak for six months.
25
GREAT UNKNOWNS
Do you have unusual questions about the world and how it works and why
stuff happens? This is the place to ask them. Dont be afraid. Nobody will laugh
at you here. Email popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za Questions will be
selected based on quality or at our whim.
MAGNETS DO GO BAD, USUALLY AS A RESULT OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE
or deprivation. Its a sad state of affairs but you can help.

In return for your R500 donation, well send you this jaunty Save
the Magnets beach bag.
But seriously, folks magnets do lose their oomph. To understand why, lets look at what makes a magnet a magnet. Take any
old piece of iron. Inside are particles known as magnetic domains.
In their natural state, these particles are magnetically charged, but
theyre arrayed randomly, pulling in so many different directions
at once that they effectively cancel each other out. Stick your iron
in a strong magnetic field generated by something like a solenoid
(an electrified coiled wire) and the magnetic domains will align
and pull in the same direction. Now youve got yourself a magnet.
The thing is, this alignment forces the magnetic domains into a
higher energy state, which (per the second law of thermodynamics)
they dont like at all. Give them half an excuse (or, to use the scientific lingo, a catalyst) and theyll randomise themselves back
into relaxation mode, just like the rest of us. One catalyst is simply time. Wait long enough and any magnet will fail. These days,
though, long enough is a couple of hundred years, so this isnt a
big worry. Another catalyst is heat. Heat a magnet sufficiently and
itll go back to plain old metal. Yet another threat is exposure to a
more powerful magnetic field, which can yank the domains back
out of alignment. Finally, theres shock. Drop a magnet repeatedly,
or pound on it enough with a hammer, and you can jar the domains
from their singular orientation. Delicate flowers, these magnets.
Does putting a piece of toilet paper on the seat do

anything to protect you from germs?
Youd do just as well to burn a pile of sacrificial owl feathers or
chant in Mycenaean Greek before mounting the commode. Or
maybe you could slather your backside with a nice marine-grade
wood varnish. Whatever makes you feel better. Any benefit
26
Is there a reason for the dearth of quality toasters?

At last a question of true import. As it happens, there are several
reasons virtually all modern toasters are lousy, and well get to
those. First, though, lets solve your problem. You want a brawny
bread browner built for the long haul? Get yourself a vintage
Toastmaster 1B14 and thank us between bites of crisp, buttered
breakfast perfection.
The 1B14 is absolutely hands down the best toaster, says Eric
Murrell of the US Toaster Collectors Association (a real thing).
More than 7 million 1B14s were manufactured between 1947 and
1961, aka the Golden Age of Toast. Theyre easy to find, theyre
not usually that expensive, and the doggone things work, says
Murrell, who, as the owner of more than 300 toasters, knows
whereof he speaks.
So why cant modern toasters compete? Blame the consumer,
whose demand for ever-cheaper appliances has led to ever-cheaper
materials and manufacturing methods. Compounding the problem
is that folks have come to accept todays feeble toasters as disposable commodities with all the soul of a plastic spork. The final
issue is maintenance specifically, nobody does any. If people
bothered to dump the crumbs out every once in a while, their
toasters might last a little longer. Not much longer, mind you, but
a little. Take care of a 1B14, on the other hand, and youll be set
for decades. My sister, she lives in Alaska, Murrell says. She
bought a secondhand 1B14 in 1969 and used it right up until, I
think, about 2009. A used toaster that lasts forty years? In
Alaska? What are you waiting for?
PM
ILLUSTRATION BY GRAHAM ROUMIEU
DO MAGNETS GO BAD?
IF SO, HOW?
derived from a toilet seat

swaddled in bum wad is strictly
psychological.
Toilet paper is both porous
and absorbent, two qualities
that more or less guarantee
any unseemly or infectious
microbes lurking on the seat
will find a ready vector straight
to your skin. The good news is
that your skin, unlike TP, is
neither porous nor absorbent,
and effectively keeps bacteria and viruses out of your body. Not
that were suggesting this (necessarily), but you could drop trou,
settle down on a nice, comfy heap of E.coli, and watch the full
directors cut of Apocalypse Now without becoming ill. Thats
because most of the bathroom-borne nasties we face things that
cause what we will delicately term gastrointestinal upset enter
our bodies through our mouths, which is why hand washing is so
important. You touch, say, the flush handle, which happens to be
contaminated, then bite your nails or toss back a handful of cocktail peanuts and you might as well stay in the can because, brother,
youre going to need it.
If youre worried about herpes, or other sexually transmitted
infections, you can also rest easy on the throne. Experts agree
these are spread only through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, not
butt-to-seat contact, and, in any event, cant survive very long
outside human hosts. You should be fine.
HERES THE NEWEST GEAR YOULL WANT TO OWN
C O M P I L E D B Y S E A N W O O D S S E A N W @ R A M S AY M E D I A . C O . Z A
GREAT STUFF
YAMAHA MCR-B142 MICRO COMPONENT SYSTEM

Get your groove on
Just because you live or work in a confined space doesnt mean you cant appreciate quality
sound derived from multiple sources. Yamahas rather classy MCR-B142 Micro Component System
(available in 10 funky colours) features Bluetooth music streaming, allowing you to enjoy your
playlists wirelessly from your smartphone, tablet or other compatible device. It comes with a CD
player, USB input for MP3 and WMA files, iPod/iPhone dock, AM/FM radio and auxiliary mini
input socket. Even better, you can use your smart device to operate all playback functions from
distances of up to 10 metres away.
Soundwise it doesnt disappoint, either. Yamahas Compressed Music Enhancer restores the
performance of compressed audio files. Its pair of 11,4 cm full-range cone woofers and its 15 watt
output deliver a sound thats astonishing for a unit this size, with deep, robust bass and clear mids
and highs (the speakers can be moved apart, too). Plus the units alarm can be controlled via your
smart device, using Yamahas DTA Controller app. Price: about R6 000. Contact Dion Wired on
0861 426 323 or visit www.dionwired.co.za
28
GREAT STUFF
PEDEGO TRAIL TRACKER
Trailblazer
If there was a prize for the best off-road electric bike,
Pedegos Trail Tracker would surely wear the crown.
Designed for trails, sand and even snow, it features extralarge Innova Spider tyres, allowing you to go places most
sane mountain bikers would fear to tread, erm pedal.
Its lightweight, removable 10 Ah 48V battery pack provides enough grunt to give the 600 W magnetic brushless
rear hub motor a comfortable range of between 30 and

40 km. Top speed is about 35 km/h (motor only). And the
battery takes between three and four hours to charge.
Other features include Avid BB-7 front disc brake and
Dia-Compe rear hub brake, handlebar-mounted battery
indicator, variable twist throttle and light aluminium frame.
Optional extras include a 3-speed upgrade (R4 000) and a
customised military makeover (about R5 000). The standard
bike will set you back a little under R37 000. Contact
Pedego SA on 031-823 0770 or visit www.pedego.co.za
WD MY CLOUD EX4100 (FOUR-BAY) NAS

Protect and store
Photographers, videographers, graphic designers and other creative
professionals wanting to get a handle on their ever- increasing volumes
of data (think RAW images and 4K video footage) should check out
WDs four-bay My Cloud EX4100 NAS (Network Attached Storage)
system. The WD Red drives can be configured using multiple
Redundant Array of Independent Discs (RAID) options, including
RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 JBOD and spanning modes. The system can also
be configured to provide up to 24 TB of storage space.
Potential uses range from backups (Windows or Mac) or digital
entertainment hub. Price: around R7 000 for a discless unit and
about R30 000 for four drives, giving you a total of 24 TB. Visit
www.wd.com
BLACK DIAMOND ION HEADLAMP

Dont trip up
Black Diamonds touch-sensitive 80-lumen Ion headlamp
switches from full power to dimmed, strobe or red light
with the swipe of a finger. It burns up to 200 hours with a
beam that stretches up to 38 metres, but weighs a mere
48 g, including two AAA batteries. Price: about R400.
Contact RAM Mountaineering on 021-532 0549 or visit
www.rammountain.co.za
29
GREAT STUFF
LEAPFROG LEAPTV GAMING

CONSOLE
Dance, learn, play
Harassed parents wondering how to
keep their little ones occupied and
stimulated this winter should check
out LeapFrogs LeapTV Gaming Console.
Suitable for children aged between
3 and 8, it encourages them to dance,
jump and hop around while teaching
them reading, maths, science and
problem-solving skills. Audio instructions make it easy for pre-readers to
follow along. Its simple interface allows
young children to navigate menus by
themselves. And the controller was
ergonomically designed for little hands.
The motion-sensing camera, specifically
designed to respond to childrens
movements, allows them to see themselves in the game on TV. A library of
over 100 age-appropriate, educatorapproved games and videos (sold separately) will keep your little ones from
getting bored. Price: about R1 800.
Contact Toys R Us on 087 234 8697
or visit www.toysrus.co.za
30
GREAT STUFF
CANON XC10 CAMCORDER

Moviemaker
Aspiring filmmakers wanting to up their game
need to get their hands on Canons new XC10 4K
video and stills camcorder. Inheriting many of
the Cinema EOS ranges features, this compact
shooter offers serious recording versatility, making
it a great option as a stand-alone camera for
independent filmmakers or a supporting B
camera on larger productions.
Able to fit seamlessly into workflows, or
productions with existing Cinema EOS cameras,
it can record UHDTV standard (3840 x 2160)
4K footage to an internal CFast 2.0 card at up
to 305 MB/s, or full HD (1920 x 1080) footage
to an SD card at up to 50 MB/s. Thats with
pro-standard colour sampling for highresolution performance.
Its specially developed 10x optical zoom
(focal range: 27-270 mm) features Canons
trusted image stabilisation technology, allowing videographers to switch easily between
sweeping scenes to intimate close-ups with a
single lens. Other features include Wi-Fi connectivity, the ability to shoot 12 MP still photos, variangle LCD touchscreen providing direct access to the
menu and an included optical loupe viewfinder that
fits the LCD to offer a more traditional filming experience.
Price: about R26 000. Contact Canon on 011-251 2400 or
visit www.canon.co.za
INCREDISONIC FALCON ZERO F-360 HD

DASHCAM
MADKON BRAAI
Open and shut case
Looking for a convenient, well-built portable braai? If so, then
the locally developed Madkon Braai (available in three sizes)
could be of interest. Thanks to its ingenious folding design,
setting it up from flatpack mode takes a mere two seconds.
Packing it away again is only marginally slower at five seconds.
Made out of 1,2 mm 3CR12 grade stainless steel, its not only
durable, but also lightweight and strong. All sizes come with
carry bags and stainless steel grids. Prices range from the
Mini (160 x 180 x 290 mm) at R2 300 up to the larger 600S
(165 x 315 x 585 mm) for around R3 000. Contact Madkon
on 084 254 8212 or visit www.madkon.co.za
Capture the crunch

Recording the indisputable facts during an accident is a
breeze with IncrediSonics Falcon Zero F-360 HD rear-viewmirror-mounted car Dashcam. Thats because this accident
video recorder features two 720P resolution cameras. Both
have a 120-degree viewing angle and can be independently
rotated 180 degrees. Loop recording makes sure you never
run out of space on your MicroSD card (it comes with a 32 GB
high-speed Class 10 SD card). You also get night vision for
interior clips and shots, as well as built-in microphone and
speaker functionality. Oh, and it switches on automatically as
you turn the ignition key. Price: about R5 700. Contact
WantItAll on 087 357 5204 or visit www.wantitall.co.za
31
GREAT STUFF
FLY6 CYCLING TAIL-LIGHT CAMERA
MBAULA GREEN PORTABLE STOVE

Versatile, efficient cooker to go
Whether youre camping or forced to make an on-the-fly culinary
plan during loadshedding, chances are youd appreciate a hot meal.
The compact, energy-efficient Mbaula Green portable stove lends
itself to a variety of cooking method: pot, pan, even braai. Its
robust, ceramic inner liner rapidly absorbs heat from the fire and
helps maintain optimum temperatures, significantly reducing the
amount of fuel required to get the job done. Speaking of fuel, it
can burn any biomass, not only wood and charcoal. Temperatures
can be regulated by adjusting the air ventilation door. It comes
with two standard fittings, a stainless steel grill, stainless steel
pot spacer and a carry bag. Price: about R600 for the galvanised
version and around R1 000 for the stainless steel model. Contact
Mbaula Green on 021-438 6003 or visit www.mbaula.co.za
Watch your rear

Cyclists need to keep tabs on whats going on behind them so
theyll appreciate the Fly6. This nifty weatherproof device combines a 30 lumen LED tail-light with a HD camera and microphone,
making it a great option for both the safety-conscious navigating
busy roads or those hitting fast trails over weekends.
The 720 P camera shoots at 30 fps and has a sensor viewing
angle of 100 degrees. Video footage (1280 x 720 resolution) is
saved automatically on the included 8 GB microSD card, every
ten minutes of your ride, in AVI format and date-stamped. The
tail-light features four dimming settings (from high to off), as well
as two flashing options and solid-on mode. Its rechargeable
2 600 mAh battery provides a runtime of up to 6 hours. Price:
about R2 000. Contact the Cycle Factory on 021-552 8285
or visit www.cyclefactory.co.za
BOSCH RANGE FINDER GLM 100C

Made to measure
Jotting down incorrect measurements or miscommunicating
with fellow contractors are two ways to guarantee a building
project goes pear-shaped fast. Fortunately, Boschs Range
Finder GLM 100C along with its smart device app helps
avoid project-limiting mishaps.
This Bluetooth-enabled device boasts 10 measuring modes,
including length, area, volume, angle and combined indirect
height. Its built-in tilt sensor displays up to 360 degrees in two
axes and features an accuracy of +/- 0,2 degrees. It also features
a range of up to 100 metres, a backlit display with flip screen
functionality (to make measuring in all directions easy) and an
integrated rechargeable Li-Ion battery.
Already a great measuring tool, connected to a tablet or smartphone via its free app, the GLM 100C just gets better. Once youve
photographed the work area using your devices camera, the
GLM 100C then transfers all measurements to the photo using
three types of graphic elements lines, surfaces (rectangles) and
angles. You can then add text and voice notes to the digital
sketch before emailing in JPEG or PDF form. Price: about R3 200.
Contact Boman Tools on 021-566 9408 or visit www.boman.co.za
32
COUGAR ARCHON CASE

Build your own beast
For hardcore gamers, few if any off-the-shelf computers will
do. That said, if youre a serious gamer who wants to build his own
machine from the ground up, then Cougars new Archon case is
for you. This mid-tower case comes with three 6,3 cm HDD/SSD
trays and three 8,8 cm HDD trays. It also features easy-to-clean,
detachable air filters on the front and bottom covers.
Once installed, the hard-working innards can be kept cool by
up to five fans: one rear (pre-installed), two optional front side
120 mm fans, and two optional side 120 mm fans. Seven PCI
vented slots provide flexibility and ventilation to suit multiple
graphic card solutions. It can accommodate up to eight drives or
drive bay accessories. To keep everything nice and neat, cables are
fed through on the motherboard tray, allowing for easy routing and
cable management. Price: about R500. Visit www.rebeltech.co.za
GREAT STUFF
DJI INSPIRE 1 (WITH 1 REMOTE)

4K eye in the sky
When a class act like DJI brings out a new drone it
always pays to check it out. The Inspire 1 doesnt
disappoint. Weighing almost 3 kg, it has a maximum
speed of just under 80 km/h, a controllable range
of 2 km and a flight time of around 18 minutes.
It can also hit an altitude of 4 500 metres, giving
you the chance to capture some amazing footage.
And, to prevent spinning propellers from getting in
the way of the camera, the two arms supporting the four
motors and landing gear lift out of the way after take-off.
A downward-facing camera keeps track of the ground,
allowing you to fly indoors and

still achieve stable positioning when
flying in difficult conditions with a
compromised GPS signal. Ultrasonic
ground proximity sensors tell the drone when
to lower its landing gear and an intelligent battery management system automatically determines when it
needs to head home for a recharge.
The camera, incorporating a Sony CMOS EXMOR
sensor, features a nine-element lens and is mounted on
a 3-axis, 360-degree rotating gimbal. The end result:
really cool 4K video footage at 30 fps and quality 12 MP
stills. Price: about R49 000. Contact Action Gear on
PM
011-781 1323 or visit www.actiongear.co.za
The cordless rotary hammer UNEO, drill and drive

screws into any surface wood, plaster, brick,
and even concrete.
*Sold as tool only,

batteries and charger sold
separately. Part of the 18V
System Tools family.
Make it your home. Drilling in concrete and masonry is especially easy and comfortable with the cordless rotary
hammer: equipped with an integrated electropneumatic hammer mechanism, the Bosch UNEO is not reliant on the
user applying feed pressure. With its powerful lithium-ion battery, the cordless rotary hammer makes it easy for you
everywhere. The UNEO is part of the 18V system tools and the batteries & charger are interchangeable with all models
that feature the Power4All
1
2
WE FEEL THE BEATING

HEART OF THE LOCAL MAKER
MOVEMENT AND MEET THE
PEOPLE AT THE BLEEDING EDGE
OF GARAGE ENGINEERING.
SOUTH AFRICA:
I USUALLY SHY AWAY FROM INDIA PALE ALE because, you know, the smell. But
the room-temperature one Im holding right now isnt that bad; it smacks
more of hops than the acidy-metallic urine notes I usually associate with an
IPA. Maybe its a combination of the crisp late autumn suburban Centurion air
and the whiff of solder drifting outside from the 80s-style family home. Its a
Tuesday night in Pretoria and Im at House4Hack, the centre of South Africas
maker universe.
You may think it bold, calling this prosaic space in Lyttleton Manor the centre
of any kind of universe. But a quick roll-call of the projects that have been
spawned by these Tuesday-evening meetings of minds lists Robobeast, Reprap
Morgan and Hans Fouches Cheetah in attendance. All three locally made 3D
printers started here. Thats a stat no other maker space in the country can
boast. And they also make palatable IPA.
34
BY L I N D S E Y S C H U T T E R S
YOU DONT BRING PROBLEMS TO THE HOUSE, YOU

BRING PROTOTYPES. Something to show that you
at least tried to solve your problem. Now you can
draw from a 300-strong hive mind and learn new
skills. Thats the real beauty of these maker spaces. There isnt really any formal training to
become a maker, so you learn by making (and
sometimes breaking). All you need is an inquisitive mind, really.
Schalk Heunis is the godfather of the house,
which he sees as an incubator for technology
1. Arnold and Phillip are the drone specialists at

House4Hack and build almost everything from
scratch. 2. Charlton Davids owns Segulla Electric, the
sole manufacturers of the RoboBeast 3D printer.
Factory capacity tops out at around 20 units per
week. 3. House4Hack is a place for collaboration and
skills transfer, a kind of open source classroom.
4
4. Omar-Pierre Soubra pitches the Cape

Maker Faire to some of the members of
House4Hack. 5. Quentin Harley is nally
ready to take orders for his RepRap
Morgan 3D printer. 6. Schalk Heunis owns
the title deed to the house and is the godfather of this network of enterprising
backyard inventors.
companies. It all started with a 3D printer, he

recalls. Now, when they first came out we were
very intrigued and got one. It took us about a
month to assemble it, because there werent
clear instructions. One of the parts would break
if you tightened it too much and the kit actually
came with spares. Tightening it to breaking
point was part of the instructions.
Before the dawning of the 3D printer, the
house was a place to tinker with existing electronics. Then came the explosion. Pieter van der
Walt came past here and said hed heard of a thing called a Printrbot and he
wanted to print a Printrbot, explains Heunis. Everyone was looking at me to
tell him he was mad. Heuniss response: Whatever, dude, go for it.
He went for it. A few weeks later, he had printed his own Printrbot and evangelised House4Hack to the dark art of RepRap (replicating rapid prototyping).
(I have a problem with the term RepRap. It should actually be SeRepRap
because the core of the project/movement is printing components to make more
printers; so its mostly a self-replicating machine. At least thats the way three
house members have used it.)
Whereas fellow house members Hans Fouche and Richard van As have gone
with conventional cubic designs for their respective Cheetah and RoboBeast 3D
35
1. The maker movement

revolves around the rapid
prototyping talents of the
3D printer. 2. Richard van
As RoboBeast is possibly
the biggest success story
to come out of House4Hack.
3. RoboBeast stays true to
the RepRap philosophy with
all the plastic parts printed
on another RoboBeast.
3
4. The RepRap
Morgan has morphed
from spare parts to
precision machining.
5. Quentin Harley,
maker of the RepRap
Morgan, helped develop the RoboBeast.
6. While RoboBeast
sells mainly to engineering rms, Morgan
is meant for the home
and small business.
printers, Quentin Harley has a RepRap Morgan that looks like a piece of modern
art. All RepRap machines are named after science superheroes, by the way; the
Morgan is named after Nobel laureate biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan. Professor
Morgans greatest work was observing the unusual-looking offspring of two regular fruit flies. The namesake machine is intended to make more unusual printers.
Fittingly, the newly launched Maker Library at the Museum Of African Design
(MOAD) has ordered a Morgan. Im told it was more of a cost-based decision than
an aesthetic one. MOADs maker library librarian (yes, its an actual title) and education director Batya Raff has been hard at work bringing the de facto tool of the
makers to her carefully curated space. Were not a white-wall, red-tape, stuck-up
museum, says Raff about MOAD which is ironically nothing but bare, white
36
walls as the museum prepares for a new exhibition

and the launch of its maker library.
THE ROAD TO MOAD if youre travelling from OR
Tambo airport takes you past bustling market
(Bruma Lake) and cultural importance (CocaCola Park via the Albertina Sisulu freeway). I
counted five schools en route to Joburgs
Jeppestown. The museum is in the heart of the
cosmopolitan Maboneng Precinct, so the space is
at an intersection of hipster craft and educationwww.popularmechanics.co.za _ JUNE 2015
1. The Basotho Heritage Blanket-inspired clothing and accessories by Aranda is decadent in

its Africaness. 2. Museum of African designs
vernissage was well attended and received.
3. Batya Raff, herself a ceramic maker, is the
librarian at MOADs Maker Library. 4. Clothing
and textiles are possibly the oldest of maker
mediums. 5. MOAD is situated in Joburgs
Maboneng precinct and attracts patrons from
all cultures and walks of life.
al tools, fertile ground for cross-cultural collaboration and skills transfer. Its a
place of connection, explains Raff. A place that draws in people who wouldnt
ordinarily come into the Joburg CBD and a place where you can experience
design and art in a different way. Were trying to show high African design and
high African art as well as explore what it means to be in that making space and
experiencing the process of making.
On opening night, the white walls are dotted with high-quality photography
depicting uniquely African street scenes. There are two projector screens playing
videos of girls getting their hair and make-up done in a nondescript African
township. Im tempted to buy a jacket made from a Basotho heritage blanket
from their exhibition and to get drunk on the bespoke Bos Ice Tea cocktails. I
bump into Raff in the Black Bottle whisky bar; its conveniently located in the
basement about five metres from the Maker Library, which has morphed into an
interactive space where guests can build geometric shapes out of laser-cut pieces
from a Trispace maker kit. Its all a bit high art and even higher fashion, but
then I realise that artists and fashion designers are also makers.
Were not following the tech shop model with big machines and electronics,
she explains. Whether its woodworking tools or a 3D printer, were equipping
the space with tools that will help us bring these exhibitions to life.
It seems a world away from the beer and pizza-fuelled buzz at House4Hack,
but the tights-sporting men and high-waisted ladies at the MOAD event are
here for the exact same reasons: to be inspired and collaborate. If you think
about it, Arduino control boards and Raspberry Pis are the same as sewing
machines and cameras when used by skilled creatives in the way that the products perform a function and were made by people.
BACK AT THE HOUSE, Arnold and Philip give me a tour of their custom-built
drones and show off a glider that took a snap of the Earths curvature from 32 km
up. They rapid prototype on a hot wire CNC machine that they built themselves.
Arnold is the only guy in the house who uses Windows and this is proving
GREATEST HITS
South Africa has a proud maker
heritage. Here are some of our nest
moments
Statscan
The technologically advanced X-ray system is
so amazing it was even included as a character
on Greys Anatomy. The ability to do a full body
scan in around 13 seconds has revolutionised
trauma units around the world and saved
countless lives.
Bumbo
Oprah put this product on the map and rightly
so. Its a brilliantly simple way to prop your
baby up so he or she can have a better view of
the world. Aside from some special parents
who leave their kids unattended on top of
tables and want to use the Bumbo as a car
seat, this product has received high international praise.
Dolos breakwater block

An elegant and effective way to protect against
water turbulence and often left off lists such
as this because of the ubiquity of application.
You find them everywhere in the world, but they
were designed right here in SA in the 1960s.
37
4
1. Many of the maker
projects revolve around
the Arduino control
board, but the South
African-produced Speedy
board is a hot favourite
at House4Hack. 2. The
glider that ew up 32 km
in the air and photographed the curvature of
the Earth. 3. Linux is the
OS of choice for SAs
open source-loving
makers.
4. The infamous PrintrBot
was the rst 3D printer
printed by another 3D
printer at the house.
5. The Replicator printed
the rst pieces for the
RoboBeast and the
RepRap Morgan and was
the primary 3D printer at
House4Hack for many
years.
problematic. The laptop isnt communicating with the 3D printer very well and
everyone he asks for help uses Linux.
I move over to find Org tinkering with a couple of lights on a PC board. He
tells me that the lights are modules that connect to the smart home system he is
busy developing. The red light is supposed to be the geyser; you can switch it on
and off, and monitor the temperature using a smartphone app. I ask him if he
has used the ZigBee smart plug/switch with the Altech Node. He says No and
explains the philosophy behind tinkering. I think Ive offended him.
Theres an almost nave charm to the excitement around each project I
encounter. You can buy similar products off the shelf, but these guys are pouring
their hearts into making it their way. And each one has a business plan. Some
have even abandoned successful careers to turn their tinkering into commerce. I
want to back each and every one of them, but I cant seem to shake the feeling of
dotcom dj vu whenever I hear about one of the start-ups.
The variety and levels of skills among the guys attending tonights House4Hack
38
meeting is truly astonishing. There are only about

12 here now, but Schalk says the membership
stretches to 300. Theyre mostly doing these projects in their spare time; most have day jobs and
families. The group tell me about a 12-year-old
member who built a robot that is intelligent
enough to identify the colour blue and how they
collaborated with another maker community to
build fire-spewing projects for AfrikaBurn. My
mind is blown and I want to go home and tell the
world about South Africas maker movement.
1. Org is the common model of a modern maker who tinkers

in his spare time. 2. A Raspberry Pi does duty as a Wi-Fi
router. 3. A small-scale smart home that you can control
from your phone. 4. Intel is trying hard to lure makers on
to its Galileo platform through its developer zone network.
5. This contraption will point out any star you ask it to and
was developed by UCT students in 10 days using Intels
Galileo board.
ITS AN IMPORTANT NIGHT because Omar-Pierre

Soubra from Trimble is pitching his Maker Faire
idea to House4Hack. Maker Faire is happening
in Cape Town in August and will showcase South
Africas making chops on the Grand Parade. The
house is skeptical because they were burnt at
2014s Maker Faire Africa in Joburg, which
turned into an arts and craft show rather than a
celebration of backyard engineering. Schalk
wants a trade show where house members can
exhibit their start-ups to a wider audience. The
concerns are valid, but the South African public
still needs to be made aware of what making is
before they will invest in the products. The house
is excited and speaks of an extensive mailing list
that blankets our countrys entire network of
makers.
We have about 56 active maker spaces in our
borders. The projects that come out of these
hubs are as diverse as there are stars in the sky.
At an Intel event, I met three UCT students who developed the software and
hardware for a device that will point out in the sky, using a laser pointer, any
star or constellation that you ask it to. They built it in 10 days, the same time it
took for a group from Tuks to build a radio-controlled car with a camera that will
point any way you want to look.
On a larger scale you have RoboBeast, the robust 3D printer you can use
upside down or in the back of a car. The inventor/designer Richard van As founded House4Hack with Schalk Heunis, and Quentin Harley was on the RoboBeast
development team. RoboBeast manufactures in Roodepoort; all the components
except the stepper motors and battery pack are locally made. Charlton Davids
owns the company that builds the RoboBeast. You can call him a maker, too.
If you make something youre a maker. Since were all making a better country
together, South Africa really is a nation of makers.
39
40
CALL IT MADNESS OR GENIUS, BUT HANS

FOUCHE IS COMPELLED BY A DEEP DESIRE
TO CHANGE THE WORLD AND LEAVE HIS
MARK IN WHATEVER WAY POSSIBLE.
BY L I N D S E Y S C H U T T E R S
Hans Fouche has done a lot of making

in his life, but his two most renowned
inventions are the Cheetah 3D Printer
that prints with ABS pellets and the
missile deployment systems for the
Rooivalk.
P H O T O G R A P H S BY
WA L D O S W I E G E R S
IT DOESNT TAKE LONG TO SEE WHY there isnt a

line forming round the outside of Hans Fouches
Kempton Park property or why his inbox hasnt
exploded with buyers clamouring for his homebaked Cheetah 3D printer. The machine, like its
inventor, isnt what you can call refined. And if
you were spending R100000 on an industrial
3D printer, youd be within your rights to
expect better finishing and at least a housing
for the control boards.
Still, though it may not look like it, the
Cheetah has come a long way. It launched
Fouche 3D Printing on the road to international
notoriety. Actually, thats a bit of a fib: Fouche
has many admirers around the globe. And most
of them will know that Fouche 3D Printing
started with chocolate.
Do you know the term Chocnology? an
animated Fouche explains. If you Google it,
youll find an event that was hosted at MOAD
(Museum of African Design). I 3D-printed chocolates for the Chocnology thing. That thing
was a Nestl event that invited artists to design
chocolate sculptures to celebrate the launch of
Android 4.4, also known as Kitkat. But how
Fouche came to be a specialist in chocolate 3D
printing starts with a tale involving the Rooivalk
attack helicopter and Formula 1 race cars.
Many years ago I was a mechanical engineer
working at Kentron (now Denel) doing launchers for the Rooivalk attack helicopters antitank missiles, explains Fouche. I got to the
age of 30 and something happened in my mind.
I wanted to see my career ahead of me and
couldnt see that at Kentron. I took my December
thirteenth cheque and jumped on a plane to the
UK with a pack of 15 CVs to hand in at all the
F1 racing car teams. The story was, at least I
had aircraft manufacturing experience, which is
very similar to racing cars.
Eric Broadley of Lola Cars eventually gave
Fouche his break with a three-month contract.
Admittedly, that was at a much reduced salary
than he was earning in South Africa, mostly
because Broadley couldnt verify the contents
of his CV a problem I found with this story,

too. Fouche grabbed the opportunity, returned
home to sell everything he owned and reported
for duty at Lola. When I arrived there was an
opening at the Formula 1 team at Lola, he
says. I said, thank you very much, because F1
is my great passion. When I was growing up in
Kempton Park I used to cycle to Kyalami to
watch the races. There wasnt a meeting at
Kyalami that I missed.
Throughout his tenure at Kentron, Fouche
was a dedicated reader of international car magazines and it was in the pages of those magazines that he found his dreams come to life. He
never says he was unhappy at Kentron; he rather
recalls the frustration of the pace of development.
Theres nothing slow about race car development
because, even over the course of a race season,
engineers are refining and evolving the car
design.
His first day at Lola was quite chaotic. In SA,
I was a senior engineer and had two guys under
me. I was a boss, he recalls. Draughtsmen do
the drawing work here, but there engineers do
it. I had to run off to the stationery shop to get
rulers and pens. In SA, I was already working on
CAD and had little experience working on a
drawing board, but luckily the design process is
the same for both.
From Lola Fouche moved to Leyton House,
eventually ending up at Brabham as the chief
aerodynamicist. Wikipedia lists him on the
design team for the BT59 Formula One car and
he was also involved in the abysmal BT60,
Brabhams last race car, best remembered for a
last place at the 1992 South African Grand Prix
our first post-isolation race. But it was at
Brabham that Fouche started playing in the
world of rapid prototyping.
When you make a race car nose you actually
build about 20 and you test it in the wind tunnel,
he explains. You then take the two or three
best-performing models and take them a step
further. And you do that with the wings, side
pods, everything. In those years it was either NC
41
Proof of concept for ABS as a printing medium and the Cheetah as an

industrial machine was the rst project, printing a lawnmower which
Fouche uses to cut his grass to this day.
(numerical control) cutting or you carve it out of wood. The more

models you could make, the better your work was gonna be.
It was then that an idea sparked to build a machine that could
form the models quickly from CAD designs. I took a plotter,
replaced the pen with a modified superglue tube with compressed
air behind. You do the first layer with superglue, then spray it
with an activator so that it immediately sets and then lift it one
millimetre to do the next layer. He did all this in his spare time,
so theres no official record of his ground-breaking innovation.
Brabham also closed its doors nine races into the 1992 season, so
his invention couldnt be proven through performances either.
When Hans returned home he got a gig designing rubbish
trucks, but was trying to convince his friends at the CSIR to start
designing F1 cars. His argument gained traction and a team
pooled from SAs world-leading engineering companies (Atlas,
Aerotek and Kentron) got to work. The project started brightly
with the CSIR wind tunnels at Aerotek providing the perfect home
base for development. Fouche installed a rolling road in the wind
tunnel so the models could be tested with wheels running relative
to the wind speed and the team signed a contract with Forti.
What formed out of this partnership was Fortis FG01, which was
little more than a reworking of the Brabham BT60-succeeding
Fondmetal GR02 concept which was designed by Fouches former
Brabham colleague and then Forti design chief Sergio Rinland.
42
To call the FG01 a disaster would be a bit harsh, but a legacy of

being the last F1 car with a manual gearbox and only one on the
grid in 1995 speaks volumes for the cars outdated technology.
To their credit, the South Africans were testing the radical new
Formula One changes implemented after the Senna tragedy in
1994. The poor performance of the Ford Cosworth ED V8 engine
did the team no favours, either. The wind tunnel models, however,
were built via stereolithography, which is also known as resin
printing; that cool new 3D printing process where the object
forms out of a liquid like the T-1000 Terminator.
The South African mindset wasnt suited to the timescales of
F1 and worked better for military contracts, so the project collapsed, explains Fouche. But I realised while working on that
project that I must take this technology further. So I bought a
little plotter and a PC and started, but then the need for wind
tunnel models evaporated. So I put icing sugar into the machine
to decorate cakes by computer. But pumping icing sugar was a bit
of a problem, especially with compressed air behind it.
He soon grew tired of the sweet explosions and started using
chocolate. The nice thing about chocolate is that you can heat it, but
pumping it is difficult, he tells us. Fouches innovative mind led him
to a solution to his chocolate pumping woes: the peristaltic pump.
Ever since, Ive printed chocolates with my machine, he says.
I then took the Z-axis out because its very slow when you do it
that way. The other very important lesson I learnt in speeding up
the process was adding more nozzles. I multiplied to a machine
with eight nozzles, which prints eight times faster.
Fouche Chocolates thrived with the two machines, but the technology, stagnated. This was a good thing, because the technology
Below: Fouches racing car

passion is echoed by an
abandoned skeleton for a
Lotus 7-inspired track car
which uses the engine and
suspension sub-frame from
a Fiat Uno.
Left: The 3D Printer that printed the

Cheetah stands abandoned in the garage,
stripped of all its worth. Far left: Also in
his garage is the innitely variable transmission a concept intended for a motorcycle that will automatically switch
between any of 32 gears under full power.
remained expensive and the number of skilled technicians stayed

low. Fouche started a new company with two other friends that was
to produce chocolates, stained glass and do NC routing for frames. A
fatal car accident involving one of the business partners halted development and Fouche then spent the next 18 years without access to
this machine control technology to further his interests.
Fast-forward to the age of Arduino, where open source control
boards and software became widely available (around 2011) and
Hans Fouche emerged from his tragic slumber. Around the same
time I discovered House4Hack and realised that I could do it
myself, he explains. Then 3D printers were becoming available
so I bought a RapMan machine and started playing around for a
year and put it to work printing small things like rapala lures and
plastic washing pegs.
When Fouche 3D Printing was conceived with the products of
the RapMan machine, he was still stuck on his multiplication
model to speed up production. Then he went bigger. First I converted the machine to work with a 3 mm nozzle. Then I moved
out to the garage and converted one of my idle chocolate
machines to a 600 x 600 x 1000 mm printer. I built all the connecting pieces for the Cheetah.
The Cheetah prints fast and cheap, but the resolution is crude.
We say it prints cheaply because, instead of printing with plastic
filament at R250 per kilo, the 3 x 2 x 3-metre monster uses ABS
(the stuff you make hard hats out of) pellets which cost a mere
R35 per kilo. Combine that with a 500 g per hour flow rate and
you have the perfect machine for industrial rapid prototyping. Its
also built with the RepRap philosophy, so the business plan is to
build more Cheetahs and sell them to industry. And thats the key.
The Cheetah isnt intended for backyard hobbyists to make dainty
trinkets, but rather an alternative to expensive injection moulding.
Hans Fouche gets ridiculed and derided not for his inventions,
but for the presentation. There arent many makers in South
Africa who can boast a CV to match his, but that legacy is also littered with ultimately failed projects and missed opportunities. All
he wants is support for his claim for the throne of the maker community. You have to admire his resolve and his vision.
Being a maker means doing everything yourself. Im a mechanical engineer, so engineers tend to make a lot of things themselves. Normally youve got the garage, youve got the drill, youve
got the press, the hacksaw, the welder. And with these machines
(3D printers) you can design projects in CAD, just press a button
and there it is. Of course its not as simple as that, but thats the
idea. The other thing is the universal manufacturing machine
the machine that can do it all. This is definitely one step closer to
the universal machine. Because you can do ashtrays, the next day
you do shoes, the next day you do whatever. In that respect, its
the closest weve come to the universal manufacturing machine.
43
HERES WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

BEFORE GETTING STARTED AT HOME
BY S E A N W O O D S
To say additive manufacturing or 3D printing as its commonly

known has a promising future would be the understatement of the
century. Granted, although were nowhere near walking into some
futuristic printing shop with the design of our next vehicle (wiring and
all) on a ash drive just yet, no one can deny that this burgeoning, disruptive technology has already gone mainstream. We take a peep
behind the tech of a typical 3D printing machine.
PRINTER TYPES
FUSED DEPOSITION MODELLING (FDM) printers are what most hobbyists use when
conjuring up their own designs. Affordable, they are also available in various
sizes, designs and levels of sophistication (think RoboBeast and MakerBot).
They print objects by extruding a stream of heated or melted thermoplastic
material, which is placed layer upon layer, working from the bottom up.
STEREOLITHOGRAPHY (SLA) machines employ a vat of liquid ultraviolet curable
photopolymer resin and an ultraviolet laser to build layers one at a time. The
laser traces a cross-section of the pattern on the surface of the resin, causing it
to cure and solidify under the ultraviolet light and join to the layer below. Once
44
Main image: Checking out the future now visitors at a

recent PM display stand around mesmerised as they
watch a 3D printer perform its magic in real time.
Above: Thanks to the 3D printing revolution, manufacturing
your own bespoke items at home has never been easier.
complete, the grown item is washed in a chemical bath to remove excess resin, then cured in an
ultraviolet oven.
SELECTIVE LASER SINTERING (SLS) is a technique
that uses a high-power laser to sinter layers of
powdered materials typically metals into
solid structures. Needless to say, this technique
is more suited to the likes of tech heavyweights
the CSIR rather than your average home workshop.
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the pros and cons, methodically scrutinise
the details and, above all, utilise one of
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TYPICAL COMPONENTS OF A
HOBBYISTS FDM MACHINE
Seeing that FDM printers are what most of us are

likely to encounter as hobbyists, heres a breakdown
of their basic components:
MOVING MECHANISM
In order to move along 3 axes/dimensions (X, Y and Z)
most printers make use of fixed rods, timing belts and
pulleys to manoeuvre the print head and/or platform to
the exact position required and small stepper motors
permit extremely precise movements of a fraction of a
millimetre. These motors are important components
as theyre in part responsible for the quality of the
end product.
EXTRUDER
The extruders job is to feed the filament into
the so-called hot-end. Extruders are where
some of the biggest differences between 3D
printers exist, and where the biggest developments are most likely to take place in the
future. Some models integrate the filament
driver as well as the hotend in one piece; other
printers feature a material
feeder separated from the
extrusion head. Both
types have their pros
and cons.
RETRACTION
Retraction is a technique
that sucks molten plastic
back into the heated
hot-end. Retracting the
filament back into the
nozzle just before jumping across gaps prevents cobweb-like thin strands of plastic
(called stringing) from forming a messy, time-consuming
job to clean up should it occur.
DUAL EXTRUDER
Some printers feature dual extruders, allowing them to print
with two filament drivers and as well as two hot-ends giving
you the ability to print in dual colours or even two different
materials. This is a great feature for those wanting to print
items with large overhangs that require a scaffold supporting
structure.
HOT END
Usually made up from a block of aluminium, the Hot End gets
heated up to around 250 degrees to melt the plastic filament,
and includes a nozzle and heat sensor. Typical nozzle diameters
range from 0,2 mm to 0,5 mm in size. The smaller the nozzle,
the finer the print, but the longer it takes to complete.
PRINTBED
The most common printbeds are made out of acrylic, aluminium
or glass. When buying a printer, always check the exact printbed size, as it plays a determining factor in the maximum size
of your future printed objects. Some printbeds are heated to
prevent the warping or cracking of prints, especially when
using ABS plastics.
46
FILAMENTS
The two most common filament types are PLA and ABS. Each
plastic has its own physical and chemical properties, so each
type needs its own specific set-up within your printing software. Before purchasing any filament, make sure you know
what diameter fits your printer.
PM
17_XTWN423_2015_ENG
turn up
the heat
Whether youre entertaining outdoors or snuggling up

to an inviting replace inside, we have a heating
solution just for you.
Visit us in-store for our latest

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on 0860 284 533 or visit us at www.builders.co.za
N E W I D E A S T H AT C O U L D C H A N G E T H E W O R L D O Compiled by THE EDITORS popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za
UPGRADE
OOMI TOUCH
Tap into smart homes

Just when we thought the world was moving towards
using smartphones as universal remote controls comes
news of a move in the opposite direction. Oomis modular
approach to the smart home uses a dedicated, customisable
touch-sensitive controller (it has physical buttons, too)
that looks remarkably like a big smartphone or small
tablet. However, it will interface with Android and iOS
apps for remote monitoring.
The systems hub is the Oomi Cube (main pic). Around
R3 500 buys you the basic kit, which includes the Cube,
Touch, and one accessory of your choice (bulb, plug or
multisensor). There are eight different sensors, including
glass break and motion detection.
According to Oomi, you can connect all sorts of things,
from door locks that secure automatically when you go
out, to air conditioners that cool your home when youre
coming back. Its able to manipulate lighting to mimic
your homes normal patterns while you are away, so it
appears to be occupied.
Components include:
1 Bulb. Lighting ambience effects range from different
colours to an unusual gradual sunrise effect or, for
evenings, a warm sunset hue.
2 Plug. This creates a smart outlet so that hard-to-reach
devices can be controlled or have their energy consumption
monitored. Theres a USB charging port on the side.
48
1
2
3 Multisensor. Detects motion, temperature, light, UV

rays, vibrations and humidity.
4 Streamer. Streams HD media directly from the Internet
to your television.
5 Air. Oomi air monitors air contaminants to make sure
your air is healthy. It senses PM2.5, which are EPA-monitored
particles that are one-fortieth the width of a human hair.
According to Oomi, seven unique security features are
built into the system. These include 128-bit encryption for
every communication, both between devices inside your
home and between your home and the cloud.
To avoid getting locked into a closed ecosystem, Oomi
is integrated with other technologies such as the next
generation of Z-Wave, the most widely used wireless
home automation technology.
Three accessories, the developers estimate, is the threshold
point at which users really start to reap the benefits of
having a smarter home. Adding an accessory (estimated
price: about R600) is as easy as tapping the Touch controller.
Operating range is up to 100 metres outdoors; indoors
range depends on the construction of the house.
Accessories build a mesh network, which means that the
more you have the better signal all of them will receive.
Oomis Indiegogo campaign is substantially oversubscribed by mid-April it had raised nearly 8 times its
$50 000 target. Production is expected by September.
Find out more: oomihome.com
SOUNDS BETTER THAN IT READS

Schiit Audio Yggdrasil DAC
It took five years of research to come up with the most tonguetwisting name in audio, Yggdrasil. Actually, we made that up:
it took that long to develop the new flagship Schiit digital-toanalogue converter. Yggdrasil (in Norse legend, the world tree
or source of all things) is, say the guys at Schiit Audio, an entirely
different take on end-game DAC design.
Yggdrasil was designed with a single goal in mind: to give
you the most from the music you already have, said Mike Moffat,
co-founder of Schiit Audio. Its the end result of five years of
research into digital filter algorithms, resulting in a unique
closed-form digital filter running on an Analog Devices SHARC
DSP processor, as well as four true 20-bit Analog Devices DACs
running in differential configuration.
Yggdrasil supports all PCM formats from 16/44 to 24/192
through all inputs, including USB, AES/EBU, BNC, Coaxial and
Toslink optical. The all-new USB Gen 3 input receiver and Schiits
proprietary Adapticlock system manage clock regeneration for
optimal performance. It outputs both balanced XLR and singleended RCA (summed) analogue simultaneously.
Schiit Audio was established in June 2010 with what partners
Jason Stoddard (ex-Sumo) and Mike Moffat (founder of Theta)
describe as a simple, if somewhat insane, mission: to bring superior performance, design and quality to audio products, while
manufacturing in the USA. The companys products span DACs,
headphone amplifiers and preamplifiers, starting at around R600
to the Yggdrasils R27 500. Unusually, they are heavily focused on
direct sales as a means to limit costs.
Find out more: schiit.com
PM
50
GARMIN VIVOACTIVE O SAMSUNG GALAXY S6 O AXA PICO PROJECTOR O BRAVEN 705 SPEAKER
COMPILED BY THE EDITORS > popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za
TESTED
GARMIN VivoActive
SMART BY NATURE
THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN

LIFESTYLE AND FITNESS is a busy
place these days. Traditional sports
watches now seem to be confined to
diehard geeks (I know, Im one) and the
initial popularity of fashionable fitbands
seems to have waned. Thus we have seen
the rise of the combination device fitband, sportswatch, GPS, smartphoneenabled and above all, stylish. The last
point is the important one: after all, for
tech to be wearable, first, youd have to
want to wear it.
52
Ease of use, accuracy, connectivity

Screen scratches easily, dark display
We were given a sneak preview of the

VivoActive just a couple of months after
its introduction at this years CES and
ahead of its SA launch.
First impressions are that good
start its part fitness tracker, part
GPS sportswatch and part smartwatch.
Its sleek and relatively unobtrusive. Its
also impossibly thin and incredibly light.
And hallelujah, its also an actual watch
that tells the time until you switch it to
its sport mode. All of this means it can
be worn all day long.
Activated by a combination of two

pushbutton controls and a colour touchscreen with an icon-based interface that
incorporates virtual Return and Menu
buttons, the VivoActive is not hard to
get up and running. Switching over to
the VivoActive from my trusty Garmin
310XT was (more or less) intuitive. Without reading the manual, I was able to
input my profile. Using it for an activity
took a little headscratching until the
delay was traced to an out-of-date version
of iOS that didnt allow me to update
my version of the Garmin Connect App. Once up to date,

though, it was a breeze.
Besides tracking hardcore sport and workout, like regular
fitbands the VivoActive also carries out activity-tracking
by monitoring your lifestyle, including sleep. A nagging
vibrating alarm reacts to inactivity (not during sleep,
clearly) and Move! appears on the display.
The display is inexplicably dark, though; you sometimes
need to squint to read the text and the backlighting is
of little use unless you are in an extremely dark coal cellar.
I also found a (drat) scratch mark that didnt seem to be
there when the device arrived. The rubber strap can feel a
little uncomfortable in prolonged use, too. In the white
colour supplied it gets grubby quickly and I would go for
black. (There are alternative straps, including leather.)
But this is praise with faint damnation. Really, the
VivoActive is a great piece of kit.
Being a smartwatch, it connects automatically to your
mobile to sync workout data, provide call and messaging
alerts as well as app notifications, including social media
and weather, and control music replay. Theres a Find My
Phone widget, too. Outdoor and indoor modes for run,
walk and bike, plus swimming and golf, are shown as screen
icons. At this stage, apparently, theres no support for
multisport (triathlon) or a power meter. It does also lack
the dedicated workout planning features of more hardcore
sportwatches. But a welcome addition to the Run mode,
for me, is cadence.
It excels at its activity-tracking function, whether outdoors using GPS for running, biking or walking, or their
indoors equivalents. It supports multiple external sensors
such as my heart-rate belt. And the mass of data available
for after-workout perusal will have many of you in sports
geek heaven: plenty of numbers to crunch as well as clear
graphs. Golfers will be pleased to know that its features
include shot distance, yardage to the front, middle and
back of the green, and yardage to layups and doglegs.
The VivoActive, like other new models from Garmin,
benefits significantly from the companys Connect IQ,
described as the first-ever open platform for third-party
developers to create apps. So theres support for additional
widgets and apps, including colourful watch faces and the
ability to translate rich sensor data into new relevant
metrics. Even more, developers can create widgets to add
to the main screen loop. These can include the score of a
big game, or when its time for users to hydrate during a
long run, ride or hike. These apps can be tailored to any
individual lifestyle, no matter what device users are using
it for, Garmin says.
So the VivoActive is very much a gadget that people
regular folk will want to wear. But what about those
diehard geeks? Will it do the job for them?
I think I can answer that. The VivoActive covers more
bases, suits more needs and ticks more boxes than just
about anything else the company makes. The price is in the
right area for local consumption, though Im disappointed
that it is so much more expensive than the $249 being
quoted on Garmins US Web site. For those who want the
ultimate in flexibility and workout planning, its not quite
there. For the other 99 per cent of the world, its the killer
app of Garmin fitwatches. ANTHONY DOMAN
Just the facts
SIZE
DISPLAY
RESOLUTION
WEIGHT (WITH BAND)
WATER RATING
BATTERY
RUNTIME
WATCH/ACTIVITY TRACKING
GPS
PRICE
43,8 x 38,5 x 8 mm
28,6 x 20,7
205 x 148
38 g
5 ATM
lithium-ion, rechargeable
up to 3 weeks
up to 10 hours
R4 499 (with HRM bundle,
R5 099)
TESTED
53
TESTED
TESTED
SAMSUNG GALAXY S6 AND S6 EDGE
FEELING GOOD
THE EDGE VARIANT OF THE

GALAXY S6 looks like a Daft Punk
helmet. The sheer audacity of the beautiful curves can make you forget how
distracting the reflections you catch on
the unusual angles truly are and that,
with a 50 per cent production yield,
Samsung makes two curved glass panels
for every one S6 Edge ordered. Its a
decadent device that raids your bank
account and the Earth with equal
brutality.
When the test units arrived, it was
the standard S6 that first reached our
desk. Samsung went all out in exorcising
the demons that plagued Galaxies S4
and 5. Gone is the sluggish and overbearing Touchwiz. Away with mediocre
camera performance. Out with the
unreliable swipe fingerprint sensor.
Down with plasticky cheapness. This
is metal-cladded glass sandwiching of
the highest order, with a truly excellent
camera and vivid screen to match.
54
Its beautiful, display, camera

Its decadent, lack of expandable memory, non-removable battery
Then the Edge arrived and completely

realigned our perception of what a
premium flagship device can and should
be. It looks better than the iPhone 6!
exclaimed one devout Apple fanboy.
The girls in the office wanted to just
be around it. Birds appeared in my
bedroom to catch a glimpse (true story).
But whereas the Edge adds eye candy
to an already great smartphone experience, the display creates problems
when text melts into the curve and
your Instagram feed gets slightly
distorted.
Samsung gave us the superb camera
experience with the Note 4 already and
the performance upgrade isnt really
that noticeable over the Galaxy S5.
Even the Galaxy A3 can match the S6
in the selfie department and harsh
edges of the Galaxy Alpha brought the
premium feel in spades.
Yes, Samsung has blended all its best
elements into one flagship phone, but
the trade-offs are massive. What good

is a fantastic camera that shoots in file
sizes upwards of 4 MB when the phone
doesnt have expandable memory? Why
would you revert to the slower microUSB 2.0 port when the micro-USB 3.0
is backwards compatible and more
than doubles the data transfer rate?
And who signed off on a smaller, nonremovable battery to drive a higherresolution screen?
The Galaxy S6 is deeply flawed
genius with painfully average battery
life, great design, the best screen and
represents the best Galaxy S since the
S3. If you cant swallow the premium
price, you can always settle on a Note 4
and get all the same photographic bells
plus the S-Pen whistles. Were happy
that Samsung leapfrogged Apple in
terms of camera performance, display
quality and design and are excited to see
the iPhones comeback later this year.
LINDSEY SCHUTTERS
Advertisement
Part 4 of our 10-part series Motorsport Technology Down the Ages
Power vs poise
STUART GRAY/ALAMY
In their own way, two polar opposites define

the end of an era in Formula One racing: the
delicate, aerodynamic, cigar-shaped Cooper T51
with its central cockpit and rear-mid engine vs
the traditional long-nosed Ferrari 246, with the
driver perched near the rear wheels, staring down
the formidable length of a bonnet that held a
brawny V6. The world was entering the Swinging
Sixties and motorsport was about to embrace,
completely, a design concept that would revolutionise top-flight racing.
When Grand Prix motor racing restarted after
World War II, car design was more or less cast in
stone: front-engined, their long noses housing air
intakes with grilles to feed the powerful engines.
Never mind that the mighty Auto Unions that
dominated pre-war racing were rear-engined.
Its said that British constructor John Cooper
went the mid-engined route because this was
more practical for his early lower-formula cars,
which used motorcycle engines with chain drive.
But there was another, even more practical
benefit that would soon become apparent and
deadly effective. Mid-engined cars had inherently
better weight distribution and, consequently,
better handling. With a heavy engine up front,
cars tended to understeer, though their power
advantage offset that to an extent.
The first works Coopers, which made their debut in 1957, caused a few ripples (Jack Brabham
managed a sixth place at Monaco), but didnt upset the establishment. A year later, though, things
began to change. Privateer teams began running
Coopers and, with rule changes that levelled the
playing field, suddenly things didnt look quite
so rosy for the front-engined brigade.

Stirling Moss drove the privateer Team Rob
Walker Cooper to victory in the seasons opening
race in Argentina the first Formula One win
by a rear-engined car. Maurice Trintignant followed with another Cooper win in Monaco. On
faster circuits the more powerful front-engined
competition still ruled, but the rear-engined cars
managed enough points to finish the season in
third place.
The real breakthrough season was 1959. The
Rob Walker Racing Team, their Cooper T51s
fitted with a 2,5-litre Climax four-cylinder, were
utterly dominant, winning five out of eight races
and earning a title win for Jack Brabham.
Power, it seemed, wasnt much good without
poise.
Unconvinced, Ferrari stuck with its frontengined 246 and paid the price. For them, the
1960 season ended with a miserable third place
in the manufacturers championship behind a
once again triumphant Cooper/Brabham combination. The other teams were beginning to sit up
and pay attention, too notably, Colin Chapmans
Team Lotus. An innovative designer, Colin Chapman set the template for many successful cars
to come with his rear-engined Lotus 18 and, by
1960, was scoring wins.
There was one last hurrah for the front-mounted engine. Phil Hill drove his Ferrari to victory at
the manufacturers home event, Monza. It was a
pyrrhic victory; the British teams boycotted the
event, citing the dangers of the circuit. It was also
the end of an era: the last championship race
victory for a front-engined car.
The Cooper Climax V8 engine nestled

in the spaceframe chassis of the 1963
championship-winning Lotus 25
epitomises the rear-mounted concept.
Not for Sale to Persons Under the Age of 18.
TESTED
AAXA P3X PICO PROJECTOR
SHOW AND TELL
Lightweight, small and portable

Focus wheel can be tricky to use, no remote control, onboard sound quality is not great
THE NEW PICO PROJECTOR from AAXA, the P3X, is a lightweight, portable projector
capable of projecting and playing 720p media files from a memory card or USB drive, as well
as content from your computer or DVD player. The P3X also offers you the ability to connect
to most mobile devices via a HDMI port. Although the device has inbuilt speakers, I must
confess that the sound is not fantastic. Fortunately, the P3X offers you the option of
connecting to an external audio source via either the AV port, USB port or the
audio output.
Being a portable projector, it cant really compete with larger projectors,
but it does offer an adequate 70 lumens of LED brightness that is able to
produce an 80-inch image in the dark. I found the image/video quality
to be best at around 40-inch, which is ideal for watching movies at
home, or for your work presentations and meetings.
JESSE HENNEY
Just the facts
TESTED
BRAVEN 705
MUSIC ON THE MOVE
BATTERY
RUNTIME
LAMP LIFE
CONNECTS TO
PRICE:
AVAILABLE:
lithium-ion
2 hours
15 000 hours
Most smart devices.
R5 499
iStore or contact Above and Beyond
Distributors on +27 861 777 258 or
www.above-beyond.co.za
Lightweight, small and portable

Focus wheel can be tricky to use, no remote control, onboard sound quality is not great
THE BRAVEN 705 is a portable Bluetooth speaker that can fit many of your audio
needs without breaking your wallet. It has some pretty impressive dare I say unique
features at this price point, including the ability to charge your phone and other devices
via the inbuilt battery, which does come in handy with modern smartphones. It also
has Bluetooth audio passthrough, which can plug into your stereo for extra bass, as well
as IPX5-certified water resistance. Admittedly, I didnt actually throw the Braven into
the pool to test this claim, but it will survive a splash or two as you do your Karaoke
thing in the shower. It also has plenty of wireless runtime and the built-in rechargeable
battery means you can take it virtually anywhere.
But enough about the peripheral stuff; what is it like as a speaker? Pretty darn good.
It is surprisingly powerful and the clarity is excellent when playing music. I paired it
with my mobile phone and it handled phone calls with aplomb, too. I cant really fault it
from a functionality perspective either: it was really easy to pair with all of my devices
and the controls are simple and large, which as a man I found to be a useful feature.
JESSE HENNEY
Just the facts
DIMENSIONS
WEIGHT
BATTERY
WIRELESS RUNTIME
WIRELESS RANGE
INPUT
DRIVERS
PRICE
AVAILABLE:
CONTACT:
56
PM
159 x 66 x 46 mm
339 g
1 400 mAh lithium-ion
12 hours
10 m
3,5 mm stereo,
2 + passive radiator
R1 699
Exclusively at the iStore
Above & Beyond Distributors on +27 861 777 258 or visit www.above-beyond.co.za
TESTED
WIN THE ULTIMATE

FATHERS DAY PRIZE
A SUZUKI SX4 WORTH R295 900!
The do-it-all Suzuki SX4 1,6 GLX M/T is the perfect
crossover for adventurous urban dads and you
could win this awesome car for your father.
During the week, if performs work and school-run
duties with aplomb. Come the weekend, however, and it morphs into a
gravel-road machine that takes the tasks of adventure-seeking fathers and
their families in its stride. Keeping them safe on all these memory-making
journeys are seven airbags, ABS and electronic stability control, while
entertainment is provided by a comprehensive entertainment system with
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LEARNING
F
F
TAK EO
T O F LY
An acclaimed novelist takes the controls of an aircraft for the rst time.
And hes scared to death.
BY
58
JOSH UA FERRIS
I WAS
TER RIF I E D.
I D O NT
MEAN
O C CASI O N ALLY.
I MEAN THAT TERROR, AS AN EMOTION, as a prevailing mood, had
overtaken my life. I woke in the night gulping for air, my heart

going faster than ever. Why? Another bad dream. It was 3:13 am.
There was no getting back to sleep. In that dark and terrible
hour, I thought dire things.
From where did the terror spring? How could I put it back in
the bottle? I didnt know. I couldnt trace it back to any one
thing. I was about to turn 40. Was that it? In the end, I assumed
it was death. Death, for me, is bound up in everything: my fear,
my ambition. Humour, sex, the urge to travel. Death is why I
shouldnt drink. Death is why I do.
Last summer, I watched my dad die. That might have been
the source of it. I saw him laid out upon a hospice bed in the
library of his house in Park Ridge, Illinois. It left me feeling
more vulnerable than usual. Or perhaps and this was the
most terrifying thought of all the terror sprang from nothing
and was here to stay.
That summer was a good one for terror. ISIS. Ebola. The kidnappings by Boko Haram. Russians invading Ukraine. Israelis and
Palestinians at war again. The police shooting in Ferguson and
the mess that followed. Warnings of drastic climate change and
continued odd weather. I saw birds flying what seemed like
meaningful patterns and I thought nothing was immune from
the taint of terror.
So what did I do? I decided to learn how to fly.
To go up in the air inside a machine is a very stupid thing
to do. It is also transcendentally cool and extremely practical.
We go up for sport. We go up for commerce. We go up for war.
We go up so effortlessly and routinely these days

that its easy to forget what it entails: the elevation
of a mighty payload of metal and fuel, with souls
aboard, by the incorporeal air. Physics says its possible
over and over again on the departures board at JFK,
but common sense stubbornly insists that its just
plain dumb.
The variable in every flight is the pilot. The laws
of physics might be absolute, but with human
beings there are no guarantees. Physics doesnt care
what the pilot does, because whether the pilot lives
or dies, its rules will be respected. Physics is like the
indifferent farmer in Bruegels Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus: as the prideful pilot-child plunges into
the sea, physics ploughs on with its days work.
Today, flying is nothing. Weve been doing it for
over a hundred years. The golden age of aviation
gave way to the golden age of air travel, which has
soured into a protracted era of airline-induced misery. The contemporary commercial flight is a shrug
and a hassle. The seats have
shrunk, the crew hates the
passengers and the passengers hate each other, and for
everything there is a fee.
Romance has quit the skies.
But do it yourself pilot a
plane from takeoff to landing, in command of every
climb and dive and see if
your pulse doesnt quicken and the raw colour come back to
your eyes. The question is no longer: can we fly? The question
to ask yourself is: can I fly?
I TOOK FLYING LESSONS for four months from Tom Fischer, who,
with his wife, Jodi, runs Fischer Aviation in Fairfield Township,

New Jersey. Seeing Tom for the first time, my initial thought
was that a man could not have been better engineered for flight
instruction. A pale man of substantial build, with eyeglasses
and a shaved head, he split the difference perfectly between an
Army general and a sixth-grade maths teacher. If he seemed
reserved at first, laconic in the style of a military man, and if I
generally liked my teachers verbal and outgoing, that was okay.
His first task was to keep me alive, and I didnt mind if the job
description called for the occasional silence.
My ultimate objective was to fly solo. I was never confident
that I would actually do something so reckless and brave. I mean
to say I didnt think it possible, either physically or psychologically. Im not a mechanically inclined man, but I am a man
scared to death of flying. Sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, darting eyes, hands gripping armrests, tears on standby, a scream
ever perched on the edge of my teeth. And thats before takeoff.
For me, there is terror, and then there is the terror of flight.
I was not always so afraid. In the eighties, after my parents
split and my mom moved us away, Id board a plane several
times a year for Chicago. These trips north were my reason to
live. They reunited me with my dad. I loved airplanes back then,
even the weird engine sounds and Reagan-era turbulence. The
stewardesses gave me a pair of golden wings to pin to
my shirt, and when I was really lucky, a free can of
Sprite all to myself. At that time, anyone could go to
the gate without a ticket, so Id come down the gangway to find my dad standing there with a big smile on
Joshua Ferris is the author of three novels, including Then We Came to the
his face, tears in his eyes, arms spread wide, and Id
End, a nalist for the National Book Award, and To Rise Again at a Decent
run into that mans embrace and breathe in his afterHour, nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in the rst year
shave and Id know that I was home.
American writers were eligible to receive it.
59
Much later, in 2003, I boarded a flight out of

John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California.
LEARNING
I was by then a nervous flier, which I differentiate
from the wreck, the puddle and the basket case.
T O F LY
I was, in other words, acquiescent but attentive. I
listened for changes in engine noise, alive to every
ripple and quiver of rough air. Some flights
departing John Wayne are required to climb very high very
quickly and then cut back the engines to reduce noise as they
glide over the wealthy neighbourhoods down below. For a full
minute, it felt to me like I was inside a rocket. When we levelled
off, the first thing I noticed was the sunlight. As it streamed in
through the windows across the aisle, I seemed to be able to
pick out each individual ray. That was the cabin beginning to
fill with smoke.
Two things happened next. The first was the sounding of a
I WANTED TO RUN AWAY WHEN I LEARNT THAT THE

PLANE WAS NEARLY 50 YEARS OLD!
60
high-pitched, continuous, not-too-loud bell the smoke alarm.

The second was a faint odour, indisputable and growing stronger:
an industrial smell, like someone using turpentine to burn a
plastic toy. By the time my fellow passengers stirred from their
naps and magazines, we were in the thick of an emergency.
Panic set in quickly. There were screams, tears. The woman in
front of me began to hyperventilate. The plane turned back, but
because we had climbed like a rocket, we now had to come down
like one. The descent did not seem planned or orderly. It felt like
we were crashing. The captain offered us no reassurances, only
a single, harsh instruction: Breathe through your shirts. I
watched in dismay as the stewardess, stricken and useless, put
on her chest harness. The woman next to me kept asking between
sobs if we were still over water. We were. I put my arm around
her. I was strangely calm. A mother held hands across the aisle
with her son. We all waited for impact.
But impact never came. We touched down shakily, but intact.
We were met by emergency vehicles. We filed off the plane. Two
free vouchers arrived in the mail a few months later, along with
an explanation. The motor responsible for pressurising the air
had burnt out and released smoke into the cabin. The plane
itself was fine.
But part of me feels like Ive been living on borrowed time
ever since.
Whats the worst that can happen to me? I asked Tom
before we took our first flight together.
On a training flight?
I nodded. Tom and I were very different men, if based
only on our choice of professions. Im a writer who never
enjoys lifting my butt off the office chair. Ideally I dont
leave the house, and a perfect day is one in which I dont
get out of bed. Tom, on the other hand, departs the
earth multiple times a day.
People unfortunately die in flight training, he said
after a long pause. I would think that would be the
worst thing.
Ha ha. Yes.
I tell people all the time, he added, its a lot of fun,
but its not a game.
With that, we headed out to the airfield.
The last time someone taught me to do something big
with a machine, I was learning how to drive. By then I
had moved north to live with my dad. He had been
teaching me to drive for years. I was 7 when he first put
me on his lap and let me steer the car around the parking
lot. Now I was old enough to do it on my own. At night,
on sleepy suburban streets, he and I went out and
worked on things like signalling and turning and braking
on time. I was a trepidatious student. The simulation
videos in Drivers Ed instill in the sensitive young man
the conviction that, at any given instant he is about to
strike and kill a child on a tricycle. I didnt want to kill
anyone, so my general approach behind the wheel was to
look, accelerate, brake, look, accelerate, brake, until, inch
by inch, we made our way down the street. This tried my
fathers patience. He was a man who liked speed.
During my time in the air with Tom I would be
reminded of all the time I spent in the car with my dad.
My reluctance to assert myself on the stick and rudder
was not unlike my reluctance to go above fifteen miles
per hour while white-knuckling the steering wheel. At a
certain point in my drivers education, when I knew how
to accelerate and brake and all the rest, and the only
thing that stood between me and authority was fear,
useless fear, my father said to me, Just drive the damn
61
LEARNING
T O F LY
car! This command came back to me from the

beyond at some point during my flying lessons.
Twenty-five years later I was still listening to my
old man. Now I sometimes think that the story of
how I learnt to fly is really just the story of how I
learnt to stop worrying and fly the damn plane.
I WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU to my airplane. We

call it Six-Two Romeo, after the call sign painted on its fuselage.
It is a single-prop Piper Cherokee Cruiser. It has four seats and
wings perched below the pilot rather than above. It has a wingspan of nine metres and weighs 570 kilograms fresh from the
bath. Its a snug ride. Tom and I sit thigh to thigh. The student
is on the left, the instructor on the right. The plane is engineered
with dual controls. Its underbelly is painted brown, with twin
ribbons of gold flowing along the fuselage. There was, I thought,
something dated about its design. I asked Tom what year the
plane was made.
1966, he said.
That was the first time I wanted to run away. (I would want to
run away with stunning regularity, often while 2 500 feet up in
the air.) On the one hand, a plane built in 1966 has demonstrated
an extraordinary safety record. On the other hand, sooner or
later, everyones luck runs out, and that Cherokee had almost
fifty years under its belt. How
much more could we reasonably
expect from it?
Isnt that kind of old? I
asked him.
He paused before answering.
I was born in 1967, he said.
We began to laugh. Ha ha ha.
My problem was a lack of
faith. In order to better understand people who deny scientific knowledge that I find easy
to accept, like evolution or the
man-made causes of climate
change, I merely need to
remember my skepticism
towards the indisputable physics of flight. I had a hard time
believing that flying was possible, no matter how often Id
gone up and come safely back
down. I didnt just think Toms
1966 Cherokee alone would
fail to hold together. I thought every plane I boarded would fail
to hold together. A thing of such size, subject to such wear and
tear, was bound to break apart, inevitably with me in it.
A year or so after my emergency landing at John Wayne
Airport, when my fear of flying was at its most rabid, I tried to
get a handle on it. It was summer, and I had an oscillating fan
going in the bedroom. During the hot months that fan went
round and round all day and all night. I looked at it, at its
spinning blades and rotating head, and wondered why I never
had the same worries about it that I had for all the planes I
boarded. The stakes werent the same, of course, but was an
airplane not a machine like the fan? The fan worked unfailingly, without a single hour of maintenance, and had for years
and years, and I never once questioned my perfect faith that it
would continue to do so for years into the future. Why should
I not have the same faith in an airplane? If anything, an airplane is subject to more scrutiny than a household fan, its use
is heavily regulated, and entire maintenance crews are devoted
THE WORLD
WAS SUDDENLY
UNRECOGNISABLE
AND MORE
DANGEROUS THAN
BEFORE. MORE
VULNERABLE.
62
to keeping it safe and operational. After this little epiphany,

whenever I boarded a plane, I took enormous comfort in my
simple fan and its continuous and faithful turning.
Then the fan broke.
THE AIRPORT OUT OF WHICH Fischer Aviation operates is called,
informally, Caldwell Airport. Its off Passaic Avenue, hidden
behind some chain-link fencing. Blink and youll miss it.
Compared with Newark or JFK, its a parking lot full of toy
planes and a patch or two of tarmac. (I was surprised to discover
during my time in the air just how many little airports there are,
at least in that corner of New Jersey, several of which are
uncontrolled. Accustomed as I was to the strangulating regulations of commercial flight, I found amateur aviation still very
much a scrappy, DIY thing, just some guys taking their winged
go-karts up for a spin.)
Out by the plane, the first thing Tom and I did was go
through the preflight checklist. Never am I more skeptical about
the ultimate wisdom of our experts in aviation than when I see
some short-sleeved pilot suffering the indignities of wind and
rain to stand beneath the belly of a plane and eyeball the structural integrity of a row of rivets. Thats it? I think. Thats safety?
But it was no different with Six-Two Romeo. Tom and I
crouched and contorted, we loomed and looked as we inspected
the planes bolts, pins, winches and wingtip lights. We felt down
the length of the propeller for any imperfections. We stopped
before the cowling (what I wanted to call the hood), and Tom
popped it open like the lid on a lunch box to reveal an engine
that could have been started with a few yanks on a pull string.
We checked it for fire damage and the presence of animals. In
everyday life, I have grown accustomed to a computer or some
other device mediating between me and the world. The digital
magically renders error and danger obsolete. But search an
engine for animals and you know youre back to the basics. Its
just you and your eyeballs and whatever faith they can lend that
the engine hasnt been molested by some rabbits.
As things progressed, I continued to see just what a thoroughly
analogue experience flying can be. In Six-Two Romeo there is no
autopilot, no computer, no digital communication between the
pilot and the controls. A commercial Airbus or Boeing jet might
be one intricate and high-powered mainframe, but Toms Piper
Cherokee was a distant cousin of the lawn mower. Expand the
motor on your rider and take away a wheel, enclose the seat and
add one for a buddy, throw on a pair of wings, and presto. Your
grass eater is now ready for takeoff.
It was kind of thrilling. Here was a well engineered (if a tad
aged) block of metal and wire nestled inside an aerodynamic
hull. It was going to put me up there in the blue sky as if by
magic. And I would guide it there using nothing but my hands
and an intimate physical knowledge of how it worked. No
updates, no inputs, no hitting enter. Just me and the 1.0 world.
Once through with the inspection, we climbed into the cockpit. We put on seat belts escaped from the back seat of an
Oldsmobile. The analogue nature of the Piper Cherokee continued to reveal itself. The yoke, which controls both the pitch and
the bank of an airplane, moved in and out and left to right with
the matter-of-fact functionality of a primitive arcade game. The
rudder pedals at my feet were notched, metallic and brutal.
There was a trim tab control (I did not know what any of this
meant practically) affixed to the ceiling that resembled the hand
crank of a window in a municipal building, while the wing flaps
were controlled by what looked like an emergency brake lever. I
would come to learn that at certain critical moments, such as
landing, the pilot, manipulating all of these controls at once, can
look not unlike one of those multi-instrumentalists simultanewww.popularmechanics.co.za _ JUNE 2015
ously strumming the guitar, blowing the harmonica, and tapping a foot drum.
I started the propeller with the push of a button. I struggled
to insert my two headphone jacks into the instrument panel a
poor harbinger of my competency with the more complicated
controls before me. Then Tom radioed to air traffic control and
we taxied to the runway.
As I sat before the yellow lines waiting for takeoff that first
time, my heart banging for its jailers inside my chest, I had second thoughts. Even now I wonder: would I have started down
the path towards a solo flight what I had begun to call my date
with the NTSB if I had known then what was coming? Im
thinking of the time, six lessons in the future, when I pointed
the plane at the runway nose down as we were landing and
didnt know it until Tom took the controls. Or the time I failed
to recover from a stall because I forgot how, and instead of pulling back on the yoke to initiate a positive climb, I just let us fall,
with stomachs bottoming out as we stared down at the tops
of trees, until Tom took the controls. Or the time I just
let go of the yoke at a critical moment and Tom
said, Dont let go! Or the time I should have
gone around during a touch-and-go but
decided to try to land anyway, going too high
and too fast, and we wobbled violently very
close to the ground until Tom took the
controls. Or during yet another landing,
when I came into ground effect and suddenly yanked up on the yoke so hard
that we started to climb again, but having such little speed we were close to
stalling out, and Tom called for more
power to get us out of that mess, but, for
reasons that still elude me, I simply didnt
react, and we might have dropped to our
deaths if he hadnt, once more, taken the
controls.
I didnt know any of that before taking off
with Tom for the first time down runway 22 in
THERE IS NO AUTOPILOT
Six-Two Romeo. I couldnt have anticipated the number of times
hed save my hide from ruin, or how frightening it was to play
back the days mistakes, or how the airplane would start to
invade my dreams. I sensed only my fear, as well as a vague
necessity.
My father couldnt breathe towards the end of his life.
Pancreatic cancer, which hed somehow gotten the better of
for seven long years, had finally overtaken his lungs. In the
days and weeks after his death, I, too, couldnt breathe. I felt,
in life, little distinction between my dad and me. We extended
our imaginations to one another. Thats what love is. It was
impossible for me to stop doing so just because he was dying.
If he could ail, I could ail. If he could die, I could die, too. The
world was suddenly unrecognisable and more dangerous than
before. More vulnerable. More terrifying.
It took months after my dad passed away for me
to understand that I wasnt going to follow him
immediately to the grave. It was his turn,
unfortunately, not mine. I wasnt even 40 years
old yet. No matter how wrecked I felt as I
watched him die, I wasnt going to just give
out. Neither was that old Piper Cherokee,
not with the love and attention Tom paid
it. I had to have a little faith. I was scared,
but I had to live. For me, and for my old
man. And whats the best way to live in
the face of death?
Fully is always the best way to live.
Just fly the damn plane.
So when Tom gave the command to
engage the throttle on Six-Two Romeo, I
engaged the throttle, and we turned, and took
the centre line, and off we went, down the runway and into the air.
PM
63
MERC MADNESS
POLO GTI
SUBARU WRX STI
INFINITI QX80
WHEELS
Compiled by
ANTHONY DOMAN
anthony@ramsaymedia.co.za
A MERCEDES SPORTS CAR COMES DOWN TO EARTH
THE 2016 MERCEDES-AMG GT S IS MORE PRACTICAL THAN ITS

PREDECESSORS, BUT ITS STILL JUST AS FAST.
Nine years ago the flagship Mercedes was the SLR McLaren
722 Edition. That car did zero to 100 in 3,6 seconds, cost around
R5 million, and looked like the SL500s coked-up uncle. It was
replaced by the SLS AMG, a car that seemed sensible by comparison it was just as quick off the line as the SLR but cost less
than half. Now the SLS is gone, replaced by the Mercedes-AMG
GT S, which starts at about R1,5 million (in the USA) and does
zero to 100 in 3,7 seconds (close enough). As far as Mercedes
performance variants go, this is the democratisation of power.
There is, of course, a catch. To keep the price down, AMG had
to dial back the outrageousness and build a more conventional
sports car. The SLR had a carbon-fibre tub and scissor doors. The
SLS had gullwing doors attached with pyrotechnic bolts, in case
you flipped it over and couldnt get out. The GT S makes do with
regular front-hinged doors, which, I admit, work just fine. But,

unfortunately, you no longer look like an astronaut exiting your
lunar capsule every time you step out at Dairy Queen.
My GT S drive begins in Miami Beach, which is a tough place
to exercise a twin-turbo V8. So I head over to the Grand Theft
Auto badlands of downtown Miami, where one can still find
empty streets and room to run on any given weekday morning.
Over there, in the shadows of the overpasses, you have to do
more than squeal the tyres to draw a second look from the cops.
And I certainly did get a little bit obnoxious. The GT S has an
exhaust-bypass button that diverts as much as 95 per cent of the
exhaust flow around the mufflers, sending V8 bass echoing off
the bridge abutments and shuttered storefronts. Conventional
wisdom says that turbochargers act as mufflers, but the GT S is
375 kilowatts, zero

to 100 in 3,7 seconds
64
a rolling refutation of that idea. Its not quite as loud as a

Jaguar F-Type V8 S not much is, outside of large artillery
but you wont weep for the departed 6,2-litre V8 that
powered the SLS.
You also wont miss the SLS transmission, because its
still here. The GT S gets the Getrag seven-speed dual-clutch
transaxle last seen in the SLS AMG Black Series. Situated
over the rear wheels, the transmission contributes to a
53per cent rear-weight bias that helps the GT S deploy its
375 kilowatts. Flatten the accelerator and the tyres issue a
tortured wail, but refuse to go up in smoke. This is a sports
car, not a German Hellcat.
In fact, the AMG GT S feels a lot like an SLS AMG similar acceleration, similar sound, similar view over that long
bonnet but at a huge discount. So I understand the logic
of taking AMGs halo machine down to less rarified air. But
Ill still miss looking like an astronaut. E Z R A DY E R
THIS MONTH IN CARS...
In Beyond the Reach, a very rich hunter accidentally

shoots a reclusive prospector in a remote desert, then tries to
cover it up by leaving his young guide to die in the heat.
There are four main characters: the man (played with a sinister charm by Michael Douglas), the guide, the desert, and a
car. A big car. A six-wheel-drive Mercedes G63 AMG that
looks like a safari war limo. The limited-edition vehicle was
originally designed for the Australian army, with a few extras
made for oil barons and anyone else who needed people to
know they could find hundred dollar bills in their couch cushions. The standard AMG has 400 kilowatts, 37-inch tyres,
and adjustable tyre pressure. The one in the movie also has a
motorised gun compartment, an espresso machine, a PA
system and articulating automatic floodlights, but, sadly, no
speaking parts. P E T E R M A R T I N
FLATTEN THE
ACCELORATOR
AND THE TYRES
ISSUE A TORTURED
WAIL, BUT REFUSE
TO GO UP IN
SMOKE.
THE DOWNSIDE
OF LED HEADLIGHTS
ILLUSTRATION BY KAGAN MCLEOD
IN MOVIES
PEOPLE THINK YOURE A

HIGH-BEAMING JERK.
The guy across the intersection
flicks his high beams at me, just
like the oncoming car did a kilometre ago, just like a bakkie will
do a few minutes later. Theyre
telling me that Ive spaced out
and left my high beams on, that
Im a negligent dummy with his
brights ablaze. Except my high
beams arent on. Im driving a 2015 Kia K900 with LED headlights,
and everyone thinks theyre too bright. Whats going on? The issue, I
think, is that each LED lighting element is so distinct. The K900 has
four low-beam LEDs on each side, so oncoming drivers perceive four
individual lights rather than one big bulb. The general public, accustomed to composite headlights, is disarmed by the white, naked
splendour of LEDs. So they high-beam you.
As for the people who think Im blinding them, I conduct an
impromptu public education seminar. I flick the Kias headlight stalk
and give them a taste of actual LED high beams, which light up the
intersection like Rikers Island searchlights during a prison break.
They wont flash me again.
65
Volvos other app
THE ARMCHAIR TEST DRIVE
VOLVOS NEW VIRTUAL-REALITY SMARTPHONE APP LETS

YOU TAKE A SPIN FROM YOUR LIVING ROOM.
Ive already driven the 2016 Volvo XC90.

Not in person, mind you. Ive driven it on a
virtual-reality headset. Which is just a cleverly
folded piece of cardboard with my iPhone
inside. Welcome to the age of the Google
Cardboard test drive.
Volvo Reality is one of the few iPhonecompatible apps for Cardboard, a DIY viewer
made using free instructions online. The free
app splits your screen to give each eye a
slightly different view, while the phones
accelerometer tracks head movement to
adjust the scene. Put it inside cardboard and
voil: 3D. Next thing you know, youre flying
into the wilderness to drive a Volvo.
Episode one opens with a black XC90

parked among trees. Soon youre inside, driving along a bucolic mountain road. The view
is from the drivers seat, but there are no
hands on the wheel. Help, Im trapped in a
ghost car! You can look around the interior
as you drive, and why not? This thing practically drives itself.
Eventually you end up at a lake, and a
graphic reads, Friday, 8:27: My home for the
night. At first I assume Im sleeping in the
car, but if you swivel your phone around you
see a tent down by the water. Although I still
think Id prefer the car. That interior looks
pretty nice.
A couple of months back, an

executive from a luxury carmaker
was talking up the range of its
new key fobs, particularly the
remote-start function. I said, Oh
yeah, well, the Volvo On Call app
lets you start your car from your
iPhone. He replied, Yeah, we
thought about offering remote
start through our app. The problem is, how do you keep someone from starting the car when its
in a garage? The implication is
that, through malice or mistake,
someone could start a car indoors
and inadvertently gas the place
with carbon monoxide. So I asked
Volvo if On Call can tell the cars
in a garage. Answer: not right
now. On the other hand, nefarious
remote starting hasnt been an
issue. Still, the app suggests leaving your hood popped to prevent
an accidental startup. Want to be
really sure your car doesnt start?
Disconnect the battery.
IN PRAISE OF HYDRAULIC STEERING
BECAUSE ITS STILL THE BEST YOU CAN GET.

Electric power steering is so prevalent that I just assume every new car has it. So when Im
hustling the 2015 Subaru WRX STI down a country road, its wheel alive with feedback, I think, finally!
Someones figured out how to build a really excellent electrically assisted steering system. Then I reach
a stop sign, turn the wheel, and watch the tachometer dip as the engine lugs the telltale sign of a
hydraulic pump imposing drag. Indeed, the STI is one of the few hydraulic holdouts, and as a result it
might have the best steering of any new car, a system perfected over years of development. Of course,
the STI also gets a miserable 12,5 litres/100 km combined, a figure that would doubtless be higher if
Subaru went electric. But in this case, Subaru has its priorities in order. And everybody else has a
benchmark: want to build the best steering system? Make it feel like a 2015 STI.
66
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALBERTO SEVESO
WHEELS
FORD FOCUS
NEW SOPHISTICATE
The act of fitting a modestly sized

car into a typical parking bay clearly
seems to defeat many drivers, judging
by the evident bumps and scrapes in
supermarket parking areas. Perhaps its
regular cars driven by regular people,
not premium models (driven by premium
people, no doubt) that need hands-free
parking.
So, many will welcome Fords introduction of hands-free Perpendicular
Parking (right) in its new Focus. But
theres a lot more to the latest iteration
of Fords international best-seller.
The new powertrain line-up, for
instance, is said to deliver fuel efficiency
improvements of up to 19per cent. It
includes, for the first time in South
Africa, the International Engine of the
Year (3 years in a row) 92 kW 1,0-litre
EcoBoost engine as well as a 132 kW/
240 N.m 1,5-litre EcoBoost. Industryfirst Enhanced Transitional Stability is
a tech highlight on the running gear
side.
and steer the vehicle while the driver

controls the accelerator and brake. The
addition of two new sensors to the rear
of the new Focus enables Perpendicular
Parking to operate in the same way. The
extra sensors make it possible to implement tech that helps drivers manoeuvre
out of parking spaces, too, in the form
of Cross Traffic Alert and Park-Out
Assist.
Look ma, no hands. Perpendicular

Parking (a segment first for Ford) is a
new hands-free parking technology
that helps drivers reverse into spaces
alongside other cars. The current Focus
introduced parallel parking aid Active
Park Assist, which uses ultrasonic sensors to locate parallel parking spaces
JUST THE FACTS

ENGINE
OUTPUT
TRANSMISSION
0-100
PRICE
1,8 TSI
141 kW, 320 N.m
6M or 7DSG
6,7 s
R326 400
VOLKSWAGEN POLO GTI

SHIFT IN EMPHASIS
Whether or not its a fact that true enthusiasts prefer manual shifting, it very much is a fact that buyers of the Polos
big brother Golf GTI prefer the automatic DSG gearshift. It
could be that they simply cant be bothered with shifting, or
(more likely) that they enjoy the DSGs characteristic vroom/
burp/vroom upshifts and blipped race-style downshift.
So at launch the Polo GTI arrived with only a 7-speed
DSG. However, in the second half of 2015 a 6-speed manual option will be on offer. Then no doubt well see who the
real enthusiasts are. By the way, the DSG version gets
5,6 litres/100 km, the the manual 6,0. Just saying.
The preceding Polos 1,4-litre engine makes way for a
1,8-litre direct-injection turbo from the same family as the
2,0-litre used in the Golf GTI. Also new for 2015 are optional
Sport Select suspension with electronically adjustable
dampers, paired with a track-capable Sport Performance
kit, and optional LED headlights.
67
WHEELS
MERCEDES BENZ CLS 400
BORN TO BE WILD
Dont let the elegant style and modest badging

fool you, that three-and-a-half-litre V6 lurking
under the bonnet is drama waiting to unfold. The
cabin is teeming with all the typical upscale Merc
trinkets right down to four different seat massage
settings and side bolsters that move to embrace
you in the corners, but the powertrain is pure
madness. Turn off the traction control and you
can treat yourself to all the sideways mayhem
you can ever want. Or cruise the unsealed streets
of the Kasi with the ride height up and everything
all comfy. Weve been a fan of the CLS arc since
its first debut and, judging from the thumbs-ups
INFINITI QX80
OUTTA MY WAY
The imposing 8-seat QX80 casts a huge

shadow. Its bold styling may not be to
everyones taste, but theres no denying
that it makes a statement. Throw in a
beefy direct-injected 5,6-litre V8 and AllMode AWD system with Auto, 4H and 4L
modes, various terrain settings and lockable rear differential, a Hydraulic Body
Motion Control (HBMC) system said to
help reduce body lean in turns and airbased self-levelling and its clear the
QX80 has earned the right to play in the
premium SUV class.
Challenge No. 1 involved threading
the QX80s formidable bulk along the
picturesque but narrow Montague
Pass. Fine, but then there was
the matter of the oncoming
JUST THE FACTS

ENGINE
OUTPUT
TRANSMISSION
ECONOMY
PRICE
68
and double takes, it seems the rest of the country also loves that dramatic curvature. You can lowball for the entry-level 350 or go large on the AMG 63, but
throughout the full model line-up, the 400 offers the perfect proposition of mindblowing performance and pampering comfort.
5,6 V8
298 kW, 560 N.m
7A
14,8 combined
R1 238 000
bakkie fortunately, our paintwork

remained unblemished thanks to the
standard camera set-up with its birdseye view facility.
Extended stretches of particularly
dodgy gravel didnt raise a sweat. Well,
mostly. Heading into a dip, with the suspension heavily compressed, we realised
too late that lurking in the shadows was
a protruding lump of rock that had the
potential to spoil our entire day. Even as
we winced, we were through the obstacle.
We neednt have worried: the QX80 didnt
even appear to bottom out. A second
eyes-wide moment involved the opposite
an uphill, the equivalent of a humpbacked bridge. The big Infiniti briefly lifted
off. Re-entry was accomplished with
minimal fuss.
On a popular Southern Cape dune
trail, we found the wheel/tyre combination to be generally equal to the
task, when deflated to 1,0 bar. At times,

though, its necessary to exercise a little
care because there is such a thing as too
much torque, apparently. (Dont ask us
how we know this.) Its a good thing the
sophisticated traction control (the 4wd
system is apparently similar to that used
in the high-performance Nissan GT-R)
makes everyone a smarter driver.
Overall, the QX80 feels as composed
on-road as off it. The ride could be more
refined, I reckon, and at times its noisy
and theres a knobbly feel on irregular
surfaces. Whether this can be traced to
the big wheel/low-profile tyre combination used on our launch vehicles is hard
to say.
Infiniti is banking on its big luxury
SUVs blend of performance and features
stealing some sales from customers who
might otherwise be considering less plush
vehicles at a similar price. Its offered
with a huge range of standard convenience, luxury and safety features that
make it a very competitive offering. AD
SUBARU WRX STI

LATE BLOOMER
Once the king of performance

hot hatches, the WRX STi has
fallen from grace quite spectacularly since those heady days
of Ken Block videos. Consider
this then a triumphant comeback. The obnoxious rear wing
and meaty exhaust note tell a
tale of the lunacy that lies
under the aggressively styled
body panels, but dont accurately capture the elegance of
the combination mechanical
and electronic centre differential. If you know what youre
doing you can tune that diff to
a frighteningly specific power
distribution bias. The traction
control can also be tinkered
with, but the one thing that we
wish the geniuses at Subaru
would add is a suspension setting. It wont break your back,
but it does a good job at trying
when youre travelling on anything other than F1 quality

asphalt. Much has been said of
the manual-only gearbox
option, with an embarrassing
video showing a Golf R running away from the STi, but
this car feels little for straightline speed and ease of use. If
you want a street-tuned rally
car then get this. The clever
torque vectoring and rapid
steering rate sing a glorious
song of driving nirvana on a
winding mountain pass; so
sweet is this siren tune that it
even makes the super hard suspension make sense. Yes, there
are more accessible and quicker
ways to enjoy four-wheel-drive
performance, but would you
rather perform surgery with a
scalpel or a steak knife? The
acres of turbo lag, lack of dual
clutch transmission and harsh
ride may be drawbacks, but
drive this thing properly and
youll be smiling for weeks. PM
JUST THE FACTS

MAX POWER:
MAX TORQUE:
0-100 KM/H:
PRICE:
221 kW
407 N.m
4,9 sec
R629 000
69
2 149 CARS
ONE
SAS BEST-SELLING MOTORING MAGAZINE
mag.co.za
The Warn PullzAll

is a battery-powered
winch that weighs
eight kilograms,
but can pull or lift
up to a half-ton.
iSTOCKPHOTO.COM/STOCKNROLL
REMOVING THE
BACKYARD
BY ROY BERENDSOHN
COLOSSUS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
TIMOTHY J REYNOLDS
The chain-link fence, the slab of asphalt, that huge boulder.

This winter, its nally time to rid your property of eyesores.
71
YO
F A C H A I N -L I N
KF
EN
OM
AT
YARDWORK
THE JUNK: AN
OVERGROWN SHRUB
It was probably beautiful when it

was trimmed in the shape of an
Italian cypress. Now it looks like a
freakishly big hamster.
Tie wire
GET RID OF IT
1. Dont start at the trunk. Snip
off large branches with bypass
loppers until you can get close
enough to the trunk to saw it off
with a chainsaw outfitted with a
semi-chisel chain, which is ideal
for hard and dirty cutting conditions. Make sure to leave enough
of the trunk to form a handgrip or
even a lever to help you get the
root ball out of the ground.
Tension band
Tension bar
THE JUNK:
2. If you intend to plant in or near

the same hole, the stump and
roots have to come out. The more
treelike the shrub, the more difficult this can be. Expose as much
of the stump below the ground as
possible by digging around it with
a shovel, pickaxe and chisel-point
crowbar. Cut the roots using the
chainsaw if you can do so safely
and without hitting a rock or burying the saws nose in the dirt. If
you cant, use a reciprocating saw
and a bimetal blade designed for
cutting wood with nails embedded
in it. After the roots have been
severed and all thats left is an
oddly shaped hunk of wood, pry
it out with your pinch-point bar.
You can put your foot on this in a
gesture of victory, if you like.
CHAIN-LINK FENCE
A rusty old fence on a property speaks volumes

about its owners. Or, rather, it shouts really
unfortunate things about them to the entire
neighbourhood, such as Were weird, and
our devil dog might eat your children. But
you only have a cat!
GET RID OF IT
1. First, snip the tie wires that hold the
fabric of the chain link to the top rail and
posts, then loosen the bolts on the tension
bands, the connectors that hold the tension bar to the end posts. Do the same to
the brace bands that hold the top rail to
the other posts. Drop the chain-link fabric
and roll it up. Slide the top rail out and set
it aside.
72
2. The end posts are usually set in concrete. Dig an oval-shaped hole around the
concrete footing and pry it out using a
pinch-point bar. The post itself also works
as a lever if you pull the top towards you,
then rotate the footing up and out of the
hole. Alternatively, a large hydraulic fencepost jack can pull a post out of the ground,
footing and all. If you rent one of these,
youll find its worth every cent.
3. If the concrete footing rests far enough

underground, you can also use a reciprocating saw with a metal-cutting blade to
cut the post flush with the ground and
pound the stub with a sledgehammer until
its sufficiently deep to be safe. Sometimes
when doing this, youll get lucky and the
footing will break up. Then you can
change tack and lift it out in chunks.
THE JUNK:
ST
Rotary
hammer
PAVEMENT
A patio whose janky, cracked foundation trips you up while youre

holding a tray of freshly grilled
steaks is no patio at all.
A K E A H O LE IN
M
TO
GET RID OF IT
1. Busting up a concrete slab
with a jackhammer is hard, loud,
dirty and exhausting, so start
with the right machine. They
range from tools you can use
with one hand to industrial monsters powered by four-cylinder
engines. You want the heaviest
electric model you can get.
These machines weigh about
30 kg and are available at
tool-rental stores.
8 mm bit
2. Begin at one edge of the pavement and run the breakers bit
straight down to break off pieces
that are about 10 cm wide. In most
cases the work goes reasonably
quickly, but all bets are off if you
run into reinforcing metal like
rebar or welded-wire mesh.
THE JUNK:
ROCKS
3. If you do hit metal, youll need
to rent a power cutter, a petrolengine circular saw equipped
with a diamond-impregnated
blade that cuts concrete and
the reinforcing metal in it.
Its like they move themselves to the

worst possible place. You dig for a
foundation. Rock. Plant a tree. Rock.
Lay out a garden? Clear, loamy topsoil. Just kidding: A rock!
GET RID OF IT
To deal with a big one, blast it to
smithereens. Its best to get the
professionals out for this one because you could damage some-
If we may:
LEAVE THE
TREE-HOUSE LADDER
thing really expensive. There are

some micro-blasting kits available,
but we doubt your insurance company will cover you if something
does go wrong. Rocks are fun.
4. After the slab is broken (or

broken and cut), shovel or lift it
into a wheelbarrow for transport
to a dumpster with a swing-out
door. This will allow you to wheel
the debris right in and then drag
your exhausted body back out.
Good job. Go get a beer.
Not the whole thing. Certainly not anything made of plastic. But a weathered board or two nailed sideways to a
tree. Sand the edges. Hang a birdhouse. You can figure out some way to make it look nice. A home should have
a little history, and if the children of the former owners come to visit, youll make their day.
73
THINGS COME APART

A PHOTOGRAPH BY
TODD McLELLAN
THE OTHER
BITS
The Bosch DDS182 drill driver is cordless,

brushless and wireless, but still comes with
a lot of stuff.
5
IN GENERAL, THE MORE BITS, accessories and attachments you buy

for a drill, the more likely that drill is to be useful. So it might seem
strange that todays power drill manufacturers seem intent on removing
stuff. Take this Bosch DDS182 drill driver. The drill itself is cordless,
its motor is brushless, and the charging system is wireless.
The Bosch still has plenty of parts, of course (see photo). What
the manufacturer has removed are the pieces that arent useful: the
ones that stand in the way of the drill in its purest, most essential
form. Without a cord, you can take it anywhere you want. Without
brushes, the motor lasts longer. Without wires, you can charge it
every time you set it down.
More important, the key feature remains: its great at making holes.
KEVIN DUPZYK
1
KEYLESS CHUCK:
The Boschs chuck

uses a system of gears
to loosen or tighten
teeth that hold the bit
in place. Older models
required a separate tool
to open and close the
teeth. It was always
promptly misplaced.
2
CLUTCH AND
GEARBOX: The
gearbox delivers power

from the motor to the drill
bit. The clutch system
decouples the motor
from the bit when torque
is too high, preventing
stripped and overdriven
screws. This is a ball
detent clutch: a spring
presses ball bearings
into notches to engage
the drivetrain. When the
torque overpowers the
spring, the balls pop
out of the notches,
and the clutch slips.
CLUTCH SETTING
SELECTOR: Turning
this collar to a higher

number adds tension to
the spring in the clutch
assembly.
4
BRUSHLESS DC
MOTOR: Whereas
traditional motors rub

conductive brushes
against a commutator
to generate magnetism
and, subsequently,
rotation, brushless
motors use an electronically controlled
system that is contactfree. Without friction,
a brushless system
is more durable.
TRIGGER/SWITCH
ASSEMBLY: The
trigger is the button you

push with your finger.
The switch is the electronic device that translates this pressure into
a signal the motor
understands.
6
DRILL CIRCUIT
BOARD: The tools
control centre. While

some manufacturers
control the tool from
the battery, keeping
these functions on
board allows the tool
itself to fine-tune power
demands based on
load.
7
INDUCTIVE
CHARGING COILS:
Copper in a plastic
case. Each coil is,
essentially, half of a
power transformer the
charger contains one
side, the battery the
other. When the battery
is placed near the charger, the chargers coil
induces a current in
the batterys coil. This
current is then stored
as energy.
8
BATTERY CASING:
BATTERY CIRCUIT
BOARD: First it
Made of a heatconducting material

that is moulded into
fins to increase surface
area, it allows heat to
dissipate quickly.
communicates with the

charging station to load
energy, then it communicates with the drill to
dole it out as needed.
74
What if I
accidentally set
my drill bits or
pocket change
on the wireless
charger? Will it
charge them?
6
7
No. When you set

the drill on the base,
the charger sends an
electronic message to
the battery to ensure
that its actually the
battery, like an air
traffic control tower
sends to a plane. If
the battery doesnt
confirm, the base
sends no energy.
Which is too bad,
because this thing
could have been one
hell of a mousetrap.
75
WINNER! of our home workshop challenge No. 2
ROCKET BOAT
The winner of our PM Home Workshop Challenge 2,
Matthew Wagner, found that devising a project suitable
for an adult and child to do together can be fun as well
as a learning experience.
Saras idea
In general, we would advise against using your kid sister as a guinea

pig, particularly in matters involving rocketry. In the case of the
Rocket Boat, we are happy to declare that you may disregard that
advice. Not only will she have a water taxi for humanoid passengers,
she will also become an actual rocket scientist.
Final-year mechanical engineering student Matthew Wagner
proved the point by designing and building a Miami speedboat
with his 8-year-old sister Sara, for her Barbie set. She absolutely
loved helping me design the shape of the craft, then paint and
decorate it afterwards, Matthew says. Shes subsequently had
lots of fun in the water with it, too.
Hopefully, as winner of our Workshop Challenge, Matthew will
have an equal amount of fun using his prize: a top-of-the-range
Makita cordless impact drill kit valued at R6 794.
His project, Matthew says, is surprisingly simple to build, yet
will teach essential engineering and scientific principles*. It can
be finished in less than two hours and, as most of the materials
are recycled, total cost should be around R40. The basic design is
easy, but if you start getting into the fluid dynamics side of things,
he says the amount of time required can become insane.
It is based on a traditional water propulsion system. However,
instead of using an engine and a propeller to increase the pressure
and flow rate of the water through the nozzle, which in turn, creates
thrust, an old Coke bottle was used. This is half-filled with water
and then air is pumped into the cylinder using a standard bicycle
Materials and tools

(All available at hardware, craft stores, bike shops or around the home)
76
2-litre plastic coke bottle
Old bicycle valve, tubeless or not. Make sure it has thread

all the way to the base.
Irrigation valve. Size is not really an issue, see picture.

Parent see note.
Irrigation riser (for jet nozzle)
Polystyrene block (400 x 200 x 100 mm.) This is an

approximation; see note.
Washer (6 mm internal diameter of hole)
pump. A simple irrigation valve (micro choke) and an old

presta bicycle valve were used to hold the pressure in the
cylinder. The micro choke is opened full throttle to send
the Rocket Boat whizzing across the water.
Sara did struggle with pumping up the rocket boat to
pressure, but she is already looking ahead. She has asked
if we can build a ship for her Girl Lego, so bigger vessels
with double jets are in store, Matthew adds. Lastly, one
can clearly see that the rocket boat was not the most streamlined super-looking vessel. I believe that letting Sara
experience the different materials, learn the procedure,
have fun and not strive for perfection was more important
for her at this stage. For an older child who desires a
more realistic craft, perfection can be attained, though
at the cost of more skill and time.
How its made

Start by making a hole in the bottle cap using a 5 mm
drill bit (if the child is young, this part is for adults). The
drill bit size will depend on the size of valve you found.
The valve must have thread all the way down so that it
can be screwed on correctly. This will form the airtight
seal at the top. If you struggle to find a threaded valve,
Additional
As needed: elastic bands, cable ties or duct tape.
Drill for making the hole in the bottle cap into which
the valve and rear jet nozzle are inserted (a bradawl
can be used with extreme care).
O Glue (Pratley Quickset is a good option) to seal the
bottle and hold the rear jet nozzle in place.
O Sandpaper (rough and smooth) 80 grit to 220 grit will do.
O Bicycle pump (used later to pump air into the cylinder).
O
O
Note on polystyrene: In the end I used some offcut

Isoboards, but any odd bits glued together from washing
machine or TV packaging could work.
you can use glue. However, any bicycle shop

will more than likely have an old one that
they want to throw away.
Then the child can fit the old bicycle valve
by inserting it through the pre-drilled hole,
placing the washer on the outside and screwing the ring on tightly. A good idea at this
point is to test for water tightness. Screw
the cap on the bottle and pump it up a little.
Hold it under water to see if any bubbles
escape. If they do, some glue will seal it.
The next few steps can be joint affairs.
First, make a small hole in the back of the
bottle. Then insert the small end piece from
the irrigation riser and permanently glue in
place using a strong adhesive. This is a good
time for a marshmallow break to wait for
the glue to dry!
Fabrication of the boat hull starts with
a choice about the type of craft you want.
Fast = long slender hull. Slower but steady
= shorter and wider hull. Use the sandpaper
and an old hacksaw blade to fashion the
craft hull. Note: this is supposed to be fun.
You can finish the boat and fine-tune the
hull later. You will play around a little to
stop it capsizing if you have a craft that is
too thin and long, as it will be top-heavy
from the bottle on top.
Make a place in the hull for the pressurised
cylinder and fuel pack (Coke bottle). Bore
a hole out the back of the hull for the jet
nozzle to protrude from; in the end Matthew
didnt need a hole and stuck it directly into
the water. It is important that the jet nozzle
is centred and straight. If not, the craft will
go in circles. This is not difficult to fine-tune
and can be helped by fitting a rudder.
Attach the pressurised cylinder fuel pack
using cable ties, strong elastic band or duct
tape to the hull. The Wagners used two
elastic bands.
Decorating the hull is a likely task for
the younger member of the team. Paint it,
draw in windows, glue down seats made
from leftover hull bits, stick on rails and
flags go wild.
The final joint effort is to put the Rocket
Boat into action. Unscrew the bottle cap
and fill the 2-litre bottle with water to just
over of a litre. Screw the cap back on and
Theres plenty of scope for involvement of

the younger member of the construction
team, as our pictures show, from glueing
to painting and assembly. The rst test
run (right) went perfectly and when
done whizzing across the water the
boat makes some really cool noises
and runs on bubbles.
pump it up using the bicycle pump to just below 2 bar for the test run.
Place the craft in a pool, dam or pond, open the irrigation valve and watch
the boat rocket away. We tested our boat to 3,2 bar, no problem and it really
went, says Matthew. There will be some fine-tuning of your design to get it to go
how you want. When it runs out of water the craft makes some really cool noises and runs on bubbles.
O And those scientific principles? Newtons Second Law, resistive forces, buoyancy and lots more: Matthew explains all on popularmechanics.co.za including
why we should credit 8-year-olds with a lot more understanding than we do.
Matthews idea
AND ANNOUNCING:
PM Home Workshop Challenge No. 3
Your DIY ingenuity or writing skills or both could win you a great prize
from Makita in our third PM Home Workshop Challenge. Full details in
next months Popular Mechanics.
77
You have a pocket computer, so your microwave

shouldnt look like it came with a slap bracelet. Try
the Breville Smart Microwave. It has a sensor that
can automatically adjust cooking times.
THE SMART MANS

GUIDE TO MICROWAVING
A refresher course for the hottest culinary gadget of the 1980s.
BY DAN PASHMAN
A MICROWAVE IS A TOOL that few of us use to its full potential. Cue the physics
professor: inside a microwave, a vacuum tube called a magnetron blasts electromagnetic waves at whatevers placed in front of it, the same way a light, an X-ray,
or a radio does, but at a different frequency (2 450 MHz). Waves at this frequency,
called erm microwaves, make water molecules in food vibrate, heating them up.
To use this information to make tasty food, see below.
8
seconds
78
25
seconds
30
seconds
THE SORT-OF-SCIENTIFIC
SCIENCE EXPERIMENT
Can a microwave
interfere with your Wi-Fi?
Ive read online that microwaves

can derail a software update by
interfering with Wi-Fi. But there
are a lot of lies online. To learn the
truth, I set my iPhone 6 Plus to
wirelessly sync music files, and my
MacBook Air to stream live TV.
Then, with both devices gulping
data, I set them on the counter
inches below a 2014 microwave,
reheating coffee for one minute at
100 per cent power. After just
fifteen seconds the data flow to
my phone and laptop halted.
Marcus Weber, a researcher at
Stanford University, says that this
is the microwave signal saturating
the receivers in my iPhone and
MacBook, both of which have filters
designed to absorb 2450 MHz
waves. This would be a problem,
except that both devices returned
to full speed after the minute ended.
If necessary, I could set my router
to transmit at 5 GHz instead of
2.4 GHz, but even I, a tech editor,
can survive a minute without
Wi-Fi. ALEXANDER GEORGE
minutes
PERFECTLY
SPREADABLE BUTTER
LAST NIGHTS
STEAK
SMOOTHER
HONEY
LEFTOVER
RICE
High heat causes

milk solids to separate. Even putting
the butter back in
the fridge wont x
that. Cut off the
piece you plan to
use, set the microwave to medium
power, and watch
it to make sure you
dont overheat.
If you go too long or

too hot, you could
continue to cook
the steak, turning
your medium rare
into medium well.
Instead, let the
steak come up to
room temperature
before heating it
on medium-high
power.
Honey crystallises
when some of its
sugars come out of
solution, but that
doesnt mean its
gone bad. Honey
never goes bad.
Heating it will allow
the sugars to redissolve, returning
the honey to
liquid form.
Old rice undergoes

a process called
retrogradation, in
which starch molecules squeeze out
water. To temporarily reverse it,
sprinkle water over
the rice, stir, top
with a paper towel,
and microwave until
its insanely hot.
IS MY MIC R OWAVE
GOING TO KILL ME?
No. Unless you put plastic in it, in
which case maybe. The radiation
in microwaves does not contain
enough energy to remove electrons
from cells the way X-rays can. If
your microwaves shield is very leaky,
it could potentially heat you the
same way it heats food, but this is
unlikely. However, certain chemicals,
such as phthalates and BPA, can
leach out of hot plastics and interfere with hormonal signalling, which
is not ideal. To be completely safe,
use only plastics labelled microwave safe, or put your food on a
plate, you animal.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN GOLDSTEIN
APPLIANCES
ASK ROY
POPULAR MECHANICS senior home

editor solves your most pressing
problems. BY ROY BERENDSOHN
PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP FRIEDMAN
I have a ceiling light that works sporadically.

Its not the bulb. Ive taken the light down
and looked it over, but couldnt see anything
wrong. How hard can it be to diagnose?
Were talking one switch and one fixture.
Im glad you said one light and one switch.
Circuits that are more complicated than that
usually require an electrician. I think you can
handle this, though.
To diagnose this at home, you need a multimeter, a battery-powered instrument that tests
voltage, current, resistance and continuity.
Inexpensive versions cost about R100.
In this case youll use the meter to check for
continuity, the integrity of an electrical path.
First, cut off the power to the light at the service
panel, then loosen the screws holding the fixture
to the ceiling box, lower the fixture, and undo
the connectors that attach the fixtures two
ARE YOU
SURE YOU
KNOW HOW
TO USE
THAT?
PIPE WRENCH
EDITION
wires to the houses wiring. Install

a standard incandescent bulb in
the fixture. Now set the meters
dial to continuity, and match the
meters leads to the two wires coming out of the fixture. It doesnt
matter which lead goes to which
wire. If theres a continuous electrical path, the meter will produce a
tone. If it doesnt, remove the bulb
from its socket and use needlenose pliers to pull up the brass tab
at the bottom. Reinstall the bulb
and test again.
If the fixture tests okay, leave the
power off and run the same test
on the switch: remove the switch
from its box and connect the meters
leads to the switchs brass terminal
screws. Again, it doesnt matter
which lead goes with which screw.
When the switch is flipped to on,
the meter should produce a tone.
If it produces an erratic tone or no
tone, the switch is bad. If both the
switch and the fixture test okay,
you have a bigger problem. Call an
electrician.
Does anybody make a rack to
mount a shovel on a wheelbarrow? Every time I move a wheelbarrow with a shovel in it, the
handle gets in my way.
A rack strikes me as impractical. Do
what countless construction workers
do: tuck the shovels handle under
your arm and rest the head in the
wheelbarrow as you move it.
Our house has ugly, beat-up
baseboard trim thats fastened
every 10 cm with a pair of large
finish nails. Ive damaged the
drywall trying to get the stuff
off. Any ideas?
One option is to trim over it. Some
home-improvement stores have
started selling mouldings that are
made from a continuous piece of

MDF (a material similar to Masonite)
called RapidFit. They have a traditional profile on the front, but the
back is an L-shaped cavity. You
place the new mouldings over the
old and fasten them on with 4d
finish nails. Putty the nail holes,
paint, and youre in business.
If youd rather just get rid of the
old mouldings, slide the straight
end of a fishtail crowbar between
the trim and the bottom wall plate
and pry forward. That should get
the mouldings started. Itll be loud
and nasty, but it shouldnt harm
your walls.
Weve got threaded steel pipe
that leaks. My husband has
taken it apart, wrapped it with
tape, and put it back together.
Twice. It still leaks. Can you
help?
When a threaded joint leaks, the
natural response is to tighten it.
Sometimes that stops the drip, but
if you over-tighten the joint, you
could ruin the threaded parts and
make the problem worse.
Most likely only one of the
pipes fittings has stripped threads.
To fix it, replace the pipe and bad
fitting. Theres no need to replace
the fitting at the other end. First,
apply a generous amount of professional-grade pipe sealant to the
male threads of the new pieces.
Once the new pieces are as snug
as you can get them with your bare
hands, you need only a full turn to
a turn and a half with tools. Hold
the fitting or the pipe with one
wrench, and with another turn
the part you are tightening. Plumbers call this back holding. With the
right sealant you can send water
through immediately.
A pipe wrench is a hardy tool, not given to easy breakage like a thin saw or a drill bit.
Heck, its a weapon in the game of Clue. But if you forget to leave a small space between
the back of a wrenchs hook jaw and the pipe youre gripping, you could strip the teeth,
bend the jaw, or damage the tightening nut. A wrenchs jaws arent parallel, and their
natural wedging action tightens around the pipe as you turn. Leaving a space permits
the jaws to tighten with just the right amount of give, says Chuck Stephens, director of
service and training for Ridgid Tools, who has been using pipe wrenches professionally
for 37 years. If you forget the space, you could turn your best wrench into a decorative
piece of cast iron, which is only a good thing if youre a blacksmith.
79
HOW TO
REPAIR A CRACKED
DASH
Tips from the
Freedom High School
Automotive
Programme.
AUTOMOTIVE
Use a razor blade

to cut a border
Cut out the around the damdamage.
aged plastic or
vinyl, then peel or
rip it off, along
with any other
areas on the dash
that feel brittle. To
check for brittleness, press your
thumb into the dash. If the vinyl
feels hard or cracks, its no good.
STEP ONE
Next, spray
some 3M PolyFill the
olefin Adhesion
crack.
Promoter on the
exposed foam
rubber. Then
apply a thin layer
of 3M EZ Sand
Flexible Parts
Repair, an epoxy
that dries like hard plastic.
Cover the entire hole and a
bit of the surrounding plastic
with a thin layer. Once the EZ
Sand is dry (the label should
specify the required time), sand
it even with the rest of the dash
using 320- or 400-grit sandpaper. The patch will be thin.
Be careful not to create holes.
STEP TWO
How to strip, repair, repaint and rewire an old car with help from an
after-school automotive club. Part four of a six-month series.
WHEN SETH REHRAUER isnt working on cars in the Freedom High
School garage in Freedom, Wisconsin, hes likely to be maintaining
some very different vehicles at home. Ive been racing snowmobiles
for five years, he says. I have a mechanic who works on my snowmobiles, and hes been teaching me stuff. Rehrauer, a 17-year-old
11th-grader, is currently taking only one automotive class at school,
but he also pops by the garage during his study hour and after school
to help out. While some kids have been priming and painting the body
panels on the 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and the 1981 Chevrolet
Camaro Z28 weve been following, others have been working on the
interior or mechanicals. For Rehrauer, plastic repair is the hardest
skill to master. Its complicated because you have to lay the repair
perfectly, he says. If you dont, youll get holes when you sand it.
Then you have to redo it. Even with all Rehrauers extra hours in
the garage, he doesnt have time for that.
THE SUPERGLUE
OF CAR REPAIR:
SPRAY PLASTIC
80
Above: Freedom
High student
Seth Rehrauer
applies 3M plastic repair to the
cracked dash.
Kick panels are called that for a reason. Those quadrants of plastic next to
the door and just below the glovebox get more abuse than a well diggers
wristwatch. One good boot and youve got a crack. Instead of spending
thousands on a new panel, just fix it yourself. Remove the panel, turn it over,
prep the surface, and push the plastic together while applying 3M Semi-Rigid
Plastic Repair. Once its dry, reattach the panel and spend the money you
saved on something else. A snowmobile, maybe.
If youre repairing a large part

Apply
of the dash in a
texture and basic colour like
colour.
black, you could
use a textured
paint or even
bed liner to
cover the damaged area. Both
mimic the surface feel of vinyl.
For a smaller or
more colourful
fix, spray a layer
of black texture
coating paint over the sanded
area to duplicate the original
texture. When dry, apply a coat
of Colour Coat in the same
colour as your dash.
STEP THREE
NEXT MONTH
BRAKE REPAIR
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERICH SCHROEDER
THE KIDS IN THE GARAGE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN LOWRY
This is made out of

cardboard, tape and
circuit boards we
bought online.
The DIY
dashboard
Update your ancient car with a
touchscreen music system you
built yourself. BY ERIC KESTER
Have you ever been stuck in traffic

and pulled up next to some maniac
singing along with the radio to an
audience of no one, index fingers drumming
out a spastic beat on the steering wheel? Thats
me. As a married man living in a big city, I
have a special affinity for my cars cloistered
interior. Its a rare womb of privacy, a workand-email-free bubble where I can reflect
quietly or rock out as the day requires.
81
Dashboard music system
ASSEMBLING THE PI
TO POWER
OUTLET
The layout for your brand-new sound machine.
TO CAR
AUXILIARY PORT
SD card
with XBian
Raspberry
Pi
LCD
screen
and
touchscreen
Memory
stick with
music
library
Touchscreen
control board
LCD
control
board
LCD input
controller
HDMI cable
TO POWER
OUTLET
A few months ago I realised my haven was losing

its appeal, and I sensed it was connected to my
radios anachronistic scan button. In a world
filled with customised on-demand entertainment,
the clunky AM/FM radio in my 2008 Ford is
embarrassingly dated. I can pretend Im Jay-Z
all I want, but his ride has to feature a media
centre with more than six FM presets.
So I decided to see if I could build a touchscreen
dash personalised with thousands of my favourite
songs using a Raspberry Pi, a computer board
barely larger than a credit card. If you havent
heard of Raspberry Pi yet, remember the name
this easy-to-use microcomputer is taking over
the programming world. Lauded by amateurs for
its accessibility and by experts for its versatility,
the Pi has been the catalyst for all sorts of cool
projects: voice-activated coffeepots, self-watering
plants... even touchscreen car dashboards.
You can find a Raspberry Pi online for surprisingly little. I ordered mine from the tech website
adafruit.com. Setting it up for this project was
fairly straightforward. The Pi is basically a Swiss
Army Knife of inputs that youre already familiar
with: HDMI and Ethernet connects, four USB
ports, an audio and analogue video port, and an
SD card slot. This last input is the most important because the Pi runs its operating system
(known, a tad confusingly, as its image) from
an SD card.
82
MATERIALS
FOR THE RASPBERRY PI:
Raspberry Pi Model B starter kit
(includes 5-volt AC/DC power
adaptor)
8 GB SD memory card
USB keyboard
Ethernet cord
USB memory stick loaded with
personal music library
FOR THE TOUCHSCREEN:

Tontec 7-inch touchscreen (comes
with control boards and wires)
Tontec 12-volt power adaptor
Masking tape
HDMI cable
FOR THE INSTALLATION:
Screwdriver
Duct tape
Foam board
Standard auxiliary cable
Radio harness extender
External battery (5 000 mAh or
higher) with multiple USB ports
Micro USB cord
USB-to-barrel plug
(size 5,5 x 2,1-mm) cord
Theres a bustling online community of

Raspberry Pi coders who make pre-programmed images available for download. When I
searched for images that would run a homemade media centre, a site called xbian.org had
the most popular version: software for a media
hub akin to what you see on an Apple TV. It
can play music and movies, display pictures,
and run other media apps such as Pandora
it can even stream content from Apple devices
using AirPlay. Most conveniently, XBian can
be played on any screen with an HDMI input,
including the touchscreen I planned to build.
I popped an 8-gigabyte SD card into my
laptop, and by following the step-by-step
directions of the free installer I downloaded
from the XBian website, I copied the image
directly to my card. Then I ejected the card,
slid it into my Raspberry Pi, and congratulated
myself on becoming a genuine programmer.
Assembling the actual touchscreen a
Tontec seven-inch HD screen I found on
Amazon for about R800 was a bit trickier.
The touchscreen comes with a primary control
board that looks strikingly similar to the
Raspberry Pi, plus two smaller control boards,
all of which help communicate data to the
Pi. The LCD screen and the glass touchscreen,
meanwhile, dont come attached to each other
because I guess that would make too much
sense, so I had to connect them myself.
Theres a rough guide online to making a
touchscreen dashboard in which the author,
a mysterious wise man identified only as
Zaqq, explains how to do this with masking
tape. I simply aligned the touchscreen atop
the LCD screen, then ran tape along the
centimetre-thick edges of the two stacked
screens. For security I used five layers of
tape, and I folded any excess neatly on to
the back of the LCD screen.
To work properly, the touchscreen needs
to be connected to its three control boards
via three cables. Tontec does not include
instructions, but each wire snaps exclusively
into a specific corresponding jack, so I managed to connect everything using trial and
error. Next I linked the touchscreen to my
Raspberry Pi through HDMI and USB cables. I
plugged the Pi into an outlet with its included
power adaptor. The touchscreen didnt come
with one, so I plugged it into the wall with a
twelve-volt AC/DC adaptor I bought separately.
Both the Raspberry Pi and touchscreen
turned on automatically. Then I had to get
the XBian operating system synced with the
touchscreen, and that required installing some
drivers directly to the Raspberry Pi from
the Internet. To do this I plugged the Pi

into my modem with an Ethernet cable,
and, using the arrow buttons of a computer keyboard to control XBian (I connected the keyboard via USB), I highlighted the power icon in the menu
screen and selected Exit. This closed the
software and opened up the command
terminal for the Pi.
Here is where things
turn into a computerhacking scene from a midThe author,
nineties movie. The comseconds before
connecting the
mand terminal asked for
touchscreen to
a username and password.
the Raspberry Pi.
I entered xbian and
raspberry respectively,
then typed in a few gibberish-looking
prompts recommended by Master Zaqq
from that online guide. Ill spell them out
here in case youre following along, but I
strongly recommend supplementing these
steps with your own Internet research.
In the terminal I entered wget https://
github.com/brantje/xbian-touch/raw/
master/install.sh, which downloaded the
touchscreen driver, followed by sudo sh
install.sh, which installed it to the Pi. After
I complied with some onscreen prompts to
orient the touchscreen, I was good to go.
The calibration of the touchscreen
wasnt as precise as I wouldve liked, but
some tinkering would probably fix that.
In the meantime I now had a slick media
centre that could play my entire MP3
library, which I had stored on a 32-gigabyte flash drive that was plugged into
the Pis second USB slot.
At last: the hard part. I suppose I should
have assumed that installing the touch-
After completing this project, you will

want to drive. This is the music.
PHOTOGRAPH (TOP) BY NATHAN PERKEL
THE TOUCHSCREEN
ROAD-TRIP PLAYLIST
The Sonics
Have Love, Will
Travel
A driving beat, an
outrageous sax
solo, and washedout guitars that
sound the way a
surfboard poking
out of a hatchback looks.
screen in a real car wouldnt be as easy

as programming the Pi. Without some
practice, I was hesitant to disassemble
my personal chariot, so I reached out to
Brooklyn Automotive High School to see if
theyd let me potentially ruin one of their
practice cars. Always happy to assist a
mechanical neophyte, the school, and
in particular, a Renato Rosales of the
schools electronics class, let me mess
around with a 2009 Pontiac G6 theyd
been taking apart and putting back
together for years.
My first step was to remove the cars
built-in radio, which was easy enough: with
the help of Rosales, I popped off the plastic
dashboard panel, unscrewed the radio, and
yanked it out. Next I had to hook up my
new media centre to the cars sound system.
This step varies from car to car, but in
general youll need to connect the cars
speakers to the 3,5-millimetre audio jack
in the Raspberry Pi. The simplest solution
Johnny Cash
Ive Been
Everywhere
Reno,
Chicago, Fargo,
Minnesota,
Buffalo, Toronto,
Winslow,
Sarasota,
Wichita, Tulsa,
Ottawa
Stone Temple
Pilots
Interstate Love
Song
A song for the
moment when
you notice how
adorable your
co-pilot looks
chewing sunflower seeds.
Edward Sharpe
and the
Magnetic Zeros
Home
The song to sing
in unison during
the final five kilometres to your
house.
is to use a standard auxiliary cable to

link the Pi to the cars auxiliary input,
but this involves keeping the original
radio connected (since it will be
functioning as an amp).
You can stash the radio in your
glove compartment or under a seat,
though the latter will likely require
you to extend the radio harness
(the collection of wires that work
the radio). For this step Rosales suggests you get a stock harness adaptor
that will plug into the vehicles existing
wiring harness and splice into the
audio outputs from there. You can
find harness adaptors at most electronics stores.
If your car doesnt have an auxiliary
input, the easiest fix is to move the
radio as described above, then use a
cassette-player auxiliary adaptor. Its
very last decade, but it should work.
Both the Raspberry Pi and the
touchscreen need their own power
sources. For this Id recommend getting an external battery thats 5 000
milliampere-hours or higher, with
multiple USB ports. Raspberry Pi
users seem to like Anker external
batteries. Connect the battery to the
Pi with a micro USB cord. Connect
the touchscreen with a USB-tobarrel plug.
Once everything was connected and
powered up, I took the Raspberry Pi,
the control boards, and the wires
and performed a fancy mechanical
manoeuvre known by us programmers
as stuffing all of it into the empty
radio cavity. Finally I duct-taped the
back of the touchscreen to a black
foam board and secured that to the
inside of the plastic dashboard panel.
When I snapped the panel back
into place, the touchscreen sat flush
with the dashboard and looked naturally integrated. The Pontiac had
become 100 per cent cooler. After
class some of Rosaless students
even admitted that the dashboard
looked pretty swag.
It wasnt until they scattered that
I actually fired up the system, threw
on some Jay-Z (okay, fine, it was
Adele), and basked in the elation
of DIY success. Was it easy? Not
exactly. Is it possible? Yes, and Im
here singing to prove it.
83
OR
ULAR ME
OP
ANICS F
CH
KIDS +
STILTS!
A project to build with your
children. DESIGNED BY ROY
BERENDSOHN
PROJECT NOTES
he key to this project is a sturdy design

thats fast and simple to build. We were
disappointed by our first few attempts to
fasten the footrest. A 2 mm heavy steel
bracket bent the moment we put any
weight on it. Bolts and screws were stronger, but
they either gave off disturbing creaking noises or
loosened as we walked on them. It wasnt until we
got to the current design, which has no through
holes to drill or angled support brackets to cut,
that we were satisfied with the footrests.
In terms of height, our first try was only 15 cm
off the ground. We wanted to get stability and build
under control before we worried about height. After
that, we went up to 30 cm. Depending on the height
of the child, you could go somewhat higher than
that, but for safety, its best not to go any higher
than the childs knee. Hell need to step up to it
without help, after all.
We wondered if we would need some sort of tread
on the bottom of the stilts, but after walking a slick
garage floor, a concrete sidewalk, and a lawn, we
found that traction was not a problem. After only a
few minutes of wear, the feet of the stilts roughened
up enough to provide grip on most surfaces.
One issue we didnt
expect was splinters.
Construction lumber has
[A]
to be carefully sanded
[B]
where the stilt user puts
his or her hands and
where the body of the
stilts rubs against the
[C]
persons arms. Fortunately, a random orbital
[D]
sander or even just hand
sanding quickly takes
care of the problem.
While youre at it, knock
off any sharp corners on
the footrests or support blocks.
We had an 80 kg man walk around on these, so
they should be more than capable of handling
most children.
84
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANNY AND ALBERT
E ASY REASONABLE
HARD
Shopping list
Difficulty:
QTY.
3
1
Time: 30 minutes
Ages: 8+
DESCRIPTION
50 x 75 x 200 posts
Box No. 10 x 75 mm Spax
construction screws
6 x 125 Spax hex-head
lag screws
80-grit sandpaper
120-grit sandpaper
Materials cut list

See diagram on previous page
[A]
50 x 75 x 125 stilts
50 x 75 x 225 side supports
50 x 75 x 275 footrests
50 x 75 x 25 bottom supports
TOOLS Mitre saw or circular saw, cordless drill,

square, 3 mm x 15 cm drill bit, sander
Instructions
parent only
parent and kid
kid only
1. Crosscut two 50 x 75s to the dimensions shown in our cut list [ A, B, C, D ].

2. Determine how high up you want the
bottom support block to be. (We recommend anywhere from 30 to 40 cm,
depending on the height, enthusiasm, and
agility of the kid.) Then mark a reference
line across the main stilt [ A ] and secure
the bottom support block [ D ] below the
line with two 8 cm construction screws.
3. Centre the footrest [ C ] on the bottom
support block so that theres equal overhang on both ends. Secure it with two
construction screws driven through the
footrest and into the bottom support
block [ D ].
[ B]
[A]
[D]
[C]
5. Turn the stilt on its side and use a

15 cm-long, 3 mm-diameter drill bit to
make a pair of pilot holes through the
side support blocks [ B ] and into the
body of the stilt [ A ]. Drive a 6 x 120 mm
lag screw into each pilot hole.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANNY AND ALBERT
[ B]
[A]
4. Flip the stilt over and position the side

support blocks [ B ] against it, centred on
the footrest. Drive one 75-mm construction screw through the centre of each
support block and into the footrest.
6. With a sander (or a square of sandpaper), use 80-grit followed by 120-grit

to carefully sand the stilts where the
users hands will grip. If there are any
sharp corners on the tops of the support blocks or footrests, reduce them
PM
with the 80-grit paper.
85
PHOTOGR APHS
BY
TOM
FOWLKS
FINALLY,
someone built an
ALUMINIUM
PICKUP TRUCK
BY
EZR A
DY E R
People said it was a gamble.

A huge risk. Why take the
best-selling vehicle in America
and start over? Because Ford
knew what no one else did:
the aluminium-clad 2015 F-150
was a sure bet all along.
This is how you make a
revolutionary bakkie.
Top row, from left: A crane operator at aluminium maker Alcoas

Davenport Works; the F-150s tow graphics show whether the truck
is level; an ingot rolls into the hot mill. Middle row: A lighter body
means better mileage; scrap aluminium is 100 per cent
recycled; weighing in at a truck stop. Bottom row: Alcoa workers
inspect the bed; the 360-degree camera is handy when youve
got a six-metre trailer; rolls of high-grade aluminium.
86
87
You have to
remove
your
wedding
ring
BEFORE YOU
SET FOOT IN
DAVENPORT
WORKS,
the sprawling aluminium

plant owned and operated
by Alcoa, in Davenport, Iowa.
You have to wear safety goggles and earplugs, a hard
hat, and steel-reinforced metatarsal boots. And youre
happy for your armour, because this place is the
Midwest heavy industry of your imagination 54
hectares of beautiful cacophony along the banks
of the Mississippi River.
At every turn theres a blast furnace disgorging
molten aluminium, or a hot mill flattening ingots,
or a 60-ton crane motoring overhead, all of it making
you feel eminently tiny and squishable. The machinery
at Davenport never stops, because the gooey, metallic
lava pouring forth from the furnaces will become a
door or a bonnet, eventually the whole damn body
of Americas most popular vehicle. Ford has decided
to make the body of the 2015 F-150 out of aluminium
instead of steel, which is what the body of every
other pickup is made of, and what the body of
every F-Series, the best-selling bakkie in America
for thirty-eight years running and one of the bestselling vehicles in the world, had been made of
since the first F-150 rolled off the line in 1975.
Last year Ford sold almost 740 000 F-Series pickups (the company does not break out individual sales
figures) and there are an estimated 14,4 million
F-150s on the road today. So when the Ford Motor
Company decided to make the switch, Davenport
Works got a lot busier.
Ive come to Davenport not just to see how an F-150
is made, but to help build a few more of them. Over
at the loading docks sits a 2 200-kg roll of automotivegrade aluminium on a tandem-axle flatbed trailer.
That trailer is hooked up to a 2015 F-150 King Ranch
4x4. Later today Ill fire up the vehicle and set a course
88
for Fords Dearborn, Michigan, stamping plant,

THE
where sheet aluminium is transformed into
COMPARISON:
truck parts.
ALUMINIUM
Ill use an F-150 to make more F-150s, because
ALLOY VS.
pick-up trucks are supposed to be handy, and Ford
STEEL ALLOY
claims that the F-150s material metamorphosis
makes it even more capable than its famously
ALUMINIUM IS:
capable steel-bodied predecessor. With less of its
own bulk to propel, the truck can haul more of
whatever needs hauling be it a boat, a load of
55% THICKER
mulch, or a two ton hunk of high-grade metal.
Davenport is excited about the F-150, and not
just because it brought new jobs and a major upgrade to the plant. This place makes the metal for
45% LIGHTER
a lot of cool stuff the wings on Air Force One
came out of this plant, Alcoa helped develop the
all-aluminium chassis for the Audi A8 and it
DENT
supplies armour for military vehicles but the
30% MORE
RESISTANT
final product is often an abstraction to the people
who work here.
The F-150 is different. Half the pickups in
the parking lot are F-150s. Out in the lobby
20% STIFFER
theres a sign-up for an F-150 raffle dubbed
Lighten Up Already, with the Al rendered
Test sample: The
like the periodic table symbol for aluminium.
F-150s tailgate panel
The tickets are going fast.
After I have on all my safety gear, I climb on a golf cart with manufacturing director Rob Woodall. The golf cart is appropriate because Davenports floor area is roughly equivalent to that of an eighteen-hole course
under one roof. Theres a network of roads inside, trafficked by forklifts
and flatbed trolleys and employees riding industrial trikes just to get
around. Mind the stop signs, because if theres something coming
the other way, itll probably be big.
They dont smelt aluminium at Davenport, but transforming recycled
or new aluminium into a finished product still requires a lot of heat.
A row of furnaces melt aluminium to be made into ingots and each
playing out at another huge plant run by Novelis,

1300 km away, in Oswego, New York. As massive as
Davenport Works is, its only half of the operation.
Heres the thing about DRIVING THE
2015 F-150:
its totally normal. Thats whats so gutsy about

Fords decision to forgo steel, the metal of skyscrapers
and battleships and Superman. The F-150 aluminium
programme is a hugely challenging and investmentintensive technical endeavour, a manufacturing and
logistic reboot for the most important vehicle in
America, and the benefits are invisible.
Im heading east on the I-80 interstate highway
towing the trailer, doing 120 km/h, listening to the
radio, cranking up my heated seat now and then. After
about thirty seconds behind the wheel, you forget that
your pickup, with its aluminium body and twin turbos,
has more in common with a Bentley than it does a Chevy
Silverado. What Ford did is akin to building a house with
a blast-proof foundation you know its important,
but its not as overtly flashy as blowing your budget
on a fancy gas oven and a whisky-stocked panic room.
You can tell that Ford is a little bit conflicted about
how to promote its move to aluminium. They want to
make a big deal out of it while simultaneously reassuring
bakkie buyers they havent done anything too radical.
Fords Forward March TV ad features Denis Leary
growling about the new trucks aluminium body, yet
the word aluminium is conspicuously absent from the
F-150s window sticker the list of features includes
fully boxed steel frame yet makes no mention of
that revolutionary body. If I were in charge at Ford,
Id offer the F-150 with no paint, like an Airstream
trailer or a polished 747 fuselage. Loud and proud.
Aluminium costs more than steel, on a per kilo basis.
Repairing it and thus insuring it might prove a little
more expensive, too. But its advantages are huge. Aluminium doesnt rust. It can absorb more crash energy
than steel. And the main reason for this whole grand
exercise its lighter. Even though a 2015 F-150 fender
is thicker than a steel counterpart, it weighs 55per cent
less. Depending on the trim, 2015 F-150s lose as much
as 300 kilos compared with the 2014 model.
Given the same power, the new pickup is quicker, it
handles better and it stops shorter. Most importantly,
it uses less fuel. And even if that improvement works
out to only one litre per 100 kilometres across the board,
millions of these vehicles could hit the road over the next
few years. A little quick math suggests that the aluminium
F-150 will save a billion litres of petrol within five years.
By comparison, the Chevy Volt an engineering feat
in its own right has saved more than 130 million
time a furnace opens up it looks like youre

gazing into the molten bowels of the Earth.
Alcoas furnaces
The nearby pedestrian walkway is protected
melt aluminium
to be poured into
by plexiglass shields, lest a furnaces fiery
moulds that form
exhalation relieve a passerby of his eyebrows.
giant ingots, bars
The ingots are dull bars of aluminium
that then go into
about five metres long, two metres wide
the mill for rolling.
your future truck in its crudest form. The
ingots next stop is for hot rolling at the
reversing mill, a machine designed to mash
that ingot down to a few millimetres thick. They never really told
me why I had to take off my wedding ring, but the implication was
ominous, and watching the hot mill at work, I can only imagine what
incident precipitated that rule. Woodall parks the cart next to the
hundred-inch mill, which makes two-metre-wide rolls of aluminium.
Thats six storeys tall, he says. I eyeball the structure. It doesnt
look that tall. Three storeys of it are underground, he adds.
When an ingot goes into the mill, massive rollers pull it back and
forth, a giant Fizzer getting longer and thinner with each pass until
its a flat sheet thats rolled into a huge coil at the continuous hot
mill. The coil cools, aided by towering fans. Then it gets cold-rolled,
so its thinner still. Coils at various stages of the rolling process sit
on racks of pallets that seem to stretch for half a kilometre.
After cold rolling the coils head to the new part of the works, the one
that cost R3 billion, the point at which the primaeval belching furnaces
give way to brightly lit finishing lines. Here the
coils are unwound yet again, heat-treated and
any wrinkles are pulled out. By now the metal
THE F-150: A BRIEF HISTORY
is so thin and its surface is so smooth and
pristine that a cushion of air supports the unwound sheet as it moves through the furnace
before being re-coiled. The rolls, weighing
1970s
1980s
A 7,5-litre V8 gave
The Twin Traction
between 9 000 and 18 000 kg each, are loaded
this generation an
Beam front
by crane onto eighteen-wheelers. Meanwhile
edge over most
suspension is still
other trucks are arriving with scrap metal to
other trucks.
controversial.
start the cycle anew. This whole process is also
1990s
1997: overheadcam V8s and real
independent front
suspension.
2000s
The F-150 adopts
the big-rig
styling that
endures today.
89
litres, according to data collected from car tracking

systems. Electric cars are great, but if you really
want to dent the national demand for crude, you
need to start with the bakkies.
This particular one, a loaded four-door King
Ranch, epitomises the all-things-to-all-people role
that pickups play in America. Its a luxury car, with
heated and cooled leather seats, adaptive cruise
control, and power-deployed running boards that
pop out when you open the door. Its a family sedan,
with seating for five and cup holders aplenty. The
3,5-litre EcoBoost V6 makes 272 kW and 570 N.m
of torque, enabling a fair impression of a muscle
car. And, yes, its a workhorse four-wheel drive,
locking rear differential, and a decided indifference
to the 3 000 kilograms or so hitched to the rear.
Although the F-150 is the lightest full-size pickup,
with a kerb weight starting at a mere 1837 kg (compare this with the previous F-150s 2152 kg), my
truck-and-trailer combo is just shy of six tons. I know
this because I weigh it on a scale at a truck stop near
Ottawa, Illinois. The fact that the V6 is dragging more
than six tons at 120 km/h explains why Im getting
23,5 litres/100 km. Which brings me to some advice
for the F-150 shopper: A ninety-litre fuel tank doesnt
take you far when youre towing. And stopping for
petrol is exponentially more irritating when you have
to navigate a trailer past the pumps. My kingdom
for the optional 140-litre extended fuel tank!
After a little more than seven hours on the road, I
pull into the parking lot of the Dearborn Inn, which
was built on Ford property in 1931. Tomorrow morning Ill drive a few minutes down the street to the
Dearborn Stamping Plant, where this bakkies body
was created from a roll of aluminium just like the
one I brought from Davenport.
FORDS ROUGE COMPLEX
Left and centre:

Freshly stamped
F-150 parts door
frames, bumpers,
bonnets wait to
be sent to Fords
Dearborn Truck
Plant to be assembled into the lightest full-sized
pickup body on
Earth (right).
looks like A SET FOR THE CLIMACTIC
BATTLE OF A JAMES BOND MOVIE:
Its a massive, imposing tableau of smokestacks, warehouses, and rail lines, the guts
of the American car industry. Dearborn
Stamping, located within, opened in 1939,
and parts of the exterior havent changed
since. Shortly after I pull through the brick
arches of the Rouge Complex entrance, a
train rumbles past dragging flame-belching
cauldrons of molten metal into the adjacent
AK Steel plant. Steel isnt going away anytime
soon, but the stamping plant next door is devoted to the aluminium
future. I park the truck and head in to meet the people who are tasked
with reinventing the F-150, including a contingent from Novelis, which,
along with Alcoa, helped devise Dearborns elaborate scrap-recapturing system.
We didnt just wake up yesterday and decide to build aluminium
F-150s, says George Luckey, Fords technical expert for advanced
engineering and manufacturing processes. Weve been working on
this for years. It goes back to when Ford owned Jaguar and built the
aluminium XJ. Manufacturing that car taught us things that are
relevant to the F-150.
Of course, pickups present challenges that dont show up on Jags.
For instance, early prototypes used steel rivets on the bed. When the
bed got scratched up, the aluminium wouldnt rust, but the rivets would
turn into ugly orange warts. The solution: replace the rivets with spot
welds and adhesives.
Dearborn Stamping engineering manager Jason Blosser leads us down
to the spotless manufacturing floor, where coils of aluminium await
their trip into the presses. The presses themselves are housed in what
look like freestanding garages, with rail tracks leading to vast doors
on each side. This is so the dies can be quickly swapped out when you
want to switch the line from making, say, a fender to a tailgate. The
THE SMALLEST F-150 You dont expect much out of a kids toy sold at Walmart, but let me tell you: the
Power Wheels F-150 is pretty unstoppable. The secret? Monster Traction, which is Fisher-Prices term
for what amounts to an electronic locking differential. After watching my 4-year-old motor out of an old
golf course sand trap, I asked Fisher-Price how it works. In high gear the two motors at each back wheel
are wired in parallel, with a hundred per cent of the battery voltage. So if one motor loads, it gets more
current, meaning power goes to the tyre with traction. It works so well, my maniac kid drove it up a
tree trunk and flipped over. Maybe the next generation should have a roll bar.
90
THE CONTRACTORS VERDICT

TOM LYNN IS A BOSTON
CONTRACTOR WHO DRIVES A
2006 F-150. WE GAVE HIM A
2015 F-150 2.7 ECOBOOST 4x4
AND TOLD HIM TO PUT IT TO
WORK. HERE ARE HIS THOUGHTS.
Downstairs a 75-kilowatt fan blows the

sorted scrap into tubes that run outside
the building and into waiting eighteenwheelers that return it to Oswego or Alcoas
Tennessee plant for recycling. This is a
major reason why the aluminium F-150
makes financial sense for Ford: zero waste.
It takes about ten times more energy
to smelt aluminium than it does to start
with recycled scrap, says Derek Prichett,
global head of recycling for Novelis. So
capturing the scrap is hugely important.
And not just from a monetary standpoint
but because the F-150 production requires
so much. On a typical automotive programme, say youre making a bonnet or
something, you might need four million
kilos of aluminium per year, Prichett
says. With the F-150 theyll need 350
or 400 million kilos a year. Thats why
there are two main suppliers. Neither of
us on our own could handle it all.
All this effort years of research, billions
of dollars, new infrastructure from New
York state to Iowa all so that the F-150
could gain a few extra kilometres per litre.
Ford took the lead to do the hard thing,
forging a path that might not reap immediate rewards. After all, the F-150 probably
wouldve remained a best-selling bakkie
whether they made it out of aluminium
or pig iron. Ford couldve dangled a bright
shiny object a small diesel engine or trick
new transmission and won plaudits
without really changing anything. Instead
they went lightweight, engineering a force
multiplier that will leverage all subsequent
improvements diesels, hybrids, ten-speed
transmissions to maximum effect. The
new F-150 is the payoff for a plan years
in the making, a machine of which Ford
should rightly be proud. But its also just
the start. This is the foundation.
PM
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY LUONG
doors have windows, so you can walk right

up and watch the magic as sheets of aluminium go in one end and bakkie parts
come spitting out the other side.
First the metal is precut to the rough
dimensions of whatever part needs to be
made. That stack of blanks goes into the
press. A many-tentacled robot uses suction
cups to grab a piece of aluminium and
place it in the press. Smash! Now it looks
like a fender, and the suction cups grab it
and move it down to the next die, which
crashes down again and refines the shape.
For steel we used electromagnets to pick
up the parts, Blosser says. That obviously
wouldnt work with aluminium, because
its nonferrous, so we had to go to the
vacuum system.
I walk around to the output end of the
press, where F-150 fenders are dropping
on to the conveyor belt like Everlasting
Gobstoppers pouring out of Willy Wonkas
chocolate factory. Workers grab the fenders
off the belt, inspect them, and place them
on racks. Theyre slinging those fenders
around like they dont weigh anything at
all. When a bed is fully assembled, tailgate
and everything, you can lift it off the
ground with one hand, Blosser says. Yet
the parts are stronger than steel depending on the chemical makeup of the alloy,
aluminium can be the foil around your
sandwich or the armour on your MRAP.
Fords stuff is closer to the latter. The alloys
have improved a lot since the company
started building prototype aluminium
sedans in the early nineties.
Out here on the main floor we see the
pickups taking shape, but in the basement
is where you find a big piece of the business
case for the aluminium F-150. As each
part is stamped, the excess metal drops
down a chute into a shredder.
Small contractors often use their

cab as their site office, and Ford
obviously understands that. I
love this cab. The console file
cabinet is genius, and the plugs for
computers and phones are in a
compartment that neatly stores
all of the wires. Im actually
writing this in the car.
In terms of power, the 2015 felt
about the same as my V8-powered 06, but the fuel mileage is
unreal. Im certain that I used
less than half the petrol I would
have in my old truck. The way
the stop/start engine shuts down
at stoplights was weird at first,
but it was never a problem, and
the added fuel efficiency makes
it worth it.
The bed works really well for
the kind of jobs I do. The spray-on
liner is awesome. I spill things,
carry debris, and slide tools in
and out all day. With this liner,
you dont worry about scarring
up the bed. The remote-locking
tailgate is very nice, too. I usually
use a tonneau cover over the bed
and the ability to easily lock and
unlock the tailgate is an asset.
The drop-down tailgate step is
kind of cool, but its another thing
to break, and Id probably prefer
not having it. The plastic cover
over the step came loose when I
was unloading a snow plough. I
drove the truck during the endless
Boston blizzards, so I can vouch
that it performs well in very deep
snow. The wiper blades stay thawed, which isnt always a given.
Finally, this truck is a babe
magnet. Im old enough that the
women arent looking at me, but
Im sure I could have gotten a
date with this truck. Let me
know if you need a contractors
thoughts on a Maserati.
91
VELDSKOEN
COMPANY:
Strassberger Skoene
LOCATION:
Clanwilliam, Cape
AS A SYMBOL OF SOUTH AFRICAN CULTURE, the

veldskoen ranks right up there with the vuvuzela,
the pointlessly outsize 4x4 and the Gatsby*. But,
like so much else in life, the vellie seems to have
fallen. Once ubiquitous to the point of anonymous,
this homespun utility boot famously turned into
a fashion item by David Kramer is being ousted
by newcomers with a more modern look. Its
called progress, folks.
The veldskoen is believed to have had its origins
in Khoisan footwear, though is associated indelibly
92
with the Great Trek and is traditionally made from

artisanal vegetable-tanned leather uppers on a
rubber or crepe sole. Essentially classless, it is as
at ease in the veld (duh) as in high society. Its even
said to have inspired Clarks Desert Boot design.
The traditional model lives on at Strassberger
Skoene (which styles itself the countrys oldest
veldskoen factory). Admittedly, it now has to share
the production line with around 40 relative newcomers, from hiking boots to work shoes and
sandals. The company was founded in 1834 on
the missionary station Wupperthal, 70 km

from Clanwilliam. What was known initially as the Wupperthal Institute came
under the leadership of German missionary Willy Strassberger, who brought onboard German shoemaker and tanner
Konrad Buttner. The missionarys three
sons founded the Gebroeders Strassberger
and moved the base of operations to
Clanwilliam, though to this day Wupperthal retains a small shoe factory.
The business fell on hard times after
a change in ownership, going into liquidation in 2010 and leaving 45 families
without an income. Fortunately, local
financiers persuaded the old firm to
regroup, jobs were restored, and today
great-grandson JJ du Plessis presides
over a vast range. Of course, you can
still get that vellie (in red, blue or
gulp purple). Clearly, they are doing
something right: already licensed footwear
suppliers to the Blue Bulls and Cheetahs
supporters clubs, theyve been given
the sole mandate to produce official
Springbok supporters shoes ahead of
the 2015 World Cup.
*For those outside the Cape, this is
something you eat.
PM
Find out more: strassbergers.co.za
93
THE
2
3
94
Certification to fly the A5,

which means getting a sport-pilot
licence, takes about a week. A single stick, rudder pedals and a
throttle maneouvre the plane. It
has a 75-litre fuel tank and can
run on premium fuel, with a
range of about 550 kilometres.
Its the aeronautical version of
driving a golf cart. Flying is a
fairly easy thing to do, Strand
says. Taking off and landing take
a lot of practice. But just flying
through the open sky is easier
than driving your car down the
road. J O E B A R G M A N N
Welcome to the era of

the personal flying machine. The
Icon A5 is a lustrous carbon-fibre
two-person plane that takes off
from and lands on water or paved
surfaces, and whose wings fold up
so it can be towed. Cofounder
Steen Strand says production for
the A5, which is 8 metres long
and has a 10-metre wingspan,
is starting this year. The R2,25million craft has already tallied
1 250 preorders, and Icon plans
to build 300 by the end of 2016.
A BALLOON TO THE EDGE OF SPACE

Even in this time of private rocket ships, space
travel for most of us still seems a speculative,
far-off dream. But World View Enterprises can
get you there, at least to the edge of space,
next year. Its helium balloon ride rises so high
to 30 000 metres, about three times farther
up than commercial airliners fly that you
travel inside a climate-controlled capsule. As
you lift off in Page, Arizona, cocktail in hand
(theres a bar), youll watch as the Grand
Canyon yawns open. The park gradually
shrinks away until you can see all of Arizona,
then the entire American West. Then, finally,
the curvature of Earth itself is revealed, and
the planet floats below in its blue-green grandeur. The capsule includes Wi-Fi, so Instagram
away: at the balloons suborbital apogee, passengers will take in views previously seen by
fewer than 550 people.
The trip lasts about six hours, two of those
at maximum altitude. To descend, the pilot
vents helium from the balloon, then releases
it, shifting flight duties to an open parafoil.
The capsule floats down from there, landing
up to 500 kilometres from the launch site.
Theyll fly you back there in a small plane all
for $75 000 (about R900 000). World View
reaches and descends from these otherworldly
heights using surprisingly retro technology: a
polyethylene balloon and the kind of parafoil
a skydiver would use, only much larger. The
views, however, are all straight from the
future. C A M E R O N J O H N S O N
THE PERSONAL
AIRCRAFT
OF
THE ELECTRIC SURFBOARD
If youve ever surfed or swum along with a wave headed

towards shore and caught it just right, you know the feeling
that comes when the water lifts you and hurtles you forward at a
speed, and with a giddy force, beyond anything you could marshal on
your own. Now theres a toy to simulate that feeling anytime, in any
significant body of water: an electric surfboard called the Lampuga.
The board, named for the fish better known as the mahimahi, one of
the fastest in the sea, can whip you across the water at speeds up to
55 kilometres per hour.
Around 2,5 metres long, it looks like a slightly bulbous longboard.
Inside the casing a composite of carbon fibre and aluminium sits a
10-kW electric jet-drive motor that sucks water from under the board
and spits it out the back. The steering is controlled via a towrope. The
handle has a thumb-operated throttle, so you can also sit or lie on the
board and hold built-in handles. If you fall off, a magnet in the safety
leash cuts power to the engine. On the R210 000 Lampuga, the
waves never stop rolling until its time to plug in again. C J
CONQUER THE OCEANS! EXPLORE THE HEAVENS! SOON!
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER LLOYD
THE DIVING SUIT

You are a long way below the oceans
surface. The waters weight is enormous, yet you move easily in your
aluminium-alloy suit. See something
shiny on the ocean floor? Activate the
thrusters on your back two vertical,
two horizontal to glide to that spot.
Your hand-like attachments are dextrous enough to snatch a coin off the
bottom of a pool. Ready to head up?
Fire the thrusters again. And dont

worry about the bends the suit
maintains a constant air pressure.
The gear that makes this adventure
possible is called the Exosuit. Its creator, Phil Nuytten, founded a company
focused on designing equipment to
operate 300 metres underwater,
where the suits smallest rotary joint
is subject to 5 711 kilograms of pressure. Its like taking a pick-up truck,
dropping it down on a 150 mm-diameter bearing, and expecting to be able

to rotate it with your fingers, he says.
The first custom-built models
shipped in 2014, and Nuytten put a
production line in place this year.
Customers include explorer JeanMichel Cousteau. For the rest of us,
a new world is about to float within
reach. K E V I N D U P Z Y K
PM
95
HOW TO GET STARTED IN . . .
BY ALEXANDER GEORGE
Because you cant

appreciate a photograph
if you never see it.
PHOTO PRINTING
Do something with
your pictures
Like store them in a smart way that allows you
to easily search and get access to them when you
need to. First, forget the cloud. Youll have more
immediate control over an external drive dedicated
to your photos. The four-terabyte Western Digital
My book (R2 800) has plenty of room, no matter
how itchy your shutter finger. Plus, it lets you
store everything in one place, not spread out over
your computer, Facebook and photo sites. All you
have to do is drag your photos to it after you
import them.
Start
with
the
right
gear
Your phone may be convenient, but it is not a

camera. Even a point-and-shoot, while definitely
NG
an upgrade, wont get you the control or the
SOMETHI
TO
advanced sensor you need to take great pictures.
R
E
CONSID
For a long time the DSLR, with its nearly instant
autofocus and interchangeable lenses, has been
Digital deteriorates
the only choice for serious digital photography.
But, in the past ten years a new category has
If you still have any photos saved on CDs, move
gained popularity: mirrorless cameras such as the
them to a hard drive, or at least put them on
Sony a6000 (R12 500), above, remove the mirror
Dropbox, as soon as you can. As CDs age, their
protective lacquer coating breaks down. This allows
that bounces an image from the lens to the eyeair to reach the aluminium and rust the disc, changpiece in a DSLR, instead relying on a digital viewing the chemical composition and eventually making
finder. Without the
it impossible to read the data.
complication of a mirror, these cameras are
lighter, more compact,
INSTANT IMPROVEMENT
THE LIGHT METER
and much less expenYou may feel silly using it, but if you really want to get
sive than DSLRs, while
serious about taking photos, you need an incident light
producing nearly the
meter. It reads the light falling on to a subject directly
same quality of image.
from the source, as opposed to the light reflecting off
Youre the only one
the object and back to the camera (along with all the
who has to know.
other light entering your camera lens). That lets you
adjust your exposure to your focal point, not to the
entire scene.
IAN ALLEN, PHOTOGRAPHER
96
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEVON JARVIS
Pick a naming system and stick to it. Dont use

dates. Its much easier to remember that you went
to Kruger than it is to remember that you took a
holiday in 2008. Group the images into categories
such as birthdays and holidays. Each event gets
its own folder, and each of those folders gets two
folders: one for the originals and one for any
corrected files.
ADJUSTMENTS
Curves
Fix them
Think of this less as editing and more as processing. Youre
turning a negative into a developed photograph. Although
the software that comes with some cameras can be quite
good, dont worry about installing it. Every expert we consulted suggested Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, for $10
(about R100) a month, or a free program called Gimp that
offers almost all of the same features. A look at the key
functions youll find in both:
Default
RGB
Auto
A function
called curves allows
you to click on a specic
part of the image you want
to adjust, then drag this line
up to increase brightness
at that light level, and
down to decrease
it.
H O W TO
USE A HISTOGRAM
CROP: Remove distractions, but try to keep limbs and
background objects complete. Use the classic rule of thirds
to line things up by imagining a noughts-and-crosses board
over the photo (like we did in the image above). Viewers
automatically focus on the intersections, so try putting a
subjects eyes along the top line. And keep it a little offcentre. Too much balance is boring.
EXPOSURE: Raising the amount of light brightens the
image, bringing out hidden details in the darkness. Lowering

it darkens the image, retrieving details that were lost in
the light.
FILTERS: Reserved for amateurs. Youre better than that.
EVERYTHING ELSE: Based on the histogram. See right.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY LUONG
INSTANT IMPROVEMENT
GET ONE GOOD LENS
Crappy lenses distort colour and cause

fading at the edges of the shot. Start with
a prime lens this Sony E35mm F1.8
OSS E-mount fits the a6000 on the previous page which will get you sharper
photos and, since it cant zoom, will
make you think about composition. You
zoom with your feet. ESTEBAN ALADRO,
THE VERTICAL AXIS

shows the number of pixels at
each light level. (A night-time
photo of a candles flame will
have high spikes to the left,
since most of the image is in
darkness, and a sunny beach
shot will be shifted all the way
to the right.) It depends on
what youre shooting, but
generally speaking, you want
more of the pixels to be in the
middle of the graph than on
the very edges.
THE HORIZONTAL AXIS
displays the full range of
brightness in an image, progressing from pure black, on
the left-hand side, to pure
white, on the right. There is a
slider on the bottom of the
chart. Move the left arrow to
make the darks darker, and
the right to make the lights
lighter.
CLIPPING If any of the
spikes on the extreme right
or left reach the top of the
screen, that indicates that

there are more of that type of
pixel than the sensor could
handle, which means youve
lost detail. Shadows may be
hiding texture, or something
might be washed out in the
Sun. Its a sign that you
should have adjusted your
exposure up or down to compensate when you took the
picture.
COLOURS Photoshop and
Gimp let you pick specific
colours and adjust their levels.
Generally, you wont need to
do this. Theres an auto
button that has earned its
reputation. But if a photo still
feels too warm (red) or cool
(blue), you can adjust it with
the colours function. Select
the colour from the dropdown, then move the line
in the appropriate direction
to change saturation or
brightness.
PHOTOGRAPHER
97
INSTANT IMPROVEMENT
USE ANGLES
If you look at actresses who know how to walk a red carpet, they turn their
hips and legs away from the camera. Thats because everyone takes a more
flattering picture with their body rotated 30 degrees to either side. Also, if
you can, shoot
with the camera
held slightly above
eye level, at an
angle looking
down on the subject. Even better.
ART STREIBER,
PHOTOGRAPHER
Know
which
ones
to fix
Whether you happen upon a great sunset or

Sharlto Copley at the golf course, sometimes
the best approach is to take multiple pictures
of the same thing in the hope that one will turn
out perfectly. But its not always easy to spot
the right one. A quick visual lesson:
Get a good printer

After testing the major
print shops, we found
their quality to be below
what you can do at home.
Plus, at home you can
catch details that didnt
show up on your monitor, fix them, and print
again. The Epson SureColor P600 (R11 000 est.)
has a nine-colour ink system that easily handles
even the subtlest shading.
Its a pigment printer,
which is usually the
And dont
forget the
paper
Let the subject dictate
which type to use.
Not only is the exposure better in the image on the right, but it also has better
framing. The fence, cars and sign are distractions you dont want.
On the left, the sky is too bright and overexposed. You cant bring back those lost
details. In the other shot, youll be able to brighten the city and leave the sky as it is.
ACTION SHOTS: For

sports or wildlife, use
glossed paper. The finish
accommodates a range
of hues, making details
extra sharp, and the
reflective coating makes
subjects in motion
appear even more
dynamic. One warning:
the glare makes glossy
paper bad for framing
under glass. Youll want
to matte them instead.
PORTRAITS, LANDSCAPES AND BLACKAND-WHITES:
Use matte paper because

it adds a slightly dreamy
quality. It also absorbs
dark colours and handles
varying textures that can
get lost in glossy prints.
On the right, the guy in grey is the clear focal point, with a background that adds to
the shot. On the left, he is just a blurry gure blocking the focal point behind him.
98
GIFTS: Its too expensive

to use all the time, but
double-weight photo
paper is more durable
and has heft and
significance.
better choice over dye.

Pigment rests the ink on
top of the paper; dye
sinks in. Dye is slightly
more vibrant, but unless
you put it under UV
glass, any exposure to
sunlight will fade a dye
image in a few months.
Pigment-printed photos
are rated for 200 years,
even when on display.
THE
LOST
ART
Passing around
a photo
Its rude to keep swiping
the screen after someone
hands you his phone to
look at a picture. But not
with printed photos.
Whether on a wall, in an
album, or rubber-banded
in a shoebox, printed
photos are to be perused.
If youre welcome in that
home, youre welcome
to those photos. Those
photos were printed with
the expectation a hope,
even that they would be
shared. And if they are
passed around to other
friends, ridiculed, and
maybe pocketed to be
used at a later birthday or
nuptials, then they will be
shared with even more
people, just as they
should be. Dont let storing images on phones
warp your idea of what
memories are for. And
certainly not whom. PM
BUYER'SGUIDE
ACCESSORIES
| PAGE
ACCESSORIES
| PAGE
3D Solids
107
Little Boy Blue
105
Autostyle
111
Lock Latch
108
Bestech
105
Lopec Auto Trading
106
Blue Saddle
102
100
Cad House
108
Lynx
CCTV
102
CFP Technologies
105
CNC Clearcut
103
CNC Instruments
107
Diesel Torque
Meguiars
101
MineLabs
102
Off Shore
108
PicC
108
103
Polygon
110
Flexishield
105
Pro Auto
110
Force Tools
109
Redline
106
Front Runner
104
Strongman
107
Garry Lumpe
104
Taunotent
102
Hex
105
Tops Auto Spares
104
Industrial Machines
106
Van Acht
108
Infocus
102
Vermont
106, 110
JG Electronics
99
BUYER'SGUIDE
100
To advertise in Buyers Guide contact Joanne, Lindi or Patrick on

011 449 1100 or email: popbuyersguide@ramsaymedia.co.za
BUYER'SGUIDE

101
BUYER'SGUIDE
102

BUYER'SGUIDE

103
BUYER'SGUIDE
104

BUYER'SGUIDE

CFP TECHNOLOGIES
Electric motors & Drives
Speed Control for your Machinery,

Pumps, Conveyors, Fans, Mixers, etc
Variable Speed Drives for Electric Motors (VFDs or VSDs)
Single phase input, three phase output models. 0.18 Kw - 4 Kw
Three phase input, three phase output models. 0.18 Kw - 1000 Kw
Electric Motors
Single Phase: 0.12 Kw - 7.5 Kw Three Phase: 0.18 Kw - 330 Kw
Website: www.cfptech.co.za
Email: cjvdb@mweb.co.za
Tel: 082 8570324
105
BUYER'SGUIDE
106

BUYER'SGUIDE

107
BUYER'SGUIDE
108

BUYER'SGUIDE

109
BUYER'SGUIDE
110

BUYER'SGUIDE

111
W I N0
D O I T Y O U R W AY / U S E F U L , C L E V E R T I P S F O R Y O U R H O M E
R1 00
WINNING TIP
DONT LET
THEM BUG
YOU
The cut off piece will

be glued inside the
motor housing, and
the remaining part
outside will hold
the tube in place.
Tube tted and

ring glued inside
housing with the
other part outside.
This is for the bugs,

spiders and other
gremlins that get
Outside housing tted
into your automatSecond end cap
and ready to pop in
ed gate opener.
glued on with
four or ve mothballs.
screw
cap
tted
You need:
inside housing.
25 mm electrical conduit
2 end stops
2 screw-in caps.
Method: Cut 10 mm off
one of the end caps and
place to one side. Cut 100
mm of pipe and drill down
its length any amount of
holes of about 5 mm whatever drill bit you have, really. Glue one end cap on the pipe.
Now, drill a 25 mm hole in the gate opener housing, away from internal motor parts.
Slide the pipe into the hole. On the inside, slide the 10 mm cutoff over the pipe and
glue it in position, as this will hold the pipe. Fit and glue the second end cap inside
the housing and screw in the end cap blank.
Now you can refit the gate housing cover, pop in four or five mothballs and screw on
the outside cap. No more bugs in the motor or circuit board and you need to top up with
mothballs only once every 23 months. The best part: no lock to undo or screws to lose.
MICHAEL CORKE
FISH HOEK
power tools, and you have to rely on the

only chisel and hammer in your toolbox.
Well, to neaten it up, put some window
putty in there and smooth it down. It
looks neat and very professional.
ANTONIO DE ABREU
HIGHVELD
PLUGGED
SMARTEN UP
After hanging new doors, then putting up the
door striker plate, you always have a messy
chiselled-out part on the inside of the striker
plate, especially if you dont have the right
Im sure that, at some time, every DIY buff

has had this problem: youve taken care to
drill the right size hole to suit the plug, but
when the plug is inserted its loose in the
hole. Either it just turns, or it pulls out as
you tighten the screw. This happened to me
the other day in a situation where I couldnt
reposition the hole and try again. I had to
be able to use the hole I had drilled.
I was using an 8 mm plug, so I cut a 6 mm
strip of 120 grit water paper, folded it over
the plug and pushed it into the hole. This
time it was tight and I had to tap it home.
It held perfectly and I was able to get a
really good fix with the screw.
ROSS WILSON
CENTURION
SEND US
YOUR HINT
AND SCORE!
Send us your most helpful home,
garage, workshop and general DIY
hints and score! The months
best tip will receive R1 000. For
more information, visit www.popularmechanics.co.za
Send your tips to:
PM Do It Your Way, Box 180, Howard
Place 7450, or e-mail popularmechanics
@ramsaymedia.co.za Please include your
name, address and contact number.
Regrettably, only South African residents
are eligible for the prize. Prizes not
claimed within 60 days will be forfeited.
TAP FIX
My house is quite old and still has the
original galvanised pipework and taps.
This tip originates from a leaking bath tap
that had a cracked seat where the tap
washer seals when closed.
I tried to recut the seat, but found that
no amount of recutting could solve the
problem. The only solution seemed to be
to remove the tap and replace it.
To do this, I would have to break out
some of the outside wall to get in under
the bath to remove the pipework and the
valve. I decided to use some of that wellknown brand of plastic steel epoxy that I
had left over from another job.
I made sure the seat was nice and dry,
mixed the steel epoxy and placed some
on the seat all the way round. I waited for
the epoxy to become like the texture of a
marshmallow: soft, but not runny. Then
I took the spindle assembly, with a new
tap washer in place, smeared some oil on
the tap washer assembly and inserted it
in place.
After reassembling, I hand-tightened
the tap spindle assembly until it was just
touching the steel epoxy enough to form a
new seat for the tap washer. When the
epoxy had cured for about an hour, I secured
the tap spindle assembly and the handle.
Now I no longer have a leak, didnt have
to break out any walls or replace a tap,
and naturally saved a lot of money
CORNELIUS JANSEN
PIETERMARITZBURG PM
RESERVATION OF COPYRIGHT
The publishers of POPULAR MECHANICS reserve all rights of reproduction or broadcasting of feature articles and factual data appearing in this journal under Section 12 (7) of the Copyright
Act, 1978. Such reproduction or broadcasting may be authorised only by the publishers of POPULAR MECHANICS. Published by RamsayMedia Pty Ltd for the Proprietors, POPULAR MECHANICS (SA)
Pty Ltd, Uitvlugt, Howard Drive, Pinelands, Western Cape. Distributed by RNA, 12 Nobel St, Industria West, Johannesburg, and printed by CTP Gravure, 19-21 Joyner Road, Prospecton,
Durban. Apple Mac support: Digicape tel 021 674-5000.
112
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XX Ideal for those quick DIY jobs,
this tool set combines function and
versatility and includes everything
you need for day-to-day DIY jobs,
in a handy nylon zippered storage
case.
The selection of commonly used
tools includes a metal tape measure,
4 sockets, a bit driver, blunt nose
pliers, 2 precision screwdrivers, a
magnetic bit holder, 3 Allen keys
and 10 screwdriver bits. It's perfect
for home, car or office.
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spectacle
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of the year
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in the crown
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GROUP PUBLISHER: Neil Piper

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