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P H O T O G R A P H B Y C H R I S T O P H E E N A
82 The Threat Is Out There Asteroid Apophis is on track for possible Earth impact. Sure, the odds are low. But some experts think they’re high enough for us to start worry-ing. Plus: fi ve plans to defl ect disaster. BY DAVID NOLAND
88 Is Your Car Smarter Than You Are? With computerized safety systems, your car is doing more of the driving for you. Is that a good thing? BY BEN STEWART
94 The Digital Ice Age It’s a huge challenge: how to store digital fi les so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. BY BRAD REAGAN
98 Giving Back We help out one of the busiest fi re-houses in New York City by updating the crew’s tools and exer-cise equipment. It’s our way of saying thanks. BY REBECCA DAY
104 Jumbo Trouble The supersize A380 was supposed to alleviate airport gridlock. But the Airbus plane is two years behind schedule, $2 billion over budget and nowhere near service. What happened? BY BARBARA S. PETERSON
V O L U M E 1 8 3 N O . 1 2
Popular Mechanics (ISSN 0032-4558) is published monthly by Hearst Communications, Inc., a unit of the Hearst Corporation, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A. Victor F. Ganzi, President, Chief Executive Officer; George R. Hearst Jr., Chairman; Frank A. Bennack Jr., Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary; Ronald J. Doerfler, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Hearst Magazines Division: Cathleen Black, President; John P. Loughlin, Executive Vice President; George J. Green, Executive Vice President; Raymond J. Petersen, Executive Vice President; John A. Rohan Jr., Vice President and Group Controller. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012499. Send returns (Canada) to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, Ontario N6C 6B2. CANADA BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. Registered as second-matter at the Post Office at Mexico D.F., Mexico, June 20, 1950, © 2006 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 7170, Red Oak, IA 51591. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE: Popular Mechanics will, upon receipt from its reader of a completely new or renewal subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first-copy delivery either to the Postal Service or alternate carriers within 6 to 12 weeks. If for some reason this cannot be done, you will be notified promptly of the issue date that will begin your subscription, with a request for any further instructions you may have concerning your order. Please address all such orders to us at Popular Mechanics, P.O. Box 7170, Red Oak, IA 51591. •Should you have any problem with your subscription, please write Joan Harris, Customer Service Department, Pop ular Mechanics, P.O. Box 7170, Red Oak, IA 51591 or call toll-free 1-800-333-4948. Please enclose your mailing label when writing to us or renewing your subscription. •Subscription prices: United States and possessions, $24.00 for one year; $42.00 for two years. Canada and all other countries add $16.00 for each year. MAILING LISTS: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies who sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to: Popular Mechanics, Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 7024, Red Oak, IA 51591-0024.
We cannot be responsible for loss of unsolicited queries, manuscripts or photos. For return, they must be accompanied by adequate postage. AS A SERVICE TO READERS, Popular Mechanics publishes newsworthy products, techniques and scien-tific and technological developments. Due to possible variance in the quality and condition of materials and workmanship, Popular Mechanics cannot assume responsibility for proper application of techniques or proper and safe functioning of manufactured products or reader-built projects resulting from information published in this magazine.
WILL THIS PLANE MAKE IT TO THE RUNWAY?The problems surrounding the Airbus A380 continue to pile up. 104
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On the cover: Asteroids and comets collided with Earth many times in the past, changing the world’s climate and causing species to go extinct. Are we due for another big hit?
New Cars 73 Contrary Crossover The Dodge Nitro relies on macho good looks to stand out in the crossover crowd. Plus: a diesel Benz sedan, race-car convertible BMW, new Sebring and Spy Reports.
Columns 58 Seeking New Depths We test dive affordable rebreather technology that eliminates bubbles—and could trans-form the scuba scene.
62 Monster PCOur idea of the perfect Media Center PC isn’t for sale—we had to build it. Now, you have a chance to win it!
Home Journal 111 Counter Resur-gency As the focal point of your new kitchen, the counter material has to be perfect. We show you what’s right for your budget.
116 Stripping CableInsider tips from our guest electrical contractor show you how to master this basic but tricky skill.
118 Homeowners Clinic Self-regulate your house’s water pressure. Plus: wood splitters; expert advice on wall mounting a power strip; and Editor’s Choice award winners.
Car Care 127 Saturday Mechanic Reattach that fallen rearview mirror.
132 Auto ClinicLubing a sticky cruise control cable; liberating rusted brake drums.
Technology 136 Double-Decker Discs How dual-layer DVDs work. Plus: Express-Cards in, PC Cards out; and how to purge Internet temporary fi les.
88 Is Your Car Smarter Than You Are?
62 Win a Monster PC!82 Killer Asteroid94 Is Your Data
Disappearing?104 Airbus Mega-Jet Mess39 Gear of the Year116 Strip Wire 127 Fix a Rearview Mirror111 Choose a Countertop118 Silence Banging
Pipes132 Cure Cranky Cables
M O N T H L YHOW TO REACH US 10
EDITOR’S NOTES 12
LETTERS 14
THIS IS MY JOB 148
N E W S , T O O L S , C A R S , H O M E + H O W-T O
M E N T I O N E D O N
T H E C O V E R
A log-splitting good time. 120 Handheld Dyson vacuum. 55
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Tech Watch 23 Diesel Refined JCB’s Diesel max shatters the previous diesel land speed record. Plus: a robot to carry wounded soldiers; chair-size helicopters; private-sector shipping to the space station; and the Pentagon’s “pain ray.”
Upgrade 39 Wish List 2007The 31 best tools, gadgets, toys and appliances that you can give, receive or just salivate over this year.
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EDITORIAL BOARD OF ADVISERS
POPULAR MECHANICS is grateful to these scientists, innovators and leaders, who help ensure we cover the most important stories in the most authoritative way.
SHAWN CARL SONExecutive Director of the Society for Amateur Scientists, MacArthur FellowDAVID E. COLEChairman, Center for Automotive ResearchSAUL GRIFFITHCo-founder of SQUID Labs, inventorTOM JONESSpace shuttle astronaut, author of Sky WalkingDR. KEN KAMLERSurgeon, author of Surviving the ExtremesAMY SMITHMIT instructor, MacArthur FellowDANIEL H. WIL SONRoboticist, author of How to Survive a Robot UprisingWM. A. WULF President, National Academy of Engineering
WHAT THEY’RE DOING
BUZZ ALDRIN Apollo 11 astronaut; colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
Buzz Aldrin’s love for space hasn’t abated since he set foot on the moon 37 years ago. This month, he launches the Buzz Aldrin Podcasting
Series (or “Buzzcasting”) via iAmplify. In the programs, available for download at buzzaldrin.com, he’ll take on all matters of space—starting with “The Apollo Dream,” an orchestra-backed 8-minute video of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.
HOW TO REACH US Keep in touch with Popular Mechanics.
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Customer Service SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS? For questions about current or new subscriptions, visit our Web site: service.popularmechanics.com. SUBSCRIBE Go to subscribe.popularmechanics.com or call 800-333-4948. BACK ISSUES Call 800-925-0485. REPRINTS Call 800-659-9878.
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PM
I FELL OFF MY mountain bike the other day and broke a fi nger. Oh, well. To me, this is
an acceptable risk in my chosen sport. And to be honest, as editors at Popular Mechanics we know that compared to the risks faced by
many of the people we cover, the chances we take in our everyday lives are pretty minor. That lesson was served up during a recent photo shoot for our story, “Giving Back,” about the Watkins Street fi rehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. (page 98). In the middle of the shoot a call came in. Within seconds, the fi re-fi ghters were out the door and rolling to a serious apartment fi re. To them, it wasn’t a big deal. Just another day at the offi ce.
Not everyone wants to face those kinds of daily risks, but luckily some people do. At our recent Breakthrough Awards ceremony (page 18), aviation pioneer Burt Rutan voiced concern that as a society, the U.S. has become too risk-averse. “We went to the moon only eight years after somebody [fi rst] fl ew out of the atmosphere,” he said. NASA has a new plan to get back to the moon, one that Rutan believes will be too slow, too expensive—and too cau-tious. Have we lost that pioneering spirit of the Apollo days? I hope not.
Then there are those dangers we tend not to worry enough about because they seem so remote. The threat of tsunamis once fell into that category—until the 2004 tragedy brought it front and center. In our cover story (page 82), David Noland explores the danger posed by the asteroid Apophis, which is on track for a possible collision with Earth in about 30 years. Fortu-nately, the risk of that happening is very, very slim. But it’s not zero. So how do we plan for an event of low likelihood but potentially devastating conse-quences? This sort of risk calculation is very different from deciding whether to ride a mountain bike, become a fi refi ghter or someday take a suborbital fl ight in Rutan’s SpaceShipTwo. Yet, it’s one we’ll eventually have to face.
WHAT ARE THE
ODDS ?
On the job: Firefi ghters from the Watkins Street fi rehouse face daily risks.
B R A D R E AG A N
The Texas-based reporter admits he’s done a poor job of maintaining his digital archives, but he’s not alone (“The Digital Ice Age,” page 94). “I don’t think most people realize it’s so easy to lose your old digital fi les,” he says, but the loss of vital information “confronts all of us, from the U.S. military right down to my mother.”
B A R BA R A S . P E T E R S O N
“Airbus is guilty of one thing—catering to the airlines. Meeting their demands threw the whole produc-tion schedule off.”—on the problems plaguing Airbus’s new A380 jumbo jet; see “Jumbo Trouble,” page 104.
M I CA E L F O RS B E R G This Stockholm, Sweden-based illustrator would love to see advanced safety technology in more vehicles. Forsberg, who created images
for this month’s road test, “Is Your Car Smarter Than You Are?” (page 88), was idling at a red light when a driver rear-ended him. “If the car behind me had the latest technology,” he says, “I wouldn’t have had that accident.”
J i m M e i g s E d i t o r - i n - C h i e f
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10/06Airships, spud
guns and nuclear power top our
reader mail.
reactors (“The Next Atomic Age,” Oct. 2006) is to increase the use of clean, affordable, safe energy. These reactors also can increase the utilization of large stores of used nuclear fuel, which will reduce the environmental impact of mining, as well as the cost and environmental impact of waste disposal.
D E N I S B E L L E R
EAGLE ALLIANCE
HENDERSON, NV
The nuclear power industry has told Congress it can’t subsist if it has to pay for its own insurance. The Price-Anderson Act, passed in 1957, could dump the primary burden of liability for a nuclear power plant accident on the tax-payer. It was supposed to be a tem-porary measure, but the industry has lobbied vigorously for the last 50 years to renew it.
M I C H E L L E E
COUNCIL ON INTELLIGENT ENERGY &
CONSERVATION POLICY
WHITE PLAINS, NY
HOW-TO RALLY Popular Mechanics is looking for reader innovations to feature in an upcoming issue. Go to popular mechanics.com for more info.
CORRECTION In “The Next Atomic Age,” we mislabeled a photo. Seen here is Patrick
Moore, chair and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd.
Your illustration of an airship on the cover shows the U.S. fl ag improp-erly displayed. When pictured on an aircraft’s right side, the union should be on the right—so the fl ag appears to be blowing in the wind.
M A S T E R S G T. G E O R G E L U C E R O
ARIZONA AIR NATIONAL GUARD
TUCSON, AZ
Very true. We stand corrected. —Ed.
CANNON FODDER Here’s a safer alternative to the spud gun (“Cheap Thrills,” Oct. 2006): My daughter and I built a cannon that can launch a marshmallow 50 yards using air pressure, a tire valve instead of igniter screws, and a PVC valve to release the pressure.
T H O M A S JA M E S H A R R I N G T O N
CULPEPER, VA
I enjoyed the article and admired your potato gun. It’s worth men-tioning that in some states it’s illegal to have one, much less fi re it. It was fun while it lasted.
R . H A M I LT O N
AUGUSTA, GA
Like cars, fi rearms and power tools, spud guns are dangerous. As we said in the article, they should be treated with respect, and used legally. —Ed.
NUCLEAR DEBATE, PART II The real reason to develop advanced
As a kid, I would spend my days at Womble’s Drug Store in Sacramento reading from the magazine rack. Popular Mechanics was one of my favorites. I particularly loved the articles about f lying wings and air-ships. Recently, I purloined an issue from a doctor’s offi ce waiting room and sent in a subscription card. To my great delight, my fi rst issue arrived and featured “Return of the Airship” on the cover. B O B KO C H NOVATO, CA
CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF
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The Dynalift er is a hybrid airship prototype.
P H O T O G R A P H B Y P H I L L I P T O L E D A N O
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If you’re like us, you want to do more than just follow the instructions. Learn the auto, home and tech skills to fi x anything with our expert advice in How-To Central.
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WELCOME TO OUR UPGRADEWe spent the better part of the past year designing and testing the newest version of PopularMechanics.com. The goals: straightforward navi-gation to get you to the stories you want to read; more content (from news feeds to features to podcasts) right on the home page; and lots of room to grow. From daily news to essential how-to’s, you’ll fi nd it all at popularmechanics.com.
F I N D YO U R WAY H O N E S K I L L S
PM Party! Winners of the POPULAR MECHANICS 2006 Breakthrough Awards (see November issue), sponsored by Newegg.com, gathered in the recently opened Hearst Tower.1. (From left ) Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan tests a poverty-fi ghting peanut sheller with Roey Rosenblith of the Full Belly Project. 2. LEGO’s Mindstorms NXT robot 3. Black & Decker’s Alligator Lopper 4. Netgear developer Frank Refol and Ed Hsu, Newegg.com marketing director 5. MIT professors Paula Hammond and Angela Belcher 6. Tech-minded Hearst Magazines leaders: executive vice president Michael Clinton and president Cathleen Black 7. Welcome to the Hearst Tower. 8. PM publisher Bill Congdon, Samsung emerging tech director Danesh Moorjani and senior marketing manager Matt Durgin, with PM editor-in-chief Jim Meigs
Behind the BreakthroughsOCT. 4, HEARST TOWER, NYC
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THE WORLD’S MOST VERSATILE ILLUMINATION TOOLSelectable-Output / Multi-Spectrum Kroma™
www.surefire.com
Streaking across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the JCB Dieselmax didn’t break the diesel land speed record of 236 mph—it destroyed it. The car hit 328 mph on its fi rst run, and 350 mph on its second. “The goal was to set history in terms of diesel engines,” says Tim Leverton, director of the Dieselmax project. “But it also gave us a lot of promotional opportunities.” UK-based JCB was showcasing the car’s two JCB444-LSR engines, modifi ed versions of the model that’s the core of the company’s heavy machinery. One engine drove the front tires, and the other drove the rear. The engines’ combined 7600 rpm sounds sluggish compared to a 19,000-rpm gas-burning Formula One race car, but the Dieselmax went nearly twice as fast as an F-1, with half the fuel consumption.
Diesel RefinedBy Emily Masamitsu
DIESEL POWER The 30-ft .-long, 5952-pound car is powered by two 750-hp JCB444-LSR die-sel engines, each providing up to 1105 lb.-ft . of torque.
CRACK DRIVER Andy Green, the vet-eran driver behind the wheel, is also the current overall land speed record holder, having cracked the sound barrier in 1997.
PURPOSE-BUILT The highly special-ized Dieselmax has a tiny 2.38-gal. fuel tank, positioned directly behind the lightweight carbon-fiber cockpit.
FLYING MILE: The record-
breaking die-sel car went 350 mph for a mile, aft er
being pushed from behind
at 30 mph to hit First gear.
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NEWS BRIEFS BY ALEX HUTCHINSON
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BUILT FOR BRAVERYThe Battlefi eld Extraction-Assist and
Retrieval robot—BEAR for short—would be hilarious if its job weren’t so serious.
A prototype has managed to pick up a human-weighted dummy and hold it for over 3 hours while rolling on treads. The robot’s legs are still being developed, but
Maryland-based Vecna Technologies says the fi nal version of BEAR will be able to walk, as in the illustration above. As its
name suggests, the U.S. Army-funded robot is intended to navigate to wounded troops and carry them to safety; it would
most likely be controlled by a human operator. Vecna also hopes to develop
variants, such as TransferBot, which would help bedridden hospital patients
into wheelchairs and bathrooms.
FISH RESPONDERS
In the battle to keep public water supplies safe from terrorist attacks,
utilities in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.,
are putting fi sh on the front line. A biomonitoring
system developed by the U.S. Army Center
for Environmental Health Research checks for toxins by running water through special
tanks (below) that house eight live
bluegills, a common freshwater fi sh. If six
or more of the fi sh start breathing or
moving abnormally, an alarm is sounded.
FREE-FLOWING OILPhysicists at Temple University have found a way to make sludgelike crude oil fl ow more quickly through pipelines. Applying an electric or magnetic fi eld makes impurities clump together, allowing the oil to fl ow more easily for several hours—at which point it needs another hit.
FLAPPY DAYA team from the University of Toronto has achieved manned fl ight in a wing-fl apping ornithopter. The power needed to fl ap a human into the sky is diffi cult to control—the fl ight covered about 365 yards in 14 seconds before one of the wings failed.
MAN-EATING EAGLESAncient birds of prey probably feasted on our early human ancestors, according to researchers at Ohio State University. While examining monkey remains found near eagles’ nests on Africa’s Ivory Coast, anthropologists discovered skulls punctured by eagle talons (above). The punctures are similar to a hole found in the 2.5 million-year-old skull of an apelike child found in South Africa in 1924, suggesting that our ancestors had enemies in high places.
TRACKING TRAFFICA new service called Traffi c Aid will steer subscribers away from traffi c-clogged routes. The system creates a moving map using the tracking signals that are periodically sent from drivers’ cellphones to relay towers, and will roll out in Florida and Georgia in 2007.
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Home-assembly kit (30 to 40 hours) available now.
$30,000
155 lb.
Up to 200 lb.—bigger engines are being developed to carry bigger pilots.
Four independent 10-hp, two-stroke engines—and it can fly safely on three if one conks out.
Neither one is quite George Jetson’s jet pack, but these two new ultralight heli-copters are about as bare-bones as a fl ying machine can get: an engine to spin two sets of rotor blades, and a chair hanging under-neath. The key to the AirScooter II and the Gen H-4 is mounting two blades on the same axis and rotating them in opposite directions to counteract each other’s torque, eliminating the need for a tail rotor.
Both designs meet the FAA’s rules for ultralight aircraft: a top speed of just over 60 mph and a 5-gal. gas tank, for about an
hour of fl ying. That means you don’t need a license to own or fl y one. “Initially, our plan was to keep the thing really low to the ground,” says AirScooter president Dwaine Barnes. But you can’t give a man a helicop-ter and tell him not to soar, so both models can be equipped with a ballistic parachute.
If we have to pick just one, the AirScooter seems like the safer bet. Its big engine and pneumatic fl oats make it look rugged and downright stable compared to the Gen H-4’s spindly aluminum piping. Now, if we can just scrape together $50,000.
Production starting in 2007.
Around $50,000
Under 254 lb.
About 350 lb.
One 65-hp, four-stroke engine.
GEN H-4AIRSCOOTER II
AVAILABILITY
PRICE
WEIGHT
LOAD
ENGINES
FLYING SOLOBY ALEX HUTCHINSON
As two personal heli-
copters duel for aerial
supremacy, flying by the
seat of your pants is tak-ing on new
meaning.
BY THOMAS D. JONES, PLANETARY SCI-ENTIST AND FORMER SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT
To cut costs, NASA plans to outsource its shipping jobs.
RESIDENT ASTRONAUT
It’s not a glamorous mission—hauling water, food, spare parts and clean clothes to the International Space Station (ISS)—but somebody has to do it. The shuttle was the truck of choice when my crew delivered the Destiny Laboratory to the ISS in 2001. But now, with the shuttle orbiters heading for retirement by 2010, NASA wants commercial suppliers to take on the orbital shipping job, to lower costs and spur industrywide innovation.
Since ISS crews moved in six years ago, the space shuttle and Russia’s unmanned Progress freighters have made deliveries. But the Columbia accident grounded the shuttle fl eet for over two years, and the Progress’s small capacity forced even two-man ISS crews into sometimes spartan operations. Last year, spacesuits aboard the ISS were out of commission for
months waiting for spare parts.The two companies getting
NASA seed money (over $100 million each) for cargo craft are SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler. SpaceX plans to loft its Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket, but the smaller Falcon 1 caught fi re and plunged into the Pacifi c last spring. With $100 million invested, the company hopes a second launch this winter will pave the way for the Falcon 9.
Rocketplane Kistler’s craft, a reusable K-1 two-stage rocket, has yet to reach a launchpad. But John Herrington, director of fl ight operations and a former shuttle astronaut, says the K-1 will not only reach the ISS, but return cargo safely to Earth.
Both fi rms plan to fl y three test fl ights by 2010. The end of the shuttle era is upon us. But future crews won’t care who delivers their cargo. They’ll just want it to show up on time.
PM
TEC HWATC H
The reusable K-1 rocket, one of two designs that could ship cargo to the space station.
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Forget lasers, phasers and other beam weapons—radiofrequency devices are here, and they’re set to “sting.”
TEC HWATC H
PM
FORECASTING PAIN
BY DAVID HAMBLING
No longer a gleam in the Pen-tagon’s eye, ray guns—or radio-frequency (RF) weapons, to be exact—offi cially have arrived. As troops are increasingly forced to serve as an ad hoc police force, nonlethal weapons have become a priority for the military. The Department of Defense is currently testing the Active Denial System (ADS), which fi res pain-inducing beams of 95-GHz radio waves, for deployment on ground vehicles. (By comparison, microwave ovens operate at around 2.5 GHz.)
The ADS heats a target’s skin, producing a sensation similar to having a light bulb pressed against fl esh. This surface heating doesn’t actually burn the target, but is pain-ful enough to force a retreat.
While the military continues to investigate the safety of RF-based weapons, defense con-tractor Raytheon has released Silent Guard-ian, a stripped-down version of the ADS, marketed to law en-forcement and security providers as well as to the military. Using a joy-
stick and a targeting screen, opera-tors can induce pain from over 250 yards away, as opposed to more than 500 yards with the ADS. Unlike its longer-ranged counterpart, Silent Guardian is available now.
As futuristic—and frightening—as the ADS “pain ray” sounds, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding an even more ambitious use of RF energy. Researchers at the University of Nevada are investigating the fea-sibility of a method that would immobilize targets without caus-ing pain. Rather than heating the subject’s skin, this approach would use microwaves at 0.75 to 6 GHz to affect skeletal muscle contrac-tions, possibly by blocking the release of neuro transmitters that carry signals to those muscles.
But the Nevada team is quick to point out that the technology also could lead to new drug- and scalpel-free medical tools. “We envision that RF-based strategies could be developed that would be noninvasive,” says one researcher, “and could help individuals with neurological disorders, neuromus-cular disorders and chronic pain.”
This project is still in the begin-ning stages, and has yet to attempt to stun even a mouse. The ADS, on the other hand, is already a painful reality.
Silent Guardian uses radio waves to heat up fl esh-
and-blood targets, but only enough
to cause pain. The
45 x 45-in. beam-fi ring antenna can rotate 360
degrees. The entire 5-ton system can be mounted on a ground vehicle or on
a ship.
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The Active Denial System
is being adapted for possible use as a battle-
fi eld weapon (top) and as a security meas-
ure (above) for nuclear facilities.
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SCREEN TESTELECTRONIC PAPER has to live up to a lot of hype. Billed as the end
of the printed page as we know it, the technology uses an electric charge to make tiny particles of dye rise to the surface of a screen,
forming crisp letters or images. Keeping the dye in place doesn’t require any power. The lack of a backlite also saves energy, and
eliminates the eyestrain caused by reading computer screens. In other words, e-paper makes digital books, magazines and newspapers feasible. But will consumers pay $350 for Sony’s Reader PRS-500 or around $800 for iRex’s iLiad, just to read a Stephen King novel on a screen? The most promising e-paper device isn’t a wannabe iPod for readers, but a general aviation tool called eFlyBook. Produced by Maryland-based ARINC, it’s an iLiad that’s loaded with maps and procedural manuals,
allowing pilots to ditch paper versions that clutter the cockpit and add weight to the plane. ARINC is also pitching versions of
the device to medical facilities and the Air Force.
BY ERIK SOFGE
The eFlyBook’s stylus lets pilots write directly onto stored images, such as maps and forms. Because it has no backlite, it runs for up to 10 hours per charge.
PM
TEC HWATC H
SEVENTY-NINE years ago this month, PM featured amateur mechanic Arthur Capron’s plans for an elec-tric fl oor scrubber. Making this homemade, plug-in scrubber would have been no small feat—Capron’s plans required two inter-locking brushes, a small motor, a shaft of “cold-rolled steel,” a rubber splash guard and a casing made from a cast-iron kitchen saucepan.
In case the purpose of this creation was in ques-tion, PM explained, “Where it is necessary to do quite
TIME MACHINE
1927Built to the specifi ca-
tions in our December 1927 issue,
this electric fl oor scrubber (above) could
hold a quart of “hot soap-suds.” Black & Decker’s PowerMop
(right) holds 25 ounces of
cleaning fl uid.
a bit of scrubbing, the electric outfi t shown in the drawing will be found to be a great convenience and labor saver.”
Today, your dreams of electric fl oor scrubbing are more easily realized. Black & Decker’s new PowerMop combines a Swiff er-style mop with a rotating power scrubber.
The PowerMop’s bristled head is intended for spot scrubbing, and so covers less surface area than Capron’s design. Regardless, buying a mop that scrubs for you could brand you as lazy in any era. At least if you built your own, by today’s standards you’d be con-sidered a rocket scientist. — CAROLYN WILSEY
Kawasaki Vulcan 1600 Mean Streak $11,000 /// Chances are, you won’t be fi nding the Mean Streak wrapped, ribboned and waiting for you under the tree this year. But that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve this diabolically styled liquid-cooled power cruiser. It’s built for long hauls, with a fuel-injected 1552cc V-twin engine that’s rubber-mounted to reduce vibration. Kawasaki also loaded the Mean Streak with high-revving sportbike components, such as inverted forks for precision steer-ing and four-piston calipers up front for better braking feedback. kawasaki.com
Winter is a harsh mistress, unleashing cold snaps, ice storms—and a happy, brief blizzard of holiday products. Here’s our guide to the best gear to give, get or simply
pine for this year, in categories ranging from high-tech foul-weather clothing to a high-def home theater setup for chilling out inside.
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Boker Whittler’s Penknife (4) $70 /// This well-crafted folding penknife could make a whittler out of anyone, thanks to a gently curving handle designed for precise control, despite its small size (35⁄8 in. long). It has four blades, from a general-use pen blade to a whittler’s coping blade. bokerusa.com
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Milwaukee Rotating-Handle Orbital Super Sawzall $210 /// It’s hard to go back to a regular recip-rocating saw aft er trying this 13-amp model. The rotating handle lets you make diagonal, sideways or multi-position cuts without torquing your wrist. milwaukeetool.com
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Hitachi DB3DL 3.6-Volt Cordless Screwdriver $79 /// The convertible handle (for a straight
or pistol grip) is use-ful, but features such as 21 clutch settings for drilling and a spin-dle lock for manual tightening make this tool indispensable. hitachipowertools.com
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GearWrench XL X-Beam 12-piece set $169 /// The ratcheting box end of these innovative wrenches is forged at a 90-degree angle to the open end, providing a more secure grip than with a fl at wrench. gearwrench.com
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Samsung Hi-Def Conversion DVD Player (DVD-HD960) $180 /// Buying an HDTV doesn’t mean you’re draft ed into the hi-def disc format war. Instead of spending $500 to $1000 on a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player and replacing your movie collection, you can get this player that upconverts the resolution of standard DVDs to as much as 1080p. samsung.com
Sennheiser RS 130 Wireless Headphones$170 /// Whether it’s too late at night for scenes with windows-rattling explosions or you just aren’t ready to deal with satellite speaker placement, these wireless headphones offer a surpris-ingly convincing surround-sound fi x. The RF-transmitter base doubles as a charging stand, providing up to 22 hours of juice. And if you’re listening to music, or you’re sick of jumping at noises coming from over your shoulder, you can switch off the surround-sound effect. www.sennheiserusa.com
Sony Grand WEGA 55-in. SXRD Rear Projection
1080p HDTV $3000 /// Every approach to HD has drawbacks, from plasma’s tendency to burn images into the screen to LCD’s
fl ickering refresh rates. The best HDTV we’ve seen this year delivers the highest resolution
available—1080p—as well as vivid colors and crisp detail. The
catch? Its bulky, humpbacked profi le prevents wall-hanging. But at this low price (by HDTV standards), we’ll splurge for a
TV stand. sonystyle.com
Klipsch Quintet III Microsystem $500 /// When companies like Klipsch trumpet the increased output and upgraded tweeters in their speakers, the words all sound the same. But aft er listening to the blistering surround sound this compact 5.1 system puts out, we hear the diff erence. For more bass, you can add a Sub-10 subwoofer for $400. klipsch.com
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Atlas BC24 $199 /// Snowshoes range from slim, aerobic models to tools such as the BC24, which is primed for deep-snow travel. Nota-ble are the BC24’s stiff chassis, exceptional ice-gripping chops, and the way it makes balancing easier on the steeps. atlassnowshoe.com
Ground Radius $400 /// In outerwear, rain-proof is easy—breath-ability is the tough part. Nothing beats eVent, the gold-standard lami-nate used in the Radius jacket. And this shell has just-right details, such as a helmet-friendly hood and zip-off powder skirt. groundwear.com
Dakine Apollo $120 /// These gloves marry luxurious, downlike Primaloft insulation to soft , waterproof leather that’s been chemically processed to nearly comic-book-mutant levels. The other materi-als in this tough-love glove are similarly rugged. dakine.com
Suunto t3 $150 /// The t3 hits a training sweet spot: It’s more than a simple running watch, less than a bulky, wrist-top computer. It logs training intensity, heart rate and other data; and can track miles with add-on “pods” such as a GPS unit ($130) shown here. suunto.com
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SmartWool Adrenaline (5) $17 to $19 /// The sheep have been busy. Merino wool feels great, works great, and doesn’t smell too bad after repeated freeze/sweat cycles. Two weights of socks are shown; both incorporate nylon for more fl ex, and performance tweaks at arch, ankle and instep. smartwool.com
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GameZnFlix $9 to $21 per month /// We’re going out on a bit
of a limb by including this Netfl ix-style service, which lets you rent up to six games or movies at a time, because
we think the currently skimpy selec-tion will grow. The plan is to have
something for every media taste: new games for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii,
as well as movies on Blu-ray, HD DVD, regular DVD and even the abandoned
UMD format. gameznfl ix.com
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Super Mario Galaxy $50 /// Nearly every game we’ve tried on Nintendo’s Wii was plagued with a lack of precision in the much-hyped motion-sensing controls. But this title was a diamond in the rough, an intergalactic leg of Mario’s ongoing quest to, well, jump on things. Gimmicks like wiggling the controller for a spin attack were fun, but didn’t get in the way of the simple game play, the psychedelic visuals or the sheer thrill of leaping through a cartoon cosmos. wii.nintendo.com
Wireless Racing Wheel (1) $150 HD DVD Player (2) $200 /// With a year to gain momentum, the Xbox 360 is entering the holidays with too many promising games for us to recommend just one. But when it comes to the console’s peripherals, there are some clear standouts. The solidly built wireless racing wheel, which can rumble in your lap or mount to a table, comes with gas and brake pedals, plus one of our favorite games, Project Gotham Racing 3. The HD DVD player is an external addition to the Xbox 360. At $200, it’s a much cheaper alternative to Toshiba’s $500 HD DVD player, at least for anyone who already owns the console. xbox.com
Resistance: Fall of Man TBA /// At press time, news was grim for the PlayStation 3, still priced at $500 to $600 and facing pro-jected shortages at launch. We have good news, though—this fi rst-person shooter, which merges World War II environments with an alien invasion story line, was one of the most impressive games we’ve ever played. Huge battles and adaptive enemies reminded us why the PS3 is worth all the trouble. us.playstation.com
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Fujifi lm FinePix F30 $349 /// This 6.3-megapixel digicam was born to shoot in the dark, with one of the most light-sensitive sensors for its size (up to ISO 3200) and a fl ash that gauges the fore-ground and background, to avoid washing out subjects. fujifi lmusa.com
Canon DC40 $900 /// Whether it’s the 10x zoom lens or the 4.3-megapixel CCD sensor, this DVD camcorder has the crisp image quality we’ve come to expect from Canon. It shoots about 60 minutes per disc in standard (4:3) and widescreen (16:9) formats. canonusa.com
Olympus FE-190 $200 /// The FE-190’s best feature is that it doesn’t look, feel or shoot like a $200 cam-era. The 6-megapixel ultracompact takes great photos, is 0.7 in. thick, and has a large 2.5-in. LCD screen and image stabilization. olympusamerica.com
Pentax K100D With 18-55mm Lens $700 /// Digital SLRs aren’t just getting cheaper, they’re getting better. This model has all the bases covered: a large 6.1-megapixel sensor and compatibility with a range of lenses, as well as sensor-based shake reduction. pentaxslr.com
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Joby Gorillapod (5) $25 /// The fl exible Gorillapod can act as a standard stiff-legged mini tripod, or it can wrap its tentacles around branches and guard-rails for on-the-fl y image stabilization. It’s stronger than it looks, and the rub-berized ring and foot grips prevent slipping in precarious positions. joby.com
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For more product news, reviews and Wish List picks we couldn’t fi t here, go to: popularmechanics.com/upgrade.
ON THE
WEB
Emerilware Fryer by T-fal $150 /// We didn’t pick this fryer because Emeril Lagasse’s name is on it. With safety-con-scious features such as a splatter-free viewing win-dow, cool-touch handles for external basket control and automatic oil drainage, it makes frying up to 2.65 pounds of high-cholesterol food so easy it’s scary. emerilappliances.com
Dyson Root 6 $150 /// If it looks like a vacuum from the year 3000, you can bet on two things: It’s a Dyson, and it puts other bagless vacs to shame. The company’s fi rst handheld model uses the same fi ltration system as its upright kin, keeping suc-tion strong without kicking out fi ne dust and odors. dyson.com
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First Alert Tundra Fire Suppressant $20 /// Finding this backup fi re extinguisher in your stocking might leave you a little cold, but you’ll thank us someday. The 9-in.-tall, 21-ounce bottle can live in a kitchen cabi-net or on a counter. And in the event of a grease or electrical fi re, the fool-proof spray-nozzle won’t leave you fumbling with levers and locking pins. fi rstalert.com
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HP Photosmart A716 Compact Photo Printer $250 /// With 4GB of mem-ory, a 2.5-in. display, a carrying handle and an optional $70 battery, this photo printer takes the PC out of the equa-tion. It reads nearly every kind of memory card, and creates border-less prints at up to 5 x 7 in. hp.com
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Wild West Gun Slinger Target Shooting Set $25 /// In a perfect world, every toy would be as smart, fun and cheap as this shooting set. It launches plastic cans and break-away bottles when you hit one of four sensors with an infrared beam. jasmantoys.com
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Sony Vaio VGC-LS1 All-in-One Desktop PC $2100 /// Taking a page out of Apple’s book, Sony crammed an entire PC into a monitor. But this monitor is ac tually a stunning 19-in. widescreen LCD TV, and the included Windows Media Center soft ware and TV tuner let you watch and record live television. sonystyle.com
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Energizer Energi to Go (4) $20 /// Who better to make an AA-powered cell-phone charger than a battery maker? Energizer’s reusable charger is compatible with 80 percent of cellphone brands—including BlackBerry—and will fully charge most phones, or provide 3 to 9 hours of talk time per pair of AA batteries. energitogo.com
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Technology is opening all sorts of places to human exploration, including areas of the sea previously too remote to spend much time lingering in. I had occa-sion to refl ect on whether this is a good or a bad thing when I went scuba diving with a rebreather in the Caribbean last summer. Rebreather technology, though new to me, has been gaining popularity among techni-cally inclined recreational divers—enabling them to dive deeper and for longer periods than with comparably sized, traditional open-circuit scuba systems.
When you inhale using a traditional sys-tem, compressed air or nitrox (a blended gas containing more oxygen and less nitrogen than ordinary air) is drawn from a tank to
Seeking New Depths
The author monitors his rebreather’s oxygen displays; the system has three for redundancy.
a regulator to your lungs. When you exhale, the air—now containing less oxygen plus carbon dioxide—bub-bles out into the water.
Though robust, reliable and inexpensive, open-circuit systems have signif-icant drawbacks. For one, the waste of all that per-fectly good oxygen. Inhaled air is about 21 percent oxygen; when you exhale, the oxygen level is still about 15 to 16 percent. In addition, those noisy bub-bles can scare fish. (They also make military divers conspicuous when they’d rather not be noticed.)
Rebreathers, in con-trast, employ a closed or semiclosed circuit; instead of releasing exhaled air into the water, the system forces it through a chemi-cal scrubber that removes the carbon dioxide. The scrubbed air is then supple-mented with oxygen from a small tank, bringing it up to
the 21 percent concentration that is easily breathable. Because gas gets compressed as a diver descends, diluent (often ordinary air or trimix, a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and helium) from another tank maintains the gas volume in the rebreather circuit.
While the concept isn’t entirely new—primitive rebreathers have been around for more than a century—modern technology has made the system much safer and more capable. (Nevertheless, the label on the unit I used read, “DANGER: This device is capa-ble of killing you without warning!”) The development of sensors that provide reli-able and accurate measures of oxygen was a major breakthrough. Though rebreath-ers are a long way from becoming as widely
High-tech test dive: Will the spread of bubble-free rebreather systems change diving forever?
THINKING AHEAD
PM
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used as open-circuit scuba gear, they have gone from being the exclusive equipment of military and scientifi c divers to a staple of sophisticated, committed recreational divers.
Wanting to see for myself how the technology has progressed, I contacted Divetech on Grand Cay-man Island and asked to be taken on a familiarization dive using the KISS Sport rebreather system.
Several divers told me that most people who go from open-circuit scuba systems to rebreathers fi nd it to be a shock—and the more skilled the diver, the harder the transition. This was certainly true for me. I felt very awkward at fi rst, as many tech-niques used by experienced open-circuit divers—such as controlling buoyancy by breathing deeper or shallower, depending on whether you want to go up or down—didn’t work with a rebreather. I did get bet-ter, though, as the dive progressed.
Frequent diving with a rebreath-er demands a considerable invest-ment in time and energy—one that
I’m not sure I’m ready for, at least right now. Among other things, rebreath-ers require more mainte-nance than regular scuba gear because the technol-ogy is more complex. The KISS system is a respect-able unit that’s been out for a couple of years. It works fine, but looks to me like it was put to-gether as a shop project. The Inspiration system, used by Nat Robb, my instructor at Divetech, is much more sophisticated. It is fully computerized, and its innards look more like a fi ghter jet’s than a vacuum cleaner’s. It costs $10,000 (compared to $5200 for KISS). But over the coming years, the grow-ing popularity of rebreather div-ing will no doubt result in falling prices, improved capabilities and, most important, better safety.
My experience with the rebreath-er got me thinking about the many technological improvements that
have made scuba diving safer and more accessible than in the Sea Hunt era. Because of better buoyancy-control devices, regula-tors, spare-air devices and, especially, dive computers that track nitrogen uptake and bottom time to help divers avoid the bends, more divers are taking up the sport than ever before.
Some people assume that’s a bad thing. All those new people, they fi gure, will ruin it for everyone. But I’m not so sure. Yes, some sites are overdived, but the big picture is probably more posi-tive. In his recent book, Sprawl,historian Robert Bruegmann notes that interest in preserving the envi-ronment took off at about the same time that people began flooding into the suburbs—and getting a little closer to nature.
And ocean explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau, in his foreword to Cathy Church’s book, My Underwater
Photo Journey, wrote that if more people were exposed to the beauty and complex-ity of the undersea world, they’d be much less likely to pollute and destroy it. People who have seen a coral reef up close tend to care more about reefs than people who haven’t.
The instinct of many people who spend time in nature is to wall it off from the great unwashed masses. But I wonder if we would be better off encour-aging people to appreciate it. Underwater, at least, advances in technology are doing just that. PM
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Most people who go from open-circuit systems to rebreathers fi nd it to be a shock—and the more skilled the diver, the harder the transition. This was certainly true for me.
Exhaled air passes through the scrub-ber twice to remove CO2. Oxygen is add-ed at a preset rate, but can be tweaked by the diver moni-toring the oxygen pressure sensor. Collapsible counter-lungs expand and contract to enable breathing. When the gas volume drops too low, a forceful inhale by the diver adds dilu-ent to compensate.
H O W I T W O R K S
THINKING AHEAD /// D I V E T E C H
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SCRUBBER STACK
COUNTERLUNG
EXHALE HOSE
O2 SENSOR & DISPLAYS
INHALEHOSE
MOUTHPIECE
OXYGEN
CARBONDIOXIDE
DILUENT
O2 MANUAL ADD VALVE
PM
BY GLENN DERENE AND ANTHONY VERDUCCI
Monster Media Center PCWe created a couch-controllable, HDTV-ready computer—and we’re giving it away.
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YOU’D HAVE TO BE CRAZY to build your own PC these days. Value and selection have never been greater—Dell and HP are sell-ing computers for under $300 that are more than adequate for Internet surfi ng and home offi ce use. Plus, constructing a computer from scratch can be a colossal headache. The PC-building hobbyist gets no customer support and no warranties in case things go wrong.
But in the technology department at Popular Mechanics, we are a little crazy. We get our kicks from diffi cult projects based on unproven technologies. A year and a half ago, we built and gave away our fi rst Monster PC, which was a powerhouse and, frankly, quite a looker. But at the end of the day, it was still a conventional computer. This year, we wanted to build a machine that was not
We wanted a home theater PC that is as satisfy-
ing from 10 ft . as it is up close. The
SILVERSTONE LC18B [$645] case
looks good from any distance.
It has the sleek shape of a home theater receiver,
and its built-in 7-in. touchscreen
gives it a func-tional face.
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only technologically sophisticated, but also broke new ground in terms of how it was used. Our plan was to create a living room PC based on the Microsoft Media Center OS. We wanted something that could play both high-defi nition movies and the latest games on a big-screen TV. We wanted the PC to be controllable from the couch via a wireless key-board, mouse and remote control, but we also wanted a touch-sensitive built-in screen. In short, our machine should be a perfect marriage of utili-tarian computer and high-powered home entertainment center.
There are a lot of Media Center PCs on the market, but none of them quite nails this balance. For help pro-curing the latest cutting-edge com-ponents for our project, we worked with online computer superstore Newegg.com. In addition to a huge selection of high-tech parts, Newegg shared its expertise about what components work well together.
For those who would dare try this at home, we learned a few lessons along the way. We looked into get-ting a boxed copy of the Windows Media Center operating system, but Microsoft doesn’t sell it directly to
BrainsCPU CHIP: INTEL CORE 2 EXTREME X6800PRICE: $950 /// Intel’s second-gen dual-core chip runs at 2.93 GHz, and has 4MB of level-
two cache and a 1066-MHz front-side bus. That means it can crunch data fast and move it faster, with-out wasting a lot of power or producing too much heat.
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS P5N32-SLI SE DELUXEPRICE: $230 /// The motherboard is the backbone of any PC. We picked this Asus board because it is one of the few out there that can support all the crazy com-
ponents we wanted and still fit inside our case.
MEMORY: OCZ GOLD PC2-8000PRICE: $370 /// We slapped in 2GB of DDR2 memory with gold-layered heatspreaders for increased airflow.
Media CardsGRAPHICS: BFG GEFORCE 7950 PRICE: $300 /// BFG bolted two nVidia SLi graphics processors together to create smooth, jaggy-free hi-def graphics and video.
SOUND: CREATIVE SOUNDBLASTER X-FI PLATINUMPRICE: $179 /// The world’s premier soundcard, the X-Fi Platinum is Dolby Digital EX-, THX- and DTS-ES-certified for superhigh-fidelity sound.
TV TUNER: HAUPPAUGE WINTV-PVR-500PRICE: $140 /// Designed specifi-cally for Microsoft ’s Media Center OS, this TV tuner card turns your PC into a digital video recorder.
StorageHARD DRIVES: TWO SEAGATE 750GB ONE WESTERN DIGITAL 74GBPRICE: $500/$150Two Seagate 750GB drives offer 350 DVDs’ worth of stor-age, and a Western Digital 10K speed drive delivers swift startups.
PowerPOWER SUPPLY: ZALMAN ZM460B-APSPRICE: $105Zalman’s whisper-quiet power supply won’t distract from the action on the screen.
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CoolingHEAT SINK/FANS: ZALMAN CNPS 9500PRICE: $48Heat kills PC components, so we installed five fans, including Zalman’s beau-tiful copper heat sink.
It’s What’s Inside That Counts
RANDOM DRAW SWEEPSTAKES:
No purchase necessary to enter or win. The Monster Media Center PC Sweep-stakes. Sponsored by Hearst Communi-cations, Inc. Limit (1) one entry per per-son. Enter online at popularmechanics.com/monstermediacenterpc begin-ning on November 15, 2006, 12:01 AM (ET) and ending on December 31, 2006, 11:59 PM (ET). Odds of winning will depend upon the total number of eligible entries received. Must be a resident of the 50 United States, Dis-trict of Columbia or Canada and have reached the age of majority in state or province of residence at time of entry. Void in Puerto Rico, Quebec Province and where prohibited by law. Sweep-stakes subject to complete offi cial rules available at popularmechanics.com/monstermediacenterpc.
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the public—you can only get it with a new machine. Luckily, we were able to get a copy of Media Cen-ter from resellers through Newegg. Unfortunately, these “non-OEM” copies, though perfectly legal, offer exactly zero customer support. (Microsoft says that Media Center functionality will be built into most versions of its upcoming Vista oper-ating system.) Also, we fell in love with the SilverStone LC18B case with a built-in touchscreen, but to get that screen to work, we had to install some Tablet PC functional-ity into the OS. And even though we generally advise against jump-ing headfi rst into new data storage formats, we just couldn’t resist shov-ing a Blu-ray drive inside (and we do mean shove—we had to remove the faceplate to get the drive to fi t in our
Optical Drives BLU-RAY DRIVE: SONY BWU100APRICE: $700 /// This is one of the trickier pieces of equipment we had to work with. Sony’s BWU100A Blu-ray drive is so new
that the soft ware to make it actually play hi-def Blu-ray movies wasn’t available when we installed it. (Don’t worry, the update will be ready before a winner is announced.) Even so, the Blu-ray disc’s potential as a storage format is formi-dable—a single disc holds 25GB to 50GB, enabling you to back up entire hard drives to a few discs.
DVD BURNER: NEC ND3550APRICE: $30 /// We had an extra drive bay, so we
decided to put in a 16X workhorse drive. In our experience, the NEC ND3550A is the most reliable dual-layer, dual-format DVD burner on the market.
PM Software SuitePRODUCTIVITY:>Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition [$110] and Office Professional Edition [$360]GAMES:>Call of Duty 2 [$38]>The Movies [$28]>F.E.A.R. [$35]>Civilization IV [$47]>Empire Earth II [$35]BLU-RAY MOVIES:>House of Flying Daggers [$22]>S.W.A.T. [$11]>XXX [$22]
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case). We also had to try out several IDE cable confi gurations before our PC could recognize the drive.
Why go through all this trouble? We did it for you, of course. We created a fi re-breathing, high-def Media Center PC with over 1.5TB of storage, a screamingly fast Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor, a TV tuner, Creative surround-sound card and speakers, a BFG dual-SLi card for stunning graphics, and a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. And we want you to win it. Starting Nov. 15, go to our Web site to enter, and remember—we offer absolutely no warranty! PM
For a chance to win the Monster Media Center PC, go to: popularmechanics
.com/monstermediacenterpc.
PeripheralsSPEAKERS: CREATIVE GIGAWORKS S750PRICE: $430 /// You’ll need to set up the Monster PC on your own TV, but you can throw away your existing audio system. That’s because we’re hooking the PC up with Creative’s THX-certified, 700-watt, 7.1-channel, surround-sound system.
KEYBOARD/MOUSE: LOGITECH DINOVO MEDIA DESKTOPPRICE: $156 /// This three-piece Bluetooth wireless combo key-board and laser mouse set lets you sit back and do your com-puting from the couch.
REMOTE CONTROL: LOGITECH HARMONY 550 UNIVERSAL REMOTEPRICE: $137 /// Complementing the diNovo Desktop is this universal remote designed to work with the Microsoft Media Center.P
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Once a unique automotive concept, the crossover has recently become so ubiquitous, it’s hard to tell one from another. Happily, you should
have no trouble spotting a Nitro. Based on a stretched and updated Jeep Liberty chassis, the Nitro is tuned for the street, though 4wd is
optional. The base model comes with a 210-hp V6, but we’d dig deeper and spring for the 260-hp R/T. You’ll get 20-in. wheels and a fi rm sus-pension. Plant your foot and the R/T pulls hard—followed by a snorty exhaust growl. Too bad the steering isn’t as quick as the suspension is
poised. Still, this is one very cool ride. — ben stewart
Contrary CrossoverTHE ALL-NEW DODGE NITRO HAS MACHISMO PRACTI-
CALLY OOZING FROM ITS BEEFY SHEETMETAL.
D O D G E N I T R O
Nitro’s tough look and squat stance distance it from other crossovers.
C R O S S O V E R S + S E D A N S + S P O R T S C A R SS P Y R E P O R T S + N E W S B R I E F S
PRICE RANGE:$19,885-$27,630
NEW C ARS
PM
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B M W M 6 C O N V E R T I B L E
Power to a FewI may as well have been driving for the checkered flag at Daytona instead of wheeling along the narrow, twisting two-lane roads of southern France. That’s how competently the BMW M6 Convertible moves fl at out. But unlike pure racers, this convertible also cruises like a well-mannered touring
vehicle. Key to the car’s M classifi ca-tion is its 500-hp V10. That’s attached to a seven-speed transmission that you can drive as a manual or auto-matic. Despite the extra dose of high performance, exterior styling and inside amenities vary little from the standard model. — jim dunne
The Start/Stop but-ton is the portal to an electronically limited top speed of 155 mph with blazing acceleration along the way.
C H R Y S L E R S E B R I N G
The Quiet ManA day spent in the mountains east of San Diego proved the new Sebring is a competent car over undulating back roads. But it also proved that the Sebring doesn’t want to be driven like a sport sedan. The car prefers comfort to speed and is equipped with an in-terior that’s more upscale than others
Sebring’s quiet interior offers
trick items such as heated and cooled
cupholders, and an MP3 sound sys-tem with 20GB of
storage built in.
>>> “IF THE CHRYSLER 300 IS THE COMPANY’S ROCK STAR, THE NEW SEBRING SEDAN IS ITS INVESTMENT BANKER.” – BEN STEWART
in its class. Three engines are available. We’d opt for one of the V6s over the base four-cylinder, which lacks the smoothness and scoot of the others. The biggest of the bunch, a 3.5-liter, brings the bonus of a six-speed automatic that improves fuel economy and performance. We’d bet that a convertible is coming next year. — b.s.
About $19,000 buys you an
elegant sedan that delivers over 30 mpg.
A mere $105,000
buys a soft -top version of
BMW’s hottest coupe.
>>> “IT IS A VOLVO AFTER ALL, SO THE S80 HAS BLIND-SPOT AND FRONTAL CRASH WARNING SYSTEMS.” – JIM DUNNE
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There’s nothing boring about the
S80’s interior. It is chic Scandinavian
modern—form aesthetically
follows function.
Our test drive in Sweden, along the Baltic Sea, showed that the new S80 is as quiet and comfortable as any lux-ury sedan. But while the ride is gen-tle and nicely controlled, the car is no cream puff. The Yamaha-built 311-hp V8 comes standard with awd for a good reason: The 325 lb.-ft. of torque
is too much for the front wheels alone. The less expensive 235-hp six-cylin-der, however, is a perfect fi t with the front-drive setup. Despite looking a lot like the previous model, the ’07 S80 is all new. The five-passenger sedan is bigger inside and out, and it sits on a redesigned chassis. — j.d.
V O L V O S 8 0
Power, Poise and Safety
With a strong V8, the S80 costs about $45,000. For roughly $10,000 less, you get a Six.
The 260-hp Six benefi ts from some tweaks that help improve the X3’s performance.
B M W X 3 3 . 0 s i
Subtly BetterThe folks at BMW would have you call their X3 3.0si a Sports Activity Vehicle to differentiate it from the endless sea of crossovers. Nice try. The reality is that this vehicle is every bit a crossover. And as my test drive through Bavaria proved, it’s quite a competent one, with awd, a 260-hp
six-cylinder and easily changeable stor-age space. The ’07 X3 gets nose and tail treatments as well as some mechanical improvements. Drivetrain modifi cations result in quicker shifts and better accel-eration. Minor changes inside include wood trim on the instrument panel. Prices start just under $40,000. — j.d.
Under-the-skin refi nements include changes to the six-speed automatic.
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We love unassuming sedans that can suck the headlights right out of a sports car. When that sedan happens to be a diesel, it’s even more delicious. Enter the $52,325 E320 Bluetec. With 400 lb.-ft. of torque—available from just off idle at 1600 rpm—this luxury sedan scoots to 60 mph in 6.6 seconds. And it leaves no smoke, no stench, no racket behind. As our drive through northern Arizona proved, one tank-ful of diesel packs a lot of miles and fun. The car meets current emissions regula-tions in all states but fi ve—California, New York, Ver-mont, Massachusetts and Maine. — don chaikin
M E R C E D E S - B E N Z E 3 2 0 B L U E T E C
Clean Getaway
This E-Class happens to have
PM Breakthrough Award-winning
technology.
From behind the wheel, you’d only know this car has a diesel engine by the way the fuel gauge never seems to move toward “E.”
NEW C ARS /// F I R S T L O O KPM
+ Fading Spark
SPY REPORTSnews
Seen in ParisBeen wanting a new Dodge sedan, but nothing as big as a Charger? Well, the Dodge boys showed their Avenger concept at the auto show in Paris back in October. While much was made of the car being ideal for international markets, it clearly is the Dodge version of the newly introduced Chrysler Sebring. That means front-wheel drive, V6 power and room for fi ve.
+ Smaller SUV Ford builds and sells the EcoSport in Mexico. It is smaller and more economical than the Escape. Ford says that the cost of building the EcoSport for the U.S. market is only a bit less than the cost of building an Escape. So, the decision is to leave it for the Mexican market—for now.
+ Front-Drive Minivan This new family hauler is slated for Chevrolet and GMC dealerships only, due late in ’07 as a 2008 model. To make room for this, its fi rst front-drive minivan, and the Acadia SUV, GMC will lose the Envoy. This prototype was caught testing at GM’s proving ground.
+ Revamped HHR Chevrolet is plan-ning a major facelift for its HHR. That means a new front end, with more angular, trucklike lines replacing the curved forms of the current model. Other differences are minor, and the sheetmetal aft of the cowl appears to be unchanged.
R I C K WAGO N E R, General Motors CEO, commenting on a possible al-liance with Renault-Nissan: “GM sells more than 9 million vehicles a year globally. It’s not logical or responsible to say we need a partner to recover.”
Someone says …
SPARK PLUG
HOMOGENEOUS CHARGE COMBUSTION
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+ How Sweet It Is The new “clean” diesels, such as Mercedes Bluetec, require ultralow-sulfur fuel, which is fi nally becoming available. This fuel has 15 parts per million (ppm) of sulfur. Minimizing sulfur is critical for the particulate fi lter at the heart of these diesels’ emissions control systems. However, many fi lling stations are still legally selling fuel labeled “low sulfur.” This contains up to 500 ppm and it’s perfectly acceptable for vehicles without a particulate fi lter. But, more than a few tankfuls will foul the fi lter. Caveat emptor.
[ D O D G E A V E N G E R ]
[ F O R D E C O S P O R T ]
[ G M C F R O N T - D R I V E M I N I V A N ]
[ C H E V R O L E T H H R ]
The Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine is a gas engine that emulates a diesel. The combustion process occurs almost simultaneously throughout the chamber—usually without the need for a spark. This compares with a fl ame starting at the spark plug or the injector of a diesel, and spreading. HCCI peak combustion temperatures stay low, which means little NOx is produced. A spark plug is still needed for starting and for full throttle. GM will show an HCCI next year.
Scientists at Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory fi rst spotted the Apophis asteroid in June 2004.
B Y D A V I D N O L A N DP H O T O G R A P H B Y B R Y A N A L L E N
FRIDAY THE 13TH OF APRIL 2029 could be a very unlucky day for planet Earth. At 4:36 am Greenwich Mean Time, a 25-million-ton, 820-ft.-wide asteroid called 99942 Apophis will slice across the orbit of the moon and barrel toward Earth at more than 28,000 mph. The huge pock-marked rock, two-thirds the size of Devils Tower in Wyoming, will pack the energy of 65,000 Hiroshima bombs—enough to wipe out a small country or kick up an 800-ft. tsunami.
On this day, however, Apophis is not expected to live up to its name-sake, the ancient Egyptian god of darkness and destruction. Scientists are 99.7 percent certain it will pass at a distance of 18,800 to 20,800 miles. In astronomical terms, 20,000 miles is a mere stone’s throw, shorter than a round-trip fl ight from New York to Melbourne, Australia, and well
MORE THAN 100,000 ASTEROIDS HURTLE PAST OUR PLANET. BUT ONLY ONE—THAT WE KNOW OF—MAY HIT US IN THE NEXT 30 YEARS.
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inside the orbits of Earth’s many geosynchronous commu-nications satellites. For a couple of hours after dusk, peo-ple in Europe, Africa and western Asia will see what looks like a medium-bright star creeping westward through the constellation of Cancer, making Apophis the fi rst asteroid in human history to be clearly visible to the naked eye. And then it will be gone, having vanished into the dark vastness of space. We will have dodged a cosmic bullet.
Maybe. Scientists calculate that if Apophis passes at a distance of exactly 18,893 miles, it will go through a “gravi-tational keyhole.” This small region in space—only about a half mile wide, or twice the diameter of the asteroid itself—is where Earth’s gravity would perturb Apophis in just the wrong way, causing it to enter an orbit seven-sixths as long as Earth’s. In other words, the planet will be squarely in the crosshairs for a potentially catastrophic asteroid impact precisely seven years later, on April 13, 2036.
Radar and optical tracking during Apophis’s fl y-by last summer put the odds of the asteroid passing through the keyhole at about 45,000-to-1. “People have a hard time rea-soning with low-probability/high-consequence risks,” says Michael DeKay of the Center for Risk Perception and Com-munication at Carnegie Mellon University. “Some people say, ‘Why bother, it’s not really going to happen.’ But others say that when the potential consequences are so serious, even a tiny risk is unacceptable.”
Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, now 71, knows a thing or two about objects fl ying through space, having been one himself during a spacewalk on the Apollo 9 mis-sion in 1969. Through the B612 Foundation, which he co-founded in 2001, Schweickart has been prodding NASA to do something about Apophis—and soon. “We need to act,” he says. “If we blow this, it’ll be criminal.”
If the dice do land the wrong way in 2029, Apophis would have to be defl ected by some 5000 miles to miss the Earth in 2036. Hollywood notwithstanding, that’s a feat far beyond any current human technology. The fanciful mission in the 1998 movie Armageddon—to drill a hole more than 800 ft. into an asteroid and detonate a nuclear bomb inside it—is about as technically feasible as time travel. In reality, after April 13, 2029, there would be little we could do but plot the precise impact point and start evacuating people.
According to projections, an Apophis impact would occur somewhere along a curving 30-mile-wide swath stretching across Russia, the Pacifi c Ocean, Central Ameri-ca and on into the Atlantic. Managua, Nicaragua; San José, Costa Rica; and Caracas, Venezuela, all would be in line for near-direct hits and complete destruction. The most likely target, though, is several thousand miles off the West Coast, where Apophis would create a 5-mile-wide, 9000-ft.-deep “crater” in the water. The collapse of that transient water crater would trigger tsunamis that would hammer California with an hour-long fusillade of 50-ft. waves.
BUT DON’T EVACUATE just yet. Although we can’t force Apophis to miss the Earth after 2029, we have the technology to nudge it slightly off course well before then, causing it to miss the keyhole in the fi rst place. According to NASA, a simple 1-ton “kinetic energy impactor” spacecraft thumping into Apophis at 5000 mph would do the trick. We already have a template for such a mission: NASA’s Deep Impact space probe—named after another 1998 cosmic-collision movie—slammed into the comet Tempel 1 in 2005 to gather data about the composition of its surface. Alternatively, an ion-drive-powered “gravity tractor” space-craft could hover above Apophis and use its own tiny grav-ity to gently pull the asteroid off course.
In 2005, Schweickart urged NASA administrator Michael Griffi n to start planning a mission to land a radio
HOW TO HEAD OFF ANASTEROID
Fortunately, Apophis needs to be nudged only about a mile to avoid a gravitational “keyhole” in space—a region that would send the asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Otherwise, it would have to be di-verted 5000 miles for it to miss our planet. This reduces the energy required to defl ect Apophis by a factor of about 10,000—mak-ing it theoretically possible using current technology. A number of methods have been proposed to do the job.
B U M P I T
A simple 1-ton “kinetic energy impactor” spacecraft that slams into Apophis at 5000 mph would theoretically change the velocity of the 50-million-ton asteroid by about 0.0001 mph. Over three years, that’s a drift of a couple of miles. UPSIDE: We already know how to do this; NASA’s Deep Impact probe hit a comet last summer. DOWNSIDE: An impact could break off new asteroids, and an off -center hit would impart spin instead of drift .
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transponder on Apophis. Tracking data from the device would almost certainly confi rm that the asteroid won’t hit the keyhole in 2029, allowing everyone on Earth to breathe a collective sigh of relief. But if it didn’t, there still would be time to design and launch a defl ection mission, a project that Schweickart estimates could take as long as 12 years. It would need to be completed by about 2026 to allow enough time for a spacecraft’s tiny nudge to take effect.
NASA, however, is taking a wait-and-see attitude. An analysis by Steven Chesley of the Near Earth Object pro-gram at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., concludes that we can safely sit tight until 2013. That’s when Apophis swings by Earth in prime position for tracking by the 1000-ft.-dia. radio telescope in Areci-bo, Puerto Rico. This data could also rule out a keyhole
T H R U S T I T
A nuclear- or solar-powered ion-drive rocket engine on Apophis’s surface could generate a few ounces of thrust over a period of weeks—enough to accelerate the asteroid by the necessary 0.0001 mph. UPSIDE: Ion-drive technology has already been proved on NASA’s 1998 Deep Space 1 mission. DOWNSIDE: The rocket would have to be “soft -landed” and fi rmly attached to unknown surface material. Because of the asteroid’s rotation, the rocket would require a complex control system, so that thrust would be applied in only one direction.
T U G I T
A 1-ton “gravity tractor” could use solar ion-drive or hydrazine thrusters to hover about 800 ft . above the asteroid’s surface. The spacecraft ’s gravity would slowly pull the asteroid off course, in eff ect transferring the engines’ thrust—a fraction of an ounce for about a month—to the asteroid. UPSIDE: The defl ection could be monitored or even modifi ed as it happens. A gravity tractor would also avoid the rotation problems of a surface thruster. DOWNSIDE: A hover position is unstable, and extra fuel must be burned to maintain it.
B L A S T I T
A thermonuclear bomb buried deep within Apophis could theoretically turn it into a swarm of smaller asteroids. UPSIDE: The visceral satisfaction of blasting Apophis to (we hope) smithereens. DOWNSIDE: Deep drilling in space is far beyond current technology. Plus, many smaller radioactive asteroids may be worse than one big one.
N U K E I T
A better place for a nuclear explosion would be just above the surface. Vaporizing surface material would propel Apophis in the other direction. UPSIDE: The rotation of the asteroid doesn’t matter. DOWNSIDE: Nuclear weapons in space are currently forbidden by international law, and stockpiling nukes for an asteroid mission might hinder nuclear disarmament eff orts.
I O N - D R I V E R O C K E T E N G I N E
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hit in 2029. But if it doesn’t, the transponder mission and, if necessary, a last-resort defl ection mission could still be launched in time, according to Chesley. “There’s no rush right now,” he says. “But if it’s still serious by 2014, we need to start designing real missions.”
IN 1998, CONGRESS mandated NASA to fi nd and track near-Earth asteroids at least 1 kilometer in diam eter. The resulting Spaceguard Survey has detected, at last count, about 75 percent of the 1100 estimated to be out there. (Although Apophis was nearly 2500 ft. short of the size criterion, it was found serendipitously during the search process.) Thankfully, none of the giants so far discovered is a threat to Earth. “But any one of those couple of hun-dred we haven’t found yet could be headed toward us right now,” says former astronaut Tom Jones, an asteroid-search consultant for NASA and a Popular Mechanics editorial adviser. The space agency plans to expand Spaceguard to include asteroids down to 140 meters in diameter—less than half the size of Apophis, but still big enough to do serious damage. It has already detected more than 4000 of these; NASA estimates approximately 100,000 exist.
Predicting asteroid orbits can be a messy business, as the history of tracking Apophis in its 323-day orbit demon-strates. Astronomers at Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Obser-vatory discovered the asteroid in June 2004. It was six
months before additional sightings—many made by ama-teurs using backyard telescopes—triggered alarm bells at JPL, home to the Sentry asteroid-impact monitoring sys-tem, a computer that predicts the orbits of near-Earth aster-oids based on astronomical observations. Sentry’s impact predictions then grew more ominous by the day. On Dec. 27, 2004, the odds of a 2029 impact reached 2.7 percent—a fi gure that stirred great excitement in the small world of asteroid chasers. Apophis vaulted to an unprecedented rating of 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a 10-step, color-coded index of asteroid and comet threat levels.
But the commotion was short-lived. When previously overlooked observations were fed into the computer, it spit out reassuring news: Apophis would not hit the Earth in 2029 after all, though it wouldn’t miss by much. Oh, and there was one other thing: that troublesome keyhole.
The small size of the gravitational keyhole—just 2000 ft. in diameter—is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it wouldn’t take much to nudge Apophis outside it. Calculations suggest that if we change Apophis’s velocity by a mere 0.0001 mph—about 31 in. per day—in three years its orbit would be defl ected by more than a mile, a piddling amount, but enough to miss the keyhole. That’s easily within the capabilities of a gravity tractor or kinetic en ergy impactor. On the other hand, with a target so minuscule, predicting precisely where Apophis will pass in relation to
the keyhole becomes, well, a hit-or-miss proposition. Current orbit projections for 2029 have a mar-gin of error—orbital
EARTH’S GREATEST HITS
About 100 tons of interplanetary material drift s to the Earth’s surface on a daily basis. Occasionally, an object hurtles with enough force to leave a mark. ASTEROIDS are large rocky or metal bodies that originate in the relatively warm inner solar system, in the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. COMETS are composed mostly of water ice and rock, and form in the cold outer solar system beyond the planets’ orbits. Scientists believe comets may have delivered the fi rst organic compounds to Earth billions of years ago. METEOROIDS are either pieces of asteroids that collided in space, or debris released by vaporizing comets. When meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere, they are called meteors, and when they reach its surface they are called meteorites. So far, the remnants of more than 160 impact craters have been identifi ed on Earth. Here are six of the most notable.
B A R R I N G E R C R A T E R Arizona
Diameter: 4100 ft .Cause: 150-ft .-wide meteorite Claim to fame: Also called “Meteor Crater” (above), this is the fi rst impact crater ever identifi ed on Earth, as well as the best preserved one. In the 1960s, astronauts went there to practice sampling techniques for the Apollo program.
50 THOUSAND
YEARS AGO
To learn how scientists are studying the Chesapeake Bay crater, visit:popularmechanics.com/impactcrater.ON THE
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IF APOPHIS IS INDEEDheaded for the gravitational key-hole, ground observations won’t be able to confi rm it until at least 2021. By that time, it may be too late to do anything about it. Considering what’s at stake—Chesley estimates that an Apo-phis-size asteroid impact would cost $400 billion in infrastructure damage alone—it seems prudent to start taking steps to deal with Apophis long before we know
whether those steps will eventually prove necessary. When do we start? Or, alternatively, at what point do we just cross our fi ngers and hope it misses? When the odds are 10-to-1 against it? A thousand-to-1? A million?
When NASA does discover a potentially threaten-ing asteroid like Apophis, it has no mandate to decide whether, when or how to take action. “We’re not in the mitigation business,” Chesley says. A workshop to discuss general asteroid-defense options last June was NASA’s fi rst offi cial baby step in that direction.
If NASA eventually does get the nod—and more impor-tant, the budget—from Congress, the obvious fi rst move would be a reconnaissance mission to Apophis. Schweick-art estimates that “even gold-plated at JPL,” a transponder-equipped gravity tractor could be launched for $250 mil-lion. Ironically, that’s almost precisely the cost of making the cosmic-collision movies Armageddon and Deep Impact. If Hollywood can pony up a quarter of a billion in the name of defending our planet, why can’t Congress? PM
scientists call it the error ellipse—of about 2000 miles. As data rolls in, the error ellipse will shrink consid-erably. But if the keyhole stubbornly stays within it, NASA may have to reduce the ellipse to a mile or less before it knows for sure whether Apophis will hit the bull’s-eye. Other wise, a mission risks inad-vertently nudging Apophis into the keyhole instead of away from it.
Can we predict Apophis’s orbit to the submile level far enough in advance to launch a defl ection mission? That level of fore-casting accuracy would require, in addition to a transpon-der, a vastly more complex orbital calculation model than the one used today. It would have to include calculations for such minute effects as solar radiation, relativity and the gravitational pulls of small nearby asteroids, none of which are fully accounted for in the current model.
And then there’s the wild card of asteroid orbital calcu-lations: the Yarkovsky Effect. This small but steady force occurs when an asteroid radiates more heat from one side than the other. As an asteroid rotates away from the sun, the heat that has accumulated on its surface is shed into space, giving it a slight push in the other direction. An asteroid called 6489 Golevka, twice the size of Apophis, has been pushed about 10 miles off course by this effect in the past 15 years. How Apophis will be infl uenced over the next 23 years is anybody’s guess. At the moment we have no clue about its spin direction or axis, or even its shape—all necessary parameters for estimating the effect.
V R E D E F O R T D O M E South Africa
Diameter: 236 miles Cause: 6-mile-wide meteorite Claim to fame: Though now the most eroded, Vredefort is the oldest and (at impact) the largest such crater on Earth. It was created by the world’s greatest known energy release, which may have altered the evolution of single-cell organisms.
C H E S A P E A K E B A Y C R A T E R Maryland
Diameter: 53 milesCause: 1- to 2-mile-wide meteoriteClaim to fame: Though long ago fi lled in by soil and water, this is the largest impact crater in the U.S. The event that caused it fractured bedrock more than a mile deep, creating a saltwater reservoir that still aff ects the region’s groundwater.
C H I C X U L U B B A S I N Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
Diameter: 110 milesCause: 6-mile-wide asteroidClaim to fame: This impact triggered enormous tsunamis and magnitude 10 earthquakes. Scientists believe it led to the extinction of dinosaurs and of 75 percent of all species, eff ectively ending the Cretaceous Period.
S U D B U R Y C R A T E R Ontario, Canada
Diameter: 155 miles Cause: 6-mile-wide cometClaim to fame: On the crater fl oor, heat from the impact and cometary water fed a system of hot springs possibly capable of supporting life. The rim of the crater also holds one of the world’s largest supplies of nickel and copper ore.
P O P I G A I C R A T E R Siberia, Russia
Diameter: 62 miles Cause: 3-mile-wide asteroid Claim to fame: The crater is fl ecked with industrial-grade diamonds created by shock pressure on graphite. A recent theory posits that this asteroid and the Chesapeake Bay meteorite originated from one asteroid.
35 MIL
LION
YEARS AGO
35.7 MIL
LION
YEARS AGO
65 MIL
LION
YEARS AGO
1.85 B
ILLIO
N
YEARS AGO
2 BIL
LION
YEARS AGO
Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart holds a model of the asteroid 1998 KY26.
BRAIN STEM AND MOTOR CORTEX
––––
PROCESSOR SPEED: 1 MHZ
––––
REACTION TIME:750 MILLISECONDS
Early in December 2005, Debbi Dixon was running late for dinner, so the medical lab technician pushed her 2004 Subaru Outback a little harder than normal down Swanee Bean Road. “It was already winter here in Thetford, Vt.,” she says, “and the road was icy. I looked down to raise the heat, and when I looked up again, there was a deer right in front of me.”
Her instincts took over, and she jerked the wheel left and then right to avoid the animal. Instead of fi shtailing
wildly on the slick road, the Subaru remained stable. “The car’s stability control system saved me before I ever real-ized what was happening.”
Dixon is just one benefi ciary of a quiet revolution in auto-motive technology. For decades, it was up to the driver’s skills and intuition to survey the environment and make the necessary adjustments to the steering, brakes and throttle to maintain control and avoid accidents. But gradually, over the past several years and without most of us noticing, that
HUMAN
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THE COMPUTING POWER OF THE FAMILY CAR HAS GROWN EXPONENTIALLY. THE QUESTION IS: DO WE LIKE IT?
B Y B E N S T E W A R T P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J P G R E E N W O O D
ELECTRONIC CONTROL UNIT
––––
PROCESSOR SPEED:2.5 GHZ
––––
REACTION TIME:10-20
MILLISECONDS
AUTO-MOBILE
control has been migrating from the driver to the driven.Antilock brake systems (ABS), which were introduced
in 1978 and became widespread in the ’80s, marked the first of the car-overrides-driver technologies. And ABS laid the foundation for all the systems that have followed. Essentially, ABS works by using sensors to keep a central electronic control unit apprised of the rotating speed of each wheel. The processor regulates hydraulic pressure to apply maximum braking force without causing a skid. Building on that data and hardware, engineers increased the capabilities of the computer controls to create trac-tion control in the ’90s and, soon after, electronic stability control (ESC). By applying pressure to individual brakes, ESC keeps the vehicle from either oversteering (fi shtail-ing) or understeering (plowing) and keeps the vehicle sta-ble. The next natural step in this progression was to equip cars with sensors and software that anticipate danger and react to it if the car decides that the driver is not doing enough to avoid an accident.
W R A P P E D I N S A F E T YThere is little question that the rise of computerized controls has made cars safer. A 2004 National Highway Traffi c Safety Administration (NHTSA) study showed that ESC reduced all single-vehicle crashes by 34 percent and single-vehicle SUV crashes by 59 percent. A 2006 Univer-sity of Michigan study found that ESC could reduce the odds of fatal rollovers in SUVs by 73 percent and in cars by 40 percent. “We’re projecting lifesaving benefi ts from
ESC that we haven’t seen the likes of since the safety belt,” says Rae Tyson, spokesman for the NHTSA.
As technology continues to develop, the next logical step is to design a vehicle that decides if an accident is immi-nent and automatically takes drastic action to prevent it. For those who drive only by necessity, a vehicle that nego-tiates traffi c and avoids accidents autonomously may be a blessing. But those who actively enjoy driving do not neces-sarily appreciate the forced oversight. “Autonomous vehi-cles hold no interest to me,” says PM contributing editor Jay Leno. “That’s called mass transportation. I enjoy being involved. When you drive a 1906 steam car and you have no brakes and it’s on fi re, it tends to keep you involved.”
Meanwhile, new-car buyers have less and less say in the matter as the technology creep continues. The trend took a major step forward recently as the NHTSA proposed a new federal safety standard that mandates electronic stability control on all light vehicles by the 2012 model year. Once ESC is universal, the NHTSA estimates that it will save 5000 to 10,000 lives every year. “I think the fact that the driver isn’t involved in deciding how to get out of trouble is what makes ESC so effective,” says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president of research for the Insur-ance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
Developing cars that provide the mandated safety sys-tems while not estranging enthusiast drivers is a delicate
balancing act for the world’s auto-makers. “We are not looking to devel-op vehicles that work like trains,” says Dr. Joerg Breuer, senior man-ager of active safety for Mercedes-Benz. “We’re developing safety sys-tems that cut in only when critical situations occur—when we are abso-
lutely certain that the driver needs some support.”
I N V I S I B L E H E L PAs ESC becomes more sophisticated, the driver may not even realize it’s working. Lexus’s Vehicle Dynamics Integrated Management (VDIM) system links stability control with steering and braking so the systems work—smoothly—in tandem. “With VDIM we’re increasing the transparency of the safety system so that it’s less crude and abrupt,” says Ben Mitchell, a Lexus product planner.
This type of systems integration allows manufacturers to build smarter cars. Electric steering systems get informa-tion from the ESC to help avoid an accident. And electronic dampers can minimize body roll for increased stability. “If I can remove some of the yaw error with the steering or suspension and not have to apply the ESC,” says Rich Marsh, director of vehicle control for General Motors, “the driver may never know we did anything.”
ESC is one part of an expanding active safety envelope.
As PM’s track testing proved, an unladen pick-up can quickly become uncontrol-lable in an emer-gency without the help of ESC.
D I A G R A M B Y M O N O W A S T E P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S . C O M | D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 91
IT BEGAN WITH ANTILOCK brake systems (ABS). Wheel-speed sensors tell an electronic control unit when one wheel is not decelerating at the same rate as the others under braking. The control unit then directs a sophisticated hydraulic pump to ease the pressure to the offending brake to prevent that wheel from skidding.
Additional software uses this same hardware for
Mounted at each brake, these sensors relay the speed of the individual
wheels to the computer. This is the critical piece of
data for antilock brakes and traction and stability
control systems.
The brains of the outfi t, the ECU is constantly correlating data from
various sensors. It can direct the engine to reduce power, the
electric power steering to change ratios, and the brake’s hydraulic pump to increase or decrease pressure.
As on some luxury sedans now, these read the traffi c
ahead. If the vehicle is drift ing out of the lane or the road is not clear, the ECU can alert the driver.
The ECU also can be used to demand more drastic
braking or steering action.
The ECU can regulate brake pressure to individual
wheels to maintain braking, traction and stability
control. The computer, available on a few cars
now, also can alter the ratio of the steering rack to help
avoid an accident. In the future, this can steer the car via an electric motor
guided by cameras.
traction control and stability control systems. In the case of the traction control system, the hydraulic pump applies braking force to a drivewheel that begins to spin under acceleration. The control unit often also has the ability to modulate engine power.
For stability control systems, which the federal government has mandated for the 2012 model year, the electronic control unit determines that the car is not going in the direction that the driver wants it to by comparing wheel speeds, steering-wheel position and vehicle yaw. And if programmed to, the computer can apply braking force and reduce power.
Add radar and video cameras to correlate traffic conditions with the driver’s intent, and the control unit will be able to determine if the driver is doing the job properly. If not, the computer will take over to stop or steer the vehicle out of trouble.
Our illustration shows a hypothetical vehicle that includes all of these currently available systems.
Keeps the electronic control unit apprised of steering inputs that the control unit compares
against information from the wheel-speed sensors.
This could help the ECU determine whether the
driver is trying to swerve or is losing focus and constantly correcting
the steering.
THECAR
ELECTRONIC CONTROL
UNIT
WHEEL-SPEED
SENSOR
STEERING POSITION SENSOR
RADAR &
CAMERAS
HYDRAULIC BRAKE PUMP
AND ELECTRIC STEERING
RACK
THAT CAN
DRIVE ITSELF
Cameras and radar add a whole new dimension. They can detect objects beyond the driver’s line of sight and, with the help of computers, gauge the speed of those objects more quickly and with more precision than any human. “If you get hit in a side impact, there’s about 6 in. between you and that incoming car’s hood ornament,” says Philip Headley, chief engineer for advanced technology at Con-tinental, a major developer and supplier of automotive safety controls. “If the system’s camera can see the car coming, there’s more time to deploy the side airbags.”
A car with a blind-spot warning system relies on cam-eras and/or radar to tell the driver whether the area out-side the mirrors’ fi eld of vision is clear. If a lane is occupied, the system alerts the driver. Similar technology is used in lane-departure warning systems, which essentially act like virtual rumble strips. And, according to IIHS, road and shoulder rumble strips reduce crashes by 25 percent.
Lexus will debut an intelligent cruise-control system in the spring of 2007 that uses two forward-facing cameras along with millimeter-wave radar to detect not only large metallic objects in the road (like cars), but also smaller, fleshy ones—like humans. A third camera observes the driver’s face; if the camera sees the operator is not looking ahead at danger, the system sounds an alert. A Mercedes-Benz radar-based cruise control system can slow a vehicle by applying up to 40 percent braking power to maintain a safe distance. It can stop the car if necessary. However, programming the software to ensure that the car knows what the best action is in a situation can get muddy. As Headley cautions, “The driver’s intent may be to do a quick lane change right before he hits the guy in front. If the system applies the brakes, it may be the wrong move.”
B U T W H AT D O E S I T A L L M E A N ?Cars will get smarter and safer. But is the technology-laden car smarter than the average driver? More impor-tant, is it a better driver?
As we found, the answer is maybe, and maybe not.To see how both expert and nonexpert drivers bene-
fi t from electronic stability control, Popular Mechanics tested three different types of vehicles, with and without stability control, on both wet and dry surfaces. Our results (see “Man (and Woman) vs. Machine” at right) show that in some circumstances computer control takes a back seat to the driver’s refl exes and skill.
“I found these stability control systems to be totally frus-trating, especially on the wet surface,” says PM’s senior auto editor and lead test driver, Mike Allen. “Even with my foot pinned to the floor, they wouldn’t deliver the power; the systems just beeped at me. And though I went through the course without drama, I was generally able to go faster—and felt more in control—with the ESC off.”
We love driving and we love honing our driving skills.
We also take pride in our ability to control a vehicle at its performance limits. Given the increasing numbers of high-performance cars at dealers and on the road, we know that we are not alone. But despite the legions of driving enthu-siasts, as we look around us on the streets and highways, we realize that we are still in the minority. For the vast sea of everyday drivers, the proliferation of automotive safety computer controls is unquestionably a good thing.
PM’s senior auto editor is our primary
test-track driver with over 20 years of vehicle testing
experience. Allen is also a veteran racer and an automotive
record holder.
MIKE ALLEN
PM’s West Coast offi ce assistant has been driving for 13
years. But Anaya had never before driven on a test track. This
was the fi rst time she had worn a crash
helmet.
DALIA ANAYA
92 D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 | P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S . C O M
WE WENT TO THE test track with front-drive and rear-drive sedans with stability control systems that could be disabled. We also included two similar pickups—one with ESC, one without. Then we put the vehicles through our usual slalom and emergency double-lane-change tests, with and without the safety
systems on. All tests were repeated on dry and wet surfaces by two “regular” drivers as well as by our usual profes-sional test driver.
We fully expected our expert to do better with-out the help of stability control. We didn’t think our novices would, how-ever. They fooled us.
In some circum-stances, all of our drivers
MAN (AND WOMAN)
VS.MACHINE
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ON THE WEB
Check our Web site for more automotive tests:popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars.
E M E R G E N C Y L A N E C H A N G E : D R Y
Tacoma with stability control 45.84 mph 44.40 mph 46.98 mph
Tacoma without stability control 49.30 mph 46.34 mph 46.98 mph
Altima with stability control 49.44 mph 51.54 mph 50.32 mph
Altima without stability control 53.31 mph 54.16 mph 52.98 mph
CTS-V with stability control 49.73 mph 51.23 mph 49.44 mph
CTS-V without stability control 49.01 mph 49.01 mph 50.47 mph
E M E R G E N C Y L A N E C H A N G E : W E T
Tacoma with stability control 48.45 mph 47.91 mph 46.85 mph
Tacoma without stability control 48.61 mph 47.51 mph 48.59 mph
Altima with stability control 48.59 mph 48.87 mph 53.65 mph
Altima without stability control 51.23 mph 49.58 mph 57.65 mph
No CTS-V data due to mechanical problems.
S L A L O M : D R Y
Tacoma with stability control 47.87 mph 40.26 mph 47.94 mph
Tacoma without stability control 48.52 mph 42.72 mph 48.07 mph
Altima with stability control 52.91 mph 44.37 mph 50.59 mph
Altima without stability control 52.91 mph 44.26 mph 49.81 mph
CTS-V with stability control 53.95 mph 41.15 mph 50.59 mph
CTS-V without stability control 53.79 mph 42.07 mph 50.59 mph
S L A L O M : W E T
Tacoma with stability control 48.33 mph 41.10 mph 47.62 mph
Tacoma without stability control 46.93 mph 39.86 mph 46.14 mph
Altima with stability control 51.61 mph 41.67 mph 49.47 mph
Altima without stability control 52.14 mph 44.64 mph 51.09 mph
CTS-V with stability control 48.0 mph 45.61 mph 48.92 mph
CTS-V without stability control 49.47 mph 44.37 mph 46.99 mph
Front-drive sedan with 270-hp/258-lb.-ft . V6 engine,
CVT.
But we’re also fi rm believers in personal choice, free-dom and responsibility. So, we strongly think that if stability control—and future autonomous driving tech-nologies—are going to be standard on every new car and truck, as mandated by the federal government, then the driver should be able to disable them when conditions allow and desires dictate.
As Nissan’s vice president of product planning, Larry
Dominique, says, “There are times when you wish you could just close your eyes and let your car just take you where you want to go. But there are also times when you just really want to enjoy the thrill that comes with driving a car. And I hope that never goes away.”
We couldn’t agree more. PM
negotiated the course more quickly without the stability control. In others, only our experienced test driver did better. But the test numbers by themselves do not tell the whole story. While Mike Allen wasn’t always the fast-est, he was always the smoothest without the benefit of ESC. With ESC off, our novices were often on the ragged edge of disaster—brushing pylons and sometimes almost spinning. In the real world those inci-dents could be serious accidents. As tester Dave Montanino pointed out after a run in the ESC-equipped pickup, “There’s no doubt that on a slick road without ESC, I would have spun out.”
Rear-drive and 4wd pickups with 236-hp/266-lb.-ft . V6
engine, fi ve-speed automatic.
Rear-drive sedan with 400-hp/395-lb.-ft . V8 engine,
six-speed manual.
M I K E A L L E N
A fi nancial planning consultant with
Fidelity Investments, Montanino has been driving since his teen years. A motorcyclist
and everyday SUV driver, he’d never
driven on a test track.
DAVE MONTANINO
>>
DA L I A A N AYA >>
DAV E M O N TA N I N O >>
NISSAN ALTIMA TOYOTA TACOMA CADILLAC CTS-V
T H E D I G I T A L
I C E A G EB Y B R A D R E A G A N
P H O T O G R A P H B Y T O M S C H I E R L I T Z
The problem is both immediately apparent and invisible to the aver-age citizen. It crops up when our hard drive crashes, or our new computer lacks a fl oppy disk drive, or our online e-mail service goes out of business and takes our correspondence with it. We consider these types of data loss scenarios as personal catastrophes. Writ large, they are symptomatic of a growing crisis. If the software and hardware we use to create and store
information are not inherently trustworthy over time, then everything we build using that information is at risk.
Large government and academic institutions began grappling with the problem of data loss years
ago, with little substantive progress to date. Experts in the field agree that
if a solution isn’t worked out soon, we could end up leaving behind
a blank spot in history. “Quite a bit of this period could con-ceivably be lost,” says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer sci-entist with the Rand Corp. who has studied digital preservation.
Throughout most of our past, preserving informa-
tion for posterity was mostly a matter of stashing photo-
graphs, letters and other docu-ments in a safe place. Personal
accounts from the Civil War can still be read today because people
took pains to save letters, but how many of the millions of e-mails sent home by U.S. service-
men and servicewomen from the front lines in Iraq will be accessible a century from now?
One irony of the Digital Age is that archiving has become a more complex process than it was in the past. You not only have to save the physical discs, tapes and drives that hold your data, but you also need to make sure those media are compatible with the hardware and software of the future. “Most people haven’t recognized that digital stuff is encoded in some format that requires software to render it in a form that humans can perceive,” Rothenberg says. “Software that knows how to render those bits becomes obsolete. And it runs on computers that become obsolete.”
In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the
W H E N T H E A I R C R A F T C A R R I E RUSS Nimitz takes to sea, it carries more than a half-million fi les with diagrams of the propulsion, electrical and other systems critical to operation. Because this is the 21st century, these are not unwieldy paper scrolls of engineering drawings, but digital fi les on the ship’s computers. The shift to digital technology, which enables Navy engineers anywhere in the world to access the diagrams, makes maintenance and repair more efficient. In theory. Several years ago, the Navy noticed a problem when older files were opened on newer versions of computer-aided design (CAD) software.
“We would open up these drawings and be like, ‘Wow, this doesn’t look exactly like the draw-ing did before,’ ” says Brad Cumming, head of the aircraft carrier planning yard division at Norfolk Navy Shipyard.
The changes were subtle—a dotted line instead of dashes or minor dimension changes—but significant enough to worry the Navy’s engineers. Even the tiniest discrepancy might be mission critical on a ship powered by two nuclear reactors and carrying up to 85 aircraft.
The challenge of retrieving digital files isn’t an issue just for the U.S. Navy. In fact, the threat of lost or corrupt-ed data faces anyone who relies on digital media to store documents—and these days, that’s practically everyone. Digital information is so simple to create and store, we nat-urally think it will be easily and accurately preserved for the future. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, our digital information—everything from photos of loved ones to diagrams of Navy ships—is at risk of degrading, becoming unreadable or disappearing altogether.
The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guar-antee of future readability. As technol-ogies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Will an entire era of human history be lost?
ACCESS DENIED: Users are discovering that records, photos and other documents recorded on yesterday’s computer systems are rapidly becoming inaccessible as those formats evolve.
P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S . C O M | D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 95
Conqueror’s Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photo-graphs, written descriptions and video clips for this new “book.” It was stored on laser discs—considered indestruc-tible at the time—so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.
But 15 years later, British offi cials found the informa-tion on the discs was practically inaccessible—not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England’s National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)
Changing computer standards aren’t the only threat to digital data. In 2004, Miami-Dade County announced it had lost almost all the electronic voting records from a 2002 election because of a series of computer crashes—reminding us that many of the failures of digital records-keeping are attributable to everyday equipment failure (see “Preserving Your Data” at right). Additionally, soft-ware companies can go out of business, taking their pro-prietary codes with them. In 2001, the online photo storage site PhotoPoint shut down and hundreds of people lost the digital photos they stored on the site.
But data loss is not always as apparent as a fried hard drive or a disc with no machine to play it. A digital fi le is just a long string of binary code. Unlike a letter or a photograph, its content is not immediately apparent to the end user. In order to see a photograph that has been saved as a JPEG fi le or to read a letter composed in a word processing program, we need software that can translate that code for us.
Software applications are updated on average every 18 months to two years, according to the Software and Information Industry Association, and newer versions are not always backward compatible with the previous ones. That could be a problem on the USS Nimitz, just as it could make trouble for you if the fi le in question held your medical records.
Likewise, law fi rms fi nd that metadata—data about the data, such as the date when a fi le was created—are often not transferred accurately when fi les are copied. For exam-ple, magnetic storage media, such as hard drives, allow for a three-part date storage system (created/accessed/modifi ed), whereas the fi le architecture of optical media, such as CD-Rs, allows for only one date. This presents a difficulty in litigation, when attorneys must build chro-nologies of key events in a case. “I see this in almost every single case,” says Craig Ball, a computer forensics expert who advises law fi rms. “It’s a complex problem at so many levels. We are losing so much.”
As Richard Pearce-Moses, past president of the Society of American Archivists, puts it, “We can keep the 0s and 1s alive forever, but can we make sense of them?”
Make a bombproof backup. The easiest way to lose data is through hardware fail-ure. To protect your fi les, get a backup drive with enough capacity to hold the contents of your entire computer. Drives such as the One Touch III Turbo from Maxtor (maxtorsolutions.com; $900) can store up to 1 tera-byte and be set to back up your PC automati-cally. Of course, even external drives can be lost in a fi re or fl ood. For extra security, consider an online storage service such as XDrive (xdrive.com) that gives you 50GB of space for about $10 per month.
I TRAVELED RECENTLY TO Washington, D.C., to meet with Ken Thibodeau, head of the National Archives’ Electronic Records Archive (ERA). The National Archives is charged with the daunting task of preserving all historically relevant documents and materials generated by the federal government—everything from White House e-mails to the storage locations of nuclear waste. Ten years ago, Thibodeau’s biggest concern was how to handle the 32 million e-mails sent to the archives by the Clinton administration. And that was just the beginning. The Bush White House is expected to produce 100 million e-mails by 2008. Thibodeau long ago realized that simply copying the data to magnetic tapes—the archives’ previous means of storing electronic records—was not going to work in the Digital Age. It would take years to copy those e-mails to tape, and that was just a trickle compared to the avalanche of more complex digital fi les that were coming his way.
“The problem is that everything we build, whether it is a highway, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers,” Thibodeau says. “Electronic records are being sent to the archives at 100 times the rate of paper records. We don’t know how to prevent the loss of most digital information that’s being created today.”
The National Archives must not only sort through the
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THERE IS NO MAGIC
MACHINE THAT WILL MAKE YOUR FILES
LAST FOREVER. BUT THESE SIM-PLE STRATEGIES
CAN HELP.
ON THE WEB
tremendous volume of data, it must also fi nd a way to make sense of it. Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that pre-serves any type of document—created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media—for as long as the United States remains a repub-lic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a govern-ment research lab about his mission, the man replied, “Your problem is so big, it’s probably stupid to try and solve it.”
Last year, the National Archives awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million contract to develop the system. “We think this is a groundbreaking effort of the Information Age,” says Clyde Relick, the project’s program director.
To date, the ERA has identified more than 4500 file types that need to be accounted for. Each file type essentially requires an independent solution. What type of
information needs to be preserved? How does that infor-mation need to be presented?
As a relatively simple example, let’s take an e-mail from the head of a regulatory agency. If the correspondence is pure text, it’s a straightforward solution. But what if there is an attachment? What type of file is the attachment? If the attachment is a spreadsheet, does the behavior of the spreadsheet need to be retained? In other words, will it be important for future generations to be able to execute the formulas and play with the data?
“That is unlike a challenge we would have with a paper document,” Relick says. More complex fi le formats, such as NASA virtual reality training programs, require more complex solutions. The ERA is working with a number of research partners, including the San Diego Super-computer Center and the National Science Foundation, on some of those more intricate challenges.
LOCKHEED IS BUILDING what is pri-marily a “migration” system, in which fi les are translated into flexible formats such as XML (extensible markup language), so the fi les can be accessed by technologies of the future. The idea is to make copies without losing essen-tial characteristics of the data.
Not everyone agrees with Lockheed’s approach. Rothen-berg, of the Rand Corp., for example, believes an “emu-lation” strategy would be more appropriate. Emulation
allows a modern computer to mimic an older computer so it can run a certain program. Popular emulation programs in use today are those that allow people to take video games made for Sony PlayStation 2 or Micro-soft Xbox and play them on PCs.
“It seems to me that migration throws away the original,” Rothen-berg says. “It doesn’t even try to save
the original. What you end up with is somebody’s idea about what was important about the original.”
Relick says the cost and technical effort involved in emulation are not feasible for a project the size of the ERA. In addition, he notes that the archives in their entirety will need to be accessible to anyone with a browser, and emula-tion becomes more diffi cult when you have to account for users with an infi nite variety of hardware and software.
The goal for the Lockheed team is to have initial operat-ing capability for the ERA in September 2007, but budget cuts may delay the program’s search functionality.
The data crisis is by no means limited to the National Archives, or to branches of the military. The
Library of Congress
Go for the gold. Burned CDs and DVDs can begin to degrade after three years. Kodak (kodak.com) and Memorex (memorex.com) make archival discs with a layer of 24-karat gold to prevent oxidation that are designed to last 300 years. Still, it’s prudent to check your storage media every few years for data corruption, and to ensure that they’re still compatible with modern computers._ _ _ _
Resurrect your data. Companies such as Ontrack Data Recovery (ontrack.com) can sal-vage information from damaged hard drives. It can be done online or by sending hardware to the lab. For digital cameras, programs such as MediaRecover (mediarecover.com; $30) and eImage Recovery (octanesoft.com; $27) can recover photos that were accidentally deleted._ _ _ _
When in doubt, print it out. Most software formats are proprietary, meaning they could become obsolete if the companies that create them go belly up. For important fi les, save a copy in a standardized format such as text or JPEG. And remember, a printed copy is sometimes the best form of backup. — B.R.
“Everything we build, whether it is a high-way, tunnel, ship or airplane, is designed using computers … we don’t know how to
prevent the loss of most digital information that’s being created today.”
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Check our Web site for more on data loss.popularmechanics.com/digitaliceage
(Continued on page 139)
— KEN THIBODEAU
If you start a conversation with a fi refi ghterat Brooklyn’s Watkins Street company—Ladder 120/Engine 231—be prepared for it to be cut short.
The fi rehouse is one of New York City’s busiest, with more than 4200 runs a year—including 180 code 1075s (structural fi res) last year. At any time of day, an alarm bell can send these guys running out the door, mid-sentence.
So what do they do on their days off? This tight group plays baseball and football (the house is fi lled with plaques and trophies), and they do volunteer work together. Despite 12-hour days and eight-day shifts, the Watkins Street
B Y R E B E C C A D A Y / / / P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M A R K A S N I N
T H E G E N E R O S I T Y O F A B R O O K L Y NF I R E H O U S E C O M E S F U L L C I R C L E .
P M M A K E O V E R
The fi refi ghters of Ladder 120/Engine 231 (and their dog, Tiller) are based in this101-year-old fi rehouse in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, N.Y.
crew takes time to work with the Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project, an organization that teaches athletics to severely injured veterans, helping them make the transition from rehabilitation to civilian life.
“This is heroes helping heroes,” says Harvey Naranjo, adaptive sports coordinator at Washington, D.C.’s Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital,
where many injured vets are treat-ed. “The Watkins Street firefighters boost their morale by letting them know that the community is support-ing them.”
We caught up with 22 members of the Watkins Street company last winter when they participated in a Wounded Warrior Learn to Ski pro-gram 150 miles northwest of the
fi rehouse, at Ski Windham in Wind-ham, N.Y. The Watkins Street crew, along with eight other FDNY fire-fi ghters, provided transportation and support for 31 disabled vets (most of them injured in Iraq or Afghani-stan), who were learning how to ski or snowboard under the tutelage of the Adaptive Sports Foundation and Disabled Sports USA.
>> MILWAUKEE SUPER SAWZALL
$229 The Milwau-kee Super Sawzall is the undisputed king of recip saws. With an incredible 13-amp motor and 3000-stroke-per-minute orbital cutting action, there’s almost no material too tough for it to handle.
>> MILWAUKEE DEMOLITION BLADE KIT FOR SAWZALL $30
The Super Sawzall is built to last, but its blades eventually need to be replaced. We picked the bi-metal blades in this variety pack for maximum strength and fl exibility.
>> HUSKY SIX- DRAWER TOOL TOWER $300 This
storage cabinet on wheels lets our fi re-fi ghters roll all the tools they need to any project in the house. Plus, the lockable trays keep tools from “walking away.”
>> STANLEY GARAGE WORKSHOP $957
The Watkins Street shop was in desper-ate need of an orga-nizational overhaul. Stanley’s modular system gives the guys fi ve big cabi-nets and three deep drawers to store their stuff .
>> LENOX HACKSAW WITH BLADE $30
Not every project requires batteries. More oft en than not, when they need to make a cut, the Watkins Street fi re-fi ghters will reach for this simple, high-quality hacksaw. It’s made for the con-tractor and metal fabricator market.
The Watkins Street fi refi ghters take care of all the routine maintenance and basic improvements in their fi rehouse. We upgraded their tool col-lection with the equipment shown here.
Greg Chero attempts a bit of fence mending in the fi rehouse parking lot by using a Ridgid 18-volt impact driver.
TOOLS: SETTING UP SHOP
From left: Firefi ghters Craig Williams, Rich Miranda, John Ostraticky and Glen Merkitch (kneeling) set up and calibrate their new table saw.
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around the house—everything from fi xing the alarm system to building a steam room.
Their tool collection, however, was an antiquated assemblage of used equipment donated by the fi refi ghters’ parents and local charities. When we contacted Ridgid, Milwaukee, Stanley, Husky and other manufacturers, all were happy to beef up the shop with
donated gear, including a powerful recip saw, a top-quality tool storage system, a table saw, and a variety of power and hand tools.
We also learned that the Watkins Street crew likes to keep in shape. On the job, firefighters in turnout gear lug as much as 100 pounds of extra weight, from masks and irons (axes and prying tools) to saws and ropes. After surveying their aging—and, in some cases, broken—cardio equip-ment and weights, we determined that the gym needed a high-tech overhaul. So, we asked our contacts at Precor how they might be able to help. The fi tness com-pany responded enthu-siastically, donating pro-fessional-grade exercise machines that can with-stand the constant use of a houseful of guys in constant training.
We at PM work in New York City, so we have a special interest in the health and well-
being of our firefighters. The guys at Ladder 120/Engine 231 give their all to the city every day, then give even more to the veterans who are their heroes. Consider this our way of saying thanks. PM
“To be able to help these guys after what they’ve sacrifi ced is motivating, to say the least,” says Eric Schmanski, a firefighter with Engine 231. “The things that they have been through are very humbling and inspiring, and the FDNY is grateful.”
We at PM were impressed by the contributions of the Watkins Street firefighters both on and off the job,
and we wanted to fi nd a way to give something back to them. We took a fi eld trip to their fi rehouse in Brook-lyn’s Brownsville neighborhood to see what we might be able to do.
The fi rst thing we discovered was that the fi refi ghters are an industri-ous bunch. Between calls and drills, the company handles most of its own repair and construction projects
Above, clock-wise from left: Greg Chero (left) and Mike Noon assem-ble a Stanley cabinet; cut-ting a chock; taped to hel-mets, chocks are used to prop open doors so they don’t close on hoses.
>> RIDGID PORTABLE TABLE SAW TS2400LS $500
We wanted the crew to have a versatile table saw that could be moved from project to project. This cart-mounted machine has a T-slot miter gauge for accurate crosscuts and a retractable rail for rip cuts.
>> RIDGID FIVE-PIECE 18-VOLT TOOL KIT $449 Firefi ghter
Frank Monaghon has been spending a lot of time doing tile work on the upstairs steam room the guys are building. He’s particularly happy about the fast recharge time on Ridgid’s 18-volt batteries.
>> HUSKY 160-PIECE TOOL SET $80 We
couldn’t fi gure out which hand tools the fi refi ghters needed most, so we got them every-thing. This soup-to-nuts kit from Husky includes socket wrenches, screw-drivers, a hammer, pliers, wrenches, utility knives and more.
FITNESS EQUIPMENT: BEYOND BASIC TRAINING
>> PRECOR—C846i RECUMBENT EXERCISE BIKE
$3195 If the Watkins Street fi refi ghters ever have to bicycle themselves to a fi re, they will be prepared. This “sit back” exercise bike places emphasis on the hamstrings and glutes. It uses a double step-up belt drive for smooth, quiet performance.
>> PRECOR—C240i STRETCHTRAINER
$795 One of the easiest ways to injure yourself dur-ing a workout is to neglect stretching. The C240i facili-tates eight essen-tial stretches for the upper and lower back, legs and shoulders.
>> PRECOR—S3.45 MULTISTATION
$4995 This strength-training system off ers more than 30 diff erent movements. “It hits all the major mus-cles in a circuit,” says fi refi ghter Eric Schmanski. “That’s important when time is a factor.”
>> PRECOR—EFX576i ELLIPTICAL $6695
This trainer has proved to be a fi re-house favorite. It works the upper and lower body at the same time. It has an adjustable incline, touch-sen-sitive heart-rate monitor and a 12-in. video screen.
>> PRECOR—C956i TREADMILL $7595
Precor knows how to make fi refi ghters run. This commer-cial-grade 4-hp treadmill has a 12-in. color video screen and comes with a specially designed fi refi ghter fi tness test training program.
The Watkins Street fi refi ght-ers asked for help replacing their broken treadmill. But they really needed a whole new gym. PM worked with fi tness company Precor to com-pletely overhaul the fi rehouse workout room. The company donated all the commercial-grade equipment seen here.
Firefi ghters have to carry heavy equipment up countless stairs. From left: Will Hickey, Kevin Smith and Rob Petraca prep for the next alarm.
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T H E W E AT H E R OV E R M U C H O F W E S T E R N E U RO P E on Sept. 4 was, in pilotspeak, severe clear—ideal conditions for the fi rst fl ight of the world’s largest
passenger airplane with “civilians” on board. Carrying nearly 500 Airbus employees, the A380 took off from Toulouse, France, where company headquarters are located,
and circled Europe for 7 hours while the volunteer passengers tested everything from video screens to plumbing. Although a few bugs were discovered, including excessive
condensation and variations in cabin temperatures that will require tweaks to the venti-lation systems, the A380 achieved what Airbus set out to do 18 years ago: Fly more
people far more comfortably than the iconic but now-aging Boeing 747. What dominat-ed the news the following day, however, was not the near-fl awless test fl ight but the fate
of Airbus’s chief operating offi cer, Charles Champion. The highly respected, Stanford-educated aerospace engineer, who had shepherded the A380 project since the plane
Supersize and super-late: An A380 prototype comes in for a landing at the Paris air show in 2005.
T H E A I R B U S A 3 8 0 W A S S U P P O S E D T O B E T H E F U T U R E O F A V I A T I O N . W I L L I T E V E R G E T O F F T H E G R O U N D ?
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was put into production in late 2000, had just been fi red.Perhaps it was a relief. Five years ago, the A380 was
being hailed as a turning point in aviation history—a plane that would reinvent air travel and leave Airbus’s rival, Boe-ing, in its wake. Today, the program is two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. Airbus CEO Christian Streiff proposed drastic changes to put production back on schedule. Frustrated by corporate governance that imped-ed this strategy, Streiff resigned. In a project of this magni-tude, holdups and design changes are expected. More than 35 years ago, the fi rst 747 rolled out of the Boeing plant in Everett, Wash., with 5000-pound concrete blocks dangling from its wings because the engines weren’t ready. But the A380’s woes go far beyond the normal setbacks. Says avia-tion consultant Scott Hamilton of Leeham Co., “A delay this big is really rare this far into the modern jet age.”
Critics say that the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. (EADS), the four-country consortium that con-trols Airbus, serves too many masters. On the one hand, EADS is shielded from the costs of bad business decisions: Some experts estimate that in the past 30 years Euro pean Union taxpayers have shelled out $15 billion to cover cost overruns. On the other, the company is vulnerable to politi-cal pressures, which sometimes seem to call for bold tech-nological statements. In the 1960s, another European consortium relied on massive subsidies to produce the Con-corde, a supersonic aircraft at once technologically adven-turous and economically disastrous. It was retired in 2003.
Will the A380 be the next Concorde—an engineering breakthrough with little chance of breaking even? Certain-ly, the problem the jetliner was supposed to help solve—airport gridlock—still exists. The world’s major hubs already operate at full capacity during peak hours, and traffi c is expected to increase 4 percent annually, from 4.2 billion passengers in 2005 to 7 billion passengers in 2020. Building new airports or signifi cantly expanding existing ones, though, is a practical and political nightmare.
The Airbus solution: Increase capacity with a plane that carries up to 900 passengers—nearly twice as many as the 747. “It is this big monster,” says Hans Weber, president of Tecop International, a San Diego-based aviation consult-ing fi rm. “And Airbus has struggled with the nightmare of making something this big economically effi cient.”
Meanwhile, Boeing has gambled that the market is most interested in a fuel-effi cient, midrange widebody that gives airlines fl exibility. Its fl agship project became the 250-pas-senger 787 Dreamliner, slated to go into service in 2008.
Virtually all experts agree that the A380 will eventu-ally join the civilian fl eet. (The plane’s maiden voyage—a planned Singapore Airlines fl ight to Sydney, Australia—was recently pushed back, again, and is now slated for late 2007.) But the problems facing the most expensive, ambi-tious nonmilitary aircraft project in history are mounting.
>> Wiring Woes On the A380, 300 miles of cable and wiring are bundled into giant harnesses that carry data and provide the juice for everything from avionics to in-flight entertainment. Such bundles are usually threaded through the skeleton of a plane before seats and other interior furnishings are installed. The basic wiring setup is then modifi ed for each customer, depending on the selected amenities.
According to some observers, delays due to wiring modifications began when customers told Airbus they wanted their A380s to be outfi tted less like cattle cars and more like cruise ships with wings. Some of the fi rst airline customers—Singapore, Emirates and Qantas—opted for
A 3 8 0C h o p p y C o n d i t i o n s
WHEN THE A380 goes into service in late 2007, regulators may require dramatically larger separation distances because of the huge plane’s wake turbulence (below). Meanwhile, Airbus engineers continue to face manufacturing glitches even as they advance aviation technology (right).
> > T U R B U L E N C E Air traffi c controllers require a landing separation distance of 6 nautical miles between the 747 and other planes to allow for dissipation of wake turbulence—a swirling, invisible vortex that can cause a trailing plane to rise, sink or roll violently. For the 560-ton A380, which is 30 percent heavier than Boeing’s jumbo jet, an international aviation safety agency is recommending a landing separation of 10 nautical miles. The ruling could mean each A380 fl ight would require two landing slots at already maxed-out airports—a potentially serious blow to the plane’s viability.
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layouts that seat fewer than 500 people in three classes of service, roughly 100 more passengers than a typical 747 can accommodate. And, what seems to appeal most to air-lines is that those passengers are spread out over 40 to 50 percent more interior space than in any other commer-cial widebody. “It’s a real estate windfall,” says Singapore Airlines spokesman James Boyd.
But to pay for that premium space, the airlines need to load up the A380 with amenities to lure high-spend-ing travelers for whom comfort is more important than price. Many of these proposed features—television reception, Internet access, cellphone capability and casino gambling—require more complex wiring.
Airbus also allowed customers to request changes to the interiors while the planes were being built—a decision the company quickly realized was going to derail the pro-duction schedule. So it switched to “concurrent engineer-ing,” constructing aircraft fuselages while working out design specifi cations with the airlines—a risky wager that Airbus lost. The delays were exacerbated when Airbus decided, well into the project, to save weight by switching from copper to mostly aluminum wiring.
To try to keep production on schedule, the company imported engineers and mechanics from its factory in Ham-burg, Germany, to toil round the clock in Toulouse. But the extra manpower has not been enough: In June, the company
> > W I N G S In February 2006, a wing failed a stress test; aluminum strips were needed to reinforce the wing box. Weighing up to 33 tons, the wing comprises 32,000 parts connected by 23 miles of wiring and covered with sheets of aluminum so big that only one plant in the world (in Iowa) is equipped to produce them.
> > W I R I N G The highly complicated system—the plane has about 100,000 electrical links—is the single biggest culprit in delivery delays. In order to save weight, Airbus switched from copper to aluminum for 60 percent of the wiring. But that required structural changes because aluminum has a bigger bending radius. Also, the computer program used in the plane’s digital design represented the wiring harnesses poorly, which led to production problems. In addition, delays meant wiring harnesses were installed after fi nal assembly—a more time-consuming job.
> > L A N D I N G G E A R During an August test fl ight, warning lights indicated jammed landing-gear doors. The aircraft set down safely; the problem is still being investigated. The world’s heaviest commercial plane, the A380 (full takeoff weight, 1.2 million pounds) lands on 22 wheels with less runway impact than the 747.
> > G L A R E The A380 is the fi rst plane to use a new composite called Glare—layers of aluminum foils and unidirectional glass fi bers impregnated with an adhesive. Found on the tail assembly (red) and elsewhere, the lightweight composite represents a weight savings of at least half a ton.
> > C O M P O S I T E S About 25 percent of the plane’s structural weight consists of composites, including engine cowlings (above, orange), outer wing fl aps (yellow) and the tail cone (blue). Other composite components not shown include the wing ribs, upper-deck fl oor beams, rear pressure bulkhead and unpressurized fuselage.
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revealed that wiring diffi culties would delay deliveries by six months. Then, in October, it shocked the aviation world by announcing still more delays, this time up to a year. Air-bus will deliver only one A380 in 2007, down from 25 in the original schedule. “It all goes back to customization,” says Craig Jenks, president of Airline/Aircraft Projects. “Airlines carried it as far as they could, and Airbus gave in.”
>> Mixed ResultsThe A380 is the fi rst large commercial plane in which the wing box is a combination of aluminum and a composite of carbon-fi ber-reinforced plastic. Composites, which have greater strength than metallic counterparts, have only recently become more widespread in commercial planes, although they are common in military aircraft. Composites have several advantages over traditional materials. “For one thing, they don’t corrode the way aluminum does,” Tecop’s Weber says, noting that metal fatigue has been implicated in a number of airplane crashes.
The ultimate advantage is to the bottom line: Light-weight composites and effi cient engines mean the A380 consumes one-fi fth less fuel per passenger than the 747. Some engineers believe the A380 is a turning point—the end of the metal age and the dawn of plastic planes.
Or not. In late 2004, at the Toulouse plant, Airbus mounted a 119-ft. specimen wing to scaffolding and began to run load tests to ensure that the component would be able to withstand conditions likely to be encountered dur-ing service. Once that limit-load testing was completed, the Toulouse team applied progressively greater loads to sat-isfy another regulatory requirement—that the wings offer a “factor of safety” 1.5 times the prescribed limit load.
During a test this past February, with a “defl ection,” or upward fl ex, of 24 ft., the wing reached its breaking point, snapping between the inboard and outboard engines. The failure occurred within 3 percent of the target, so regu-lators did not require Airbus to repeat the test or modify this vital component’s basic design. “The tweaking we had to do was relatively minor,” says Thomas Burger, product marketing manager for the A380. Engineers added alumi-num strips to stiffen the wing box, a component that keeps wings cantilevered.
But some experts think the A380 doesn’t go far enough in its use of composites. Boeing’s Dreamliner will be 50 per-cent composite—twice as much as the A380. “In a few years, the A380 is just going to be an old chunk of metal with old engines,” says Richard Aboulafi a of the Teal Group, a Wash-ington, D.C., consultancy. “It’s almost last generation.”
B i g A m b i t i o n s , S m a l l M a r ke ts
Construction on the HK-1 Hercules Flying Boat—aka the Spruce Goose, although it is mostly birch—began when Howard Hughes won an $18 million government contract to build planes capable of carrying 750 troops. With a 320-ft. wingspan, the largest aircraft ever built fl ew once, covering a mile. It is now housed in a museum in McMinnville, Ore.
AS AIRCRAFT BECOME MORE MASSIVE, aviation designers and engineers continue to redefi ne what it is possible to get into the air—and get back on the ground. These three megaplanes all rivaled or outstripped the A380 in size, but that was no guarantee of success. Only the Soviet government-funded An-225 made it into service … barely.
The Bristol Brabazon, with its 230-ft. wingspan (35 ft. more than a 747’s), became a plane without a mission almost as soon as its maiden fl ight ended. The British turboprop luxury liner, which cruised at 330 mph, was designed to carry just 100 passengers nonstop between London and New York. Post-war, airlines turned instead to smaller, faster planes such as the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC8.
1 9 4 2 - 1 9 4 7
The An-225 Cossack is the world’s largest and heaviest cargo plane, with a maximum payload of nearly 250 tons and a gross weight of 700 tons. The 275-ft.-long lifter was designed to haul the Buran space shuttle on its “roof rack” and Energia rocket boosters in its cargo bay. Only one prototype was built; that plane is currently being reconfi gured as a space vehicle air launcher.
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Check our Web site for links and more information about the A380: popularmechanics.com/a380.
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>> Separation Anxiety The heavier the plane, the bigger the wake vortexes—invisible tornadoes that spiral back from the wingtips, and then spread and linger behind the plane. In extreme cases, wake tur-bulence can fl ip a smaller plane.
In June, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a safe-ty agency, recommended that all air-craft be held 1 additional minute before departing behind an A380, allowing more time for turbulence to dissipate. Spacing between an A380 and a following plane should be 10 nautical miles on fi nal approach, the committee said, double that of other widebodies. ICAO recommended a 15-nautical-mile separation for all other phases of fl ight—nearly triple the distance required behind a 747.
Airbus countered with its own three-year study, conducted with the Federal Aviation Administration and Joint Aviation Authorities (Europe’s version of the FAA). Its recommen-dations included a separation of 6 nautical miles for heavy aircraft landing behind an A380, 8 nautical miles for medium-weight planes and 10 nautical miles for light planes.
ICAO does not have enforcement powers, but its recommendations usually are implemented by regu-lators and air traffi c control organizations. If the agency doesn’t reverse itself, airports will have to allow more time between takeoffs and landings. At busy hubs that will mean assigning the A380 the equivalent of two landing slots. It would all but erase the chief benefi t of the plane; the ability to carry more people into congested airfi elds.
>> Betting the Company The list price on the A380 is $290 million, but launch dis-counts and, now, late fees, are rumored to have reduced that signifi cantly. Airbus now needs about 300 orders to break even; at press time, 16 airlines had ordered 159 planes. Some likely customers, such as British Airways, are delaying a decision until they see how the jet performs when it fi nally gets into revenue service. Airbus has essen-tially bet the company on a plane without any assurance that it will ever turn a profi t.
Airbus believes the market for aircraft that carry 500-plus passengers will be about 1200 planes over the next
15 years. Boeing, which initially argued that the market is no greater than 350 planes, now seems to quietly agree that the world needs a next-generation jumbo. Its recent forecasts on the demand for jets in this category are far more bullish than its public pronouncements. “They are now saying that the market could be almost 1000 planes,” aerospace consultant Scott Hamilton notes. “That means room for both Airbus and Boeing.”
Airbus was looking forward to having that market all to itself for several years before its American competitor could make a countermove. But the recent A380 delays have erased that advantage. Although Boeing’s focus is on the Dreamliner, the company has not forgotten its old standby. It has decided to keep the 747 production line going, with a new souped-up version of the plane—the 747-800. Its passenger capacity? Almost as high as the A380’s. PM
This center section of the double-decker A380 fuselage, assembled at the Airbus factory in Saint-Nazaire, France, is 28 ft . high and 23 ft . 5 in. wide.<<
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B A S I C P L U M B I N G + L O G S P L I T T E R S + S T R I P P I N G W I R E
Of all the choices to make in a new kitchen, none get more atten-tion than the countertop materi-al—simply because there are so many options. There are dozens of new products available, rang-ing from stone to acrylic, with prices running as high as $250 per square foot.
“Usage and budget play key roles in making a good deci-sion,” says Bruce Colucci of Le Gourmet Kitchen, a design serv-
ice in Orange, Calif. “An active household with multiple cooks and kids requires a different countertop surface than a child-less couple that eats out.” To help sort through the possibilities, here’s what you’ll fi nd—from the elegant to the economical.
Natural StoneFew countertop materials can compete with the striking appear-ance and solid feel of granite,
KITCHEN WORK SURFACES FOR EVERY TASTE AND BUDGET. BY JOSEPH TRUINI
Counter Resurgency
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soapstone and slate. Of the three, granite is the most popular, ranging in color from vibrant blues and vari-egated browns to midnight black and mottled white. It’s cut into long slabs that require few seams. “We routinely fabricate counters up to 10 ft. long,” explains Ziggy Oskwarek of S.J. Masters in Canaan, Conn. Seams are often fi lled with clear sili-cone, but Oskwarek prefers to use an epoxy tinted to match the stone.
Counter fabricators typically polish granite to a high gloss, but a matte fi nish is also available. Then, they treat the surface with a sealer that makes it stain-resistant. For daily cleaning, use a nonabrasive product designed for use on stone. Expect to pay from $75 to over $250 per square foot, depending on the color and type of granite, and the complexity of the fabrication.
Soapstone is usually a dark green-ish-black, although lighter green-gray slabs are common. It’s porous, so treat it with mineral oil from time to time to reduce staining. Slate has a soft matte sheen and comes in fi ve colors: green, red, gray, pur-ple and black. It is virtually mainte-nance-free. “Slate is nonporous and requires no sealer or surface treat-ment,” says designer Diane Tardif of Wood-Stock Kitchens and Baths in Essex Junction, Vt. Slate counter-tops cost roughly $100 to $200 per square foot, depending on the fab-rication. Soapstone counters cost about $100 to $150 per square foot.
As an alternative to slabs, gran-ite, slate and marble are available as tiles, with prices ranging from $2 to over $5 per square foot.
Solid SurfacesSolid-surfacing materials, such as Corian, Gibraltar and Avonite, are little more than homogeneous slabs
Natural Stone
of plastic, but they’re arguably the perfect countertop material. These materials are stain- and scratch-resistant, and their seams are fused
together for undetectable joints.Traditional solid-surfacing ma-
terials are made of 100 percent acryl-ic, 100 percent polyester or a combi-
Solid Surfaces
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[1] Silestone Leather Green River [2] DuPont Zodiaq Copper Sunset [3] DuPont Indus Red [4] Wilsonart Earthstone Palomino [5] Corian Concrete [6] Formica Granite Collection Graphite [7] Formica Classics Green Tea Concrete
[1] Black Galaxy Granite [2] Madura Gold Granite [3] Soapstone [4] Black Marble Tile [5] Red Jade Marble Tile [6] Tumbled Marble Tile [7] Gray Slate [8] Red Slate
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nation of acrylic and poly. However, there’s another type of solid surface worth considering—quartz compos-ite. Also known as engineered stone, this material is composed of 93 per-cent quartz and 7 percent acrylic or epoxy binder. DuPont Zodiaq, For-mica Stone, Cosentino’s Silestone and CaesarStone are a few of the quartz composites available.
Engineered stone is much harder than ordinary solid-surfacing ma-terial, and it more closely resembles natural stone. It also costs more than traditional solid surfaces, but both materials are comparable to a high-end granite job; expect to pay $150 to $200 per square foot for a quality solid-surface counter.
ConcreteConcrete represents the fastest-growing—but still most unusual—countertop option. If you’ve never seen a concrete kitchen counter, rest assured it looks nothing like a side-walk. It more closely resembles a slab of natural stone—only it’s more consistent in color and strength. This level of beauty, durability and smoothness is achieved through a combination of sophisticated con-crete mixes, a palette of rich colors, and the use of precise molding and fi nishing techniques.
Originally, concrete counters were poured in place—a messy, imprecise and time-consuming job—but today, they’re prefi nished and delivered to the job site. In addition to being fl atter and smoother, pre-cast counters can be removed and replaced if necessary.
Concrete counters are available in slabs up to 10 ft. long, and seams are fi lled with clear silicone caulk. Cracking is always a concern with concrete, and fabricators often use wire mesh or metal rebar to re-
inforce the counter if cracks occur.The maintenance required to keep
concrete looking great depends part-ly on its fi nish. A penetrating sealer provides resistance to scratches and heat, but it won’t prevent all stain-ing. A urethane coating is virtually stainproof, with heat resistance simi-lar to that of plastic laminate. A high-quality precast concrete counter costs $85 to $100 per square foot.
Ceramic TileTile creates a durable, heat-resistant surface, but the grout joints between the tiles are susceptible to staining, and the tiles can chip. Nevertheless, tile is a highly decorative material that comes in a wide array of sizes, shapes, colors and patterns. It’s an excellent choice for backsplashes, or secondary work surfaces, such as islands and eat-at counters.
“Only ceramic tile rated for use on fl oors or countertops should be used for kitchen work surfaces,” recom-mends tile contractor Jimmy Tigan-ella of Classic Tile in Oakville, Conn. “Never use wall tile on a counter. It’s too thin and will easily crack.”
It’s not possible to give exact pric-es for a tile countertop since so much depends on the tile chosen and the intricacy of the installation. Simple, solid-color tiles can be purchased for as little as $1 per square foot, but
the average cost is more in the range of $3 to $5. A pro installation costs between $30 and $50 per square foot, plus the cost of the tile.
Plastic LaminatePlastic laminate has been the most popular countertop material for nearly 60 years because it’s afford-able and durable. It’s available in hundreds of colors and dozens of patterns, including many that resemble stone, wood and leather. It comes in various textures, but only those with a matte or fi ne matte fi n-ish should be used for counters. High-gloss or heavily embossed sur-faces quickly show signs of wear.
Plastic laminate is sold at most lumberyards and home centers in 2 x 4 or 4 x 8 sheets; prices range from $1.50 to more than $2.50 per square foot. Home centers also sell ready-to-install postformed lami-nate counters that have a seamless front edge, top surface and back-splash. A solid-color 8-ft.-long post-formed countertop costs between $80 and $100. Custom-built coun-ters range from $15 to more than $25 per square foot. PM
Tile and Laminate
For more on kitchen counter-tops, visit our Web site:popularmechanics.com/countertops.
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[1] Marble Ceramic Tile [2] Blue Ceramic Tile [3] Rust Ceramic Tile [4] Wil-sonart Standards Barcoo Brush [5] Formica Color Portfolio Marine Blue
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SSTEP 3
STEP 1
With the cable clamped in a rotary cutting tool (seatekco.com), turn the handle until the cutting wheel slices the metal cladding [1]. Twist the cladding off , and strip the wires as with NM cable. Insert an anti-short bushing [2]. Using a bushing on MC is not required by the National Electri-cal Code, but it’s good practice. It pro-tects the wires’ insulation from dam-age by a rough edge on the cladding.
Stripping a wire is about as basic as mechanical work gets, but it’s surprisingly easy to damage a con-ductor as you remove its insulation or the sheathing over the insulation. Doing so creates a vulnerable point in a home’s electrical system—and a fi re hazard. When a branch circuit gets knocked out, a light fails, or a recently installed switch or out-let doesn’t work, it’s not unusual to fi nd a damaged wire at the root of the problem—once you’ve tedi-ously checked every connection. As an electrician, I see it all the time.
Damage can occur in one of two ways. First, if you nick a conduc-tor, that tiny notch forms a point of stress concentration and failure. Second, copper can be damaged by a process called work hardening. Bending copper back and forth, or clamping down on it with exces-sive force, creates a hard and brit-tle area. As the damaged wire goes through the heating and cooling process caused by current fl ow, it will weaken. Eventually it will fail, either at the point where the wire is clamped under a terminal screw on a switch or outlet, or where the wire is twisted together with other wires using a wire connector.
Moral? When stripping wire, use the right tools and a light touch. Also, take a few practice cuts fi rst.
Use a utility knife and carefully slice the cable sheath along the bare cop-per ground wire located in the cable’s center [1]. Then, bend back the solid plastic sheath, and pull the wires out one at a time. When the correct length of wires is exposed, clip off the sheath with the cable stripper’s shears [2]. Spread the wires apart, and strip the insulation using the method shown above for NM cable.
By far, the most common cable that a homeowner will have to strip is interior-rated NM, usually in 14- or 12-ga. sizes. This easy-to-work product is sheathed with vinyl, and is oft en referred to as Romex, the name given it in 1922 by the Rome Wire Co. in Rome, N.Y. To strip NM cable, sever its sheath [1], then push and pull the sheath off and clip off the paper wrapping [2]. Using the correct notch on the stripper’s jaw, cut the insulation on the outside of each wire [3].
UF (UNDERGROUND-FEEDER) CABLE MC (METAL-CLAD) CABLE
NM (NONMETALLIC) CABLE
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Stripping Cable
A few basic tools and a deft touch are all you need to do this work.
BY PAT PORZIO
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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y T R A N S L U S Z E N T. D E
Adjusting a water-pres-sure regula-tor valve is
easy. Loosen the locknut
and turn the adjust-ing screw counter-
clockwise to reduce pressure.
Pressure Regulator
Check water pres-
sure with a gauge
($8 to $12) installed on an exterior
faucet.
Is the pressure regulator on an incoming water line adjustable? The pipes bang when I fl ush a toilet or abruptly let off pressure on a garden hose nozzle.Yes, the regulator is adjustable and you should try adjusting it before resorting to more expensive remedies, such as installing cushioning devices called water hammer arrest-ers. In addition to causing the banging you describe (a condition called water hammer), high water pressure can erode washers and result in leaks. It also creates premature wear on appliances, including your dishwasher and clothes washer.
The typical inlet water pressure to a home is about 40 to 45 psi. Normally, it should not exceed 60 psi. The pressure regulator is usually preset to 50 psi. However, it can be adjusted anywhere from 25 to 75 psi with a simple turn of a screw, as shown above.
To check the pressure, connect a pressure gauge to the nearest exterior faucet. These gauges are sold at home centers in the same area as in-ground sprinkler components.
Homeowners Clinic
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I R O N & O A K B H V H 2 6 0 2 B R AV E E Z S P L I TT I M B E R W O L F T W - P 1
Q AClog Busting the Kitchen DrainMy kitchen drain clogs and is not easily cleared. I’ve tried a plunger, but since the sink is a double-bowl type, the plunger
force is inadequate. How can I keep the trap clear? Be sure that your dishwashing habits are not contributing to the problem. The worst kitchen drain clogger is grease. Pour off grease from cook-
ware into a container, then dispose of it when it has cooled.
Also, remove and inspect the trap to confi rm that hardened minerals or debris is not blocking it. Replace the trap if its internal diameter has
Split Decision
W O O DS P L I T T E R S
Running a small maple sugar operation at my farm in upstate New York, I burn dozens of cords of wood every sugaring season to boil down sap. Recently, I tried out four moderately priced wood splitters. I learned that each was up to the task for which it was designed and priced.
Gas-engine splitters start at about $800 and can cost as much as $8000. To determine how much you should spend on a splitter, multi-ply the number of cords you burn by $500. If you burn one to three cords a year, choose a machine in the $800 to $1500 range. If you
burn more than three cords, buy a light-commercial model in the $2000 range. It’s better to go slightly oversize because a larger splitter cycles faster and is more durable than a smaller one. Don’t be fooled by just the size of the hydraulic cylinder. The engine and the hydraulic pump provide the performance, not the cylinder. — Fred Mackerodt
PRICE: $1500ENGINE: 5.5-hp HondaRAM: 27 tons/14-second splitting cycleCOMMENT: A good buy. This medium-duty splitter on a light trailer operates horizontally or vertically. troybilt.com
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PRICE: $1895ENGINE: 5.5-hp HondaRAM: 20 tons/13-second splitting cycleCOMMENT: A heavy-duty machine on a rugged trailer. Optional four-way wedge speeds production. timberwolfcorp.com
PRICE: $2581ENGINE: 9-hp (optional) RobinRAM: 26 tons/12-second splitting cycleCOMMENT: Operates horizontally or vertically. It bridges pro/homeowner needs. logsplitters-ironoak.com
PRICE: $800-$900, depends on shippingENGINE: 3.5-hp Briggs & StrattonRAM: 8 tons/18-second splitting cycleCOMMENT: Great for the occasional fi replace user. Light enough to pick up and move by hand. braveproducts.com
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been reduced by hardened buildup. With the trap removed, run a hand-powered auger through the down-stream pipes.
Adding Attic InsulationMy attic has 6 in. of insulation, but I’d like to add more. How do I go about installing it?It’s easy to add insulation, but fi rst use a can of spray foam insulation to seal any openings (including holes for electrical wires and pipes) that allow warm air to pass from the living area into the attic.
Install unfaced insulation above the existing insulation. Fill the joist cavities fi rst. Afterward, you may decide to apply an additional layer of insulation perpendicular to the joists. To determine how much
T RA D ES M A N T I P
Hanging Power StripsPOWER STRIPS ARE not diffi cult to install, but putting their mounting screws in the right location can be a bit tricky. Try this: Apply a piece of tape to the strip’s back and use a pencil to punch holes through the tape, centered in the hanging holes. Remove the tape and press it on the wall where you will hang the strip. Next, use screws to mark the wall through the holes in the tape. Drill on the marks and install the hollow wall fasteners for the hanger screws. — Pat Porzio is a mechanical contractor in Haskell, N.J.
insulation to install, visit eere.energy.gov.
Take several precau-tions when working in the attic. Wear a respira-tor, eye protection and disposable painter cover-alls. Leave the coveralls in the attic when you come down for a break to avoid bringing dust and loose insulation fi bers into the house’s living area. Put down plywood or lumber to serve as a work sur-face. Be mindful of roof-ing nails poking through roof sheathing.
A typical attic is fi lled with electrical wiring (some of which may be old and brittle), junc-tion boxes, air-condition-ing ducts and condensate drains. Break any of this by stepping on it, and you’ll have more than heat loss to worry about; expensive mechanical repairs will offset any gains made by the insulation relative to your heating costs. Finally, don’t insulate against recessed light fixtures that are not approved for insulation contact. Leave at least 3 in. of air space around them.
At the eaves, use a polystyrene baffl e such as Owens Corning Raft-R-Mate (owenscorning.com). These panels pre-vent insulation from blocking soffi t vents, and allow air to fl ow up from the eaves and out of a ridge or gable vent.
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Too Many Amps?My 200-amp electrical panel box has 400 amps’ worth of circuit breakers. Is this safe?Yes. It’s better to have many indi-vidual circuits than fewer circuits with larger electrical loads. Also, not every circuit will be energized at the same time, and it’s unlikely that they will see the full load for which they are rated.
For example, a 120-volt, 15-amp branch circuit that provides power to four lighting fi xtures, each of which has a 150-watt bulb, uses only 5 amps.
Ugly CabinetsMy 1970s-era kitchen cabinets are dark-colored and kind of ugly. Otherwise, they’re in good condi-
applied over previously fi nished wood. However, you should remove the cabinet doors and drawers, as well as the hardware from both. Then, clean the doors, drawer sur-faces and the cabinet itself with a degreaser. Lightly scuff-sand the surfaces before applying the fi nish. Remove all traces of sanding dust before proceeding.
After the second coat of paint is dry, install new hardware, and the cabinets will look like new. PM
tion. I’d like to paint them a lighter color, but how?Two coats of Insl-x Cabinet Coat (insl-x.com) should work. It’s a water-based urethane-acrylic satin enamel formulated to cover diffi cult substrate such as kitchen cabinets, which tend to be dark and fi nished with smooth coatings that include polyurethane or varnish. A gallon costs $35 to $40.
A work-saving benefi t: Cabinet Coat doesn’t require a primer when
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Check our Web site for more Homeowners Clinic articles. popularmechanics.com/homeownersclinic
DO YOU HAVE A HOME-MAINTENANCE OR REPAIR PROBLEM? Just ask Norman about it. Send your questions to Homeowners Clinic,
Popular Mechanics, 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019-5899 or [email protected]. While letters cannot be answered individually, problems of general interest will be discussed in the column.
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W I N N E RS
Products to Get the Job DoneHelp for damaged fasteners, garage storage, home protection and loud work environments.
GRIP-TITE SOCKETS $25 for 7-piece set
Grip-Tite sockets work on ordinary bolt heads and nuts, but also on those that have had their corners rounded off. Even better is that the sockets hold a bolt and keep it from falling out when the socket is turned upside down, making it far easier to drive a bolt in a hard-to-reach location. The sockets are lined with six cam pins that grip a fastener in an uncanny fashion. mygriptite.com
RACORPRO WORKSTATION WITH FOLDING TABLE $130
This three-shelf workstation is ruggedly built out of 1⁄8-in.-thick aluminum, and its fold-down table has a 100-pound load rating. A paper towel holder is concealed below the table. racorinc.com
PROTECTED HOME WATER ALARM PLUS $99
The alarm consists of two components: a dialer that connects to a landline phone or DSL, and a water sensor. When the sensor detects water, it sounds an 85-decibel alarm. The dialer calls a programmed phone number. A similar product, the MiniAlarm Plus, alerts you in the event of an intruder. protectedhome.com
CRETESHEET $20
The CreteSheet is a polyethylene rectangle with four handles. Use it to mix concrete or mortar by gripping its handles and tumbling the material back and forth. It works best with two people. Afterward, rinse the sheet clean and fold it for storage. cretesheet.com
PROTECH COMMUNICATIONS NOISEBUSTER EARMUFF $149
These earmuffs employ active noise cancellation to protect your ears. Microphones in the unit pick up incoming noise, and the Noisebuster’s electronics generate an opposing sound wave and send it back out the earcups. protechcommunications.com
D E G R E E O F D I F FI C U LT Y /// EASY
S AT U R D AY M E C H A N I C
S T I C K Y C A B L E S + T O W I N G + C O R R O D E D C O N N E C T O R S
All you can see in your rearview mirror is grille. There are lots of shiny chrome teeth, all the better to chew up your tiny little economy car, and spit out a stream of nuts, bolts, glass and a hank of hair. It has the makings of a bad B movie—but actually you’re being tailgated by a giant sport utility vehicle.
One bad pothole later, the SUV disappears suddenly—not because the driver has given up on passing you so he can get to Starbucks 8 seconds sooner, but because your inside rearview mirror has dropped off the wind-shield glass and is resting peacefully on the carpet in the passenger foot well.
Reattaching a Rearview Mirror By Mike Allen
Replacing a rearview mirror is straightforward; you probably won’t need any tools beyond a screwdriver and one Allen wrench.
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Stick to ItMost vehicles rely on a simple glue joint to hold the rearview mirror onto the windshield. The adhesive can fail due to the ravages of heat, humidity and time—not to mention the added stress of a half-pound of fuzzy dice or kewpie doll ornament swinging back and forth for years.
Fortunately, it’s relatively simple to reglue the metal mounting button to the glass. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple to reglue it properly, so that it remains on the glass for more than a few days. Just a dab of 5-minute epoxy won’t cut it.
Your fi rst step is to head for an auto parts store or local big-box retailer with an auto parts section. Pick up a rearview mirror installa-tion kit. Don’t buy one that’s hang-ing on a hook from your local odd-lot-merchandise emporium or any other place that isn’t likely to have a fresh kit on hand. These kits have a limited shelf life, especially if not stored properly. Similarly, don’t buy one and keep it stashed in your hot glovebox—it won’t last.
Many cars nowadays integrate electrochromic dimming functions, fl ux gate compasses and even cour-tesy lights with their interior rear-view mirrors. If some functionality of the mirror has failed, or the glass is cracked, you probably can sim-ply replace it without regluing the button to the glass.
Have a Nice DayYou’ll need to park your car in a place where the temperature is some-where between 50 and 75 degrees. If it’s winter, fi nd a heated garage to work inside. During the summer, pick a nice day, with moderate tem-perature and humidity. Park in the shade, because if the glass is too
(1) Mark the posi-tion of the button on the outside of the windshield with a felt pen or grease pencil.(2) Pop the but-ton loose. Some mirrors come off by removing a set-screw, but this one had spring-loaded fi ngers that had to be gently per-suaded with a screwdriver.(3) Clean, clean, clean the glass and button with the cleaner pad in the installation kit.
hot, the adhesive will set with less strength. Rainy days will leave mois-ture on the glass.
First, you’ll need to remove the metal button from the mirror assem-bly. Very few (usually older) vehi-cles have mirrors that glue directly to the glass, but most will have a button you glue on fi rst and then attach the mirror to. The Audi mir-ror we replaced here can be forced to part company with its button by removing a small piece of trim, dis-connecting the electrics, and then inserting a screwdriver blade into the latch. Twist gently, and the mirror will pop off into your hand. Other vehicles may require loosen-ing a small Allen-head setscrew.
Very important: Find some way to label the button “this side up.” The last thing you need is to glue on the button upside down. Mark it with a felt pen or a scratch at the very top or bottom. Don’t mark the side that faces the glass, because the next thing we’re going to do with the button is clean that surface down to bare metal. Also, you’ll be looking at that surface from outside your car for a few years. Do you really want to see a smiley face there?
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A Circle Marks the SpotThere are probably some remnants of the glue on the windshield. Before you clean anything up, use a felt pen, grease pencil or a piece of masking tape to mark the position of the but-ton. For reasons that are about to become obvious, mark the outside of the glass. If nothing else, there is probably a constellation of your fi n-gerprints on the inside of the glass from adjusting the mirror in the past to guide you. If you are very short or very tall, you might want to use this opportunity to adjust the position of the mirror an inch or two verti-cally. Don’t forget that there might
be wires to connect if you have any electrical components in the mirror. If you have trouble hanging pictures level in your living room, you might want to add a plumb line to the windshield with a spirit level so you can keep the button square. We usually just eyeball it.
Cleanup on Aisle ThreeRemove every last vestige of old adhesive from the button. The kit we bought had a piece of sandpaper in it for this. If there is any adhesive left on the glass, scrape it off with a single-edge razor blade. Follow up with some solvent, such as lacquer
thinner or rubbing alco-hol, to remove your fi nger-prints from both the glass and the button. (Now you know why we marked the outside of the glass.)
The kit we used had a special cleaner/primer pad saturated with a solu-tion that did double duty. A solvent cleans the glass and also acts as a catalyst for setting the adhesive later. Scrub the glass and the button without touch-ing the surface with your fi ngers. You don’t want to leave any oily fi ngerprints behind—they will prevent full adhesion.
Ready? Car and glass at a moderate tempera-ture? Got the button right side up? If so, open the small vial of adhesive with a razor blade and squeeze
a single, generous drop out onto the face of the button. Squint, aim pre-cisely, and press the button onto the glass. You get only one chance, so we really do mean aim precisely.
Hold the button in place for 1 min-ute, using moderate pressure. The directions in the kit say for 10 sec-onds, but we’re professional skep-tics. Similarly, the directions say you can install the mirror after only 30 minutes have elapsed, but we prefer to wait overnight to be sure the adhesive has cured properly.
Hang ’Em HighNow it’s a simple matter of reinstall-ing the mirror. If you have a set-screw-style attachment, it’s easy. Just hold the mirror in place with one hand while you run the setscrew in with the other. Remember, it’s a setscrew—don’t strip the threads by overtightening it. Use just enough torque on the wrench to keep the mirror from rattling.
Our Audi was a little trickier; your vehicle may be, too. We need-ed to rotate the mirror around the octagonal piece of the button to pop it on. After that, it was a sim-ple matter to reconnect the electri-cal wiring harness and reinstall the small trimpiece.
Unbuttoning the ButtonUpgrading to a better mirror because you have fl ux gate compass envy? Or you wanted to recycle a mirror from another car, say, that junker rusting slowly away out by the fence line? Then you’ll need to remove the but-ton from the glass. You might be able to shave it off with that razor blade. If it won’t come off readily, here’s a trick: Take a crescent wrench and “unscrew” the button from the glass. It’ll pop off with a surprisingly gentle amount of force. PM
Check our Web site for more Saturday Mechanic articles.popularmechanics.com/carcare
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(4) A small vial of adhesive has enough glue to attach a good dozen mirrors. Don’t feel compelled to use it all.(5) Press the button onto the glass for 1 minute, then let it cure.
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B Y M I K E A L L E N
Cable Woes
Auto Clinic
The cable that runs from my cruise control unit to the throttle is sticky. It hangs up and won’t let the cruise control engage. I went to the dealer to get a replacement cable, but the technician said he couldn’t even order one because my car is too old. I tried lubing it, but the aero-sol lubricant wound up going every-where except into the cable.Bowden cables, like the one shown above, comprise an inner cable and an outer jacket. They are used for throttles, brakes and clutches on cars, motorcy-cles, outdoor power equipment, boats and aircraft. Large-diameter Bowden cables are used for handbrakes and shift linkages. These cables are usually lined with nylon or some other slippery
TOP: Bowden con-trol cables use a
nylon-lined sheath to guide a braided
steel cable. It’s dif-fi cult to lubricate
the inner cable because you need to force lube into the small clear-
ance between the cable and sheath.
INSET: Use a shop rag pinched between your fi n-
gers to get lube into the sheath.
plastic, and are supposed to never need lubrication.
Eventually they can be-come corroded and collect
enough dirt to get sticky. Yes, as you observed, it’s diffi cult to get any
lube into the small clearance between the inner cable and outer jacket.
Here’s my trick: Clean as much of the inner cable as you can with brake or carb cleaner, or even kerosene. Then, get an aerosol can of lubricating oil. My pref-erence is something Tefl on-bearing that leaves dry lube behind after the petro-leum dissipates. Don’t use silicone-based products—they can damage O2 sensors. Hold the straw from the aerosol near where the inner cable disappears inside the metal fi tting on the end of the sheath. Now wrap a shop towel or piece of paper towel around the whole mess, pinch with your fi ngers, and give the cable a good 5- or 10-second shot of lube.
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Start with more penetrating oil and some moderate hammer taps. The tapping will break up the crys-talline structure of the rust that’s locked up the joint. After this has failed to work, apply heat. A propane torch—or better yet, two—will make the drum expand ever so slightly,
at which time the penetrating oil/tapping routine may work.
Or not. In this case, you’ll need to rent or borrow a brake drum puller. This device has arms to hook over the edge of the drum and a large-diam-eter screw in the center that will pull the drum off anything. It also has
Highlights From Technical Service Bulletins
Does the door-lock cylinder of your 2005-06 VW Jetta spin around like a windmill when you try to use the key to open it? Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) 06-01 says it’s supposed to do that, at least if you’re pushing in on the key as you try to turn it. It’s part of a new antitheft lock mechanism.
Tire Pressure Warning System sensors are prone to damage when tires are being mounted or demounted, according to Toy-ota TSB PG010-05 Revised. The TSB suggests letting the sensor fall inside the tire by unscrewing the nut and washer from the stem when demounting, and indexing the valve stem away from the tire machine’s mounting arm when mounting a new tire.
S E R V I C E T I P SThe rag will force the lube into the sheath—that’s certainly better than it ricocheting all over your face. If possible, hold the cable vertically to let the lubricant run to the far end, and watch the rusty goo drip out. Give the cable a couple of more shots of lube until the goo gets cleaner, if not totally clean. Goodbye, sticky action, for a long while.
Warning: Do not use aerosol white grease or any high-viscosity lubricant, particularly in cold cli-mates. When the temperature drops, this grease will turn hard as a rock, and the cable will be immobile until spring. A full infusion of grease (not oil) may cause logy action, even in moderate temperatures.
When TwoBecome as OneMy 2000 2wd Ford Expedition’s rear brake drum/rotor is rusted fast to the axle. It has a tight slip fi t to the axle boss. I have put pene-trating oil on this joint, and subjected it to torsion and light hammer blows and wedges driven between the rotor/disc and the caliper mount, to no avail. I also have driven the car with the lug nuts very lightly tightened and made hard stops going backward and forward at low speeds. The parking brake was adjust-ed to pull the shoe assem-bly away from the drum.Brake parts that have become one with the hub can be mighty stubborn. And whanging on them with a big hammer is more than likely to warp them because that drum is made of old-fash-ioned cast iron.
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enough starch to bend the drum as if it were a Fris-bee pounced on by an Irish setter, so be prepared to replace the drum after you pry it off.
Prevent this problem by cleaning the mating sur-faces of the new drum and the axle with a wire brush, preferably one chucked in a drill. Then smear the surfaces with a thin coat-ing of, what else, antiseize compound. Actually, high-temperature brake-caliper grease is almost as good.
Follow the LeaderI have always heard that you can damage a car’s automatic transmission by towing it (like behind a motorhome). Yet, I always see RVs pulling cars with just a tow bar. Are there any good reasons that I should invest in a tow dolly?Not all cars can be safely fl at-towed. Most vehicles with an automatic trans-mission can’t because when the engine isn’t running, the oil pump in the tran-ny isn’t spinning and, thus, isn’t providing lubrication to the gears and bearings. Vehicles with manual gear-boxes usually can be towed safely, and part-time 4x4 trucks can be towed if the transfer case is in Neutral. Rear-wheel-drive cars and trucks with automatic trans-missions can be towed by removing the driveshaft.
Some vehicles can be modifi ed to be fl at-towed
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successfully. There are disconnects for the driveshaft or axles, and elec-tric lubrication pumps for keeping ATF fl owing. All-wheel drives usual-ly can’t be towed at all and have to be fl at-bedded. The owner’s manual will tell you if fl at-towing is allowable.
Otherwise, you’ll need to use a tow dolly. One exception: If you have a short tow, just leave the car in Neu-tral with the engine idling to provide lubrication to the transmission.
Slow BoilI have a 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix GT 3.8-liter V6 with 140,000 miles. The car runs quite well, but no matter what setting the climate control is on (automatic, split zone, upper dash, lower dash, combo), the vast majority of the air comes out of the windshield
vents and driver and passenger foot-well vents. I have noticed this problem on other vehicles I have owned as they approach and sur-pass 100,000 miles. Are the vac-uum hoses in the system losing their seals or developing cracks?I think your diagnosis is at least par-tially accurate. Many HVAC systems use manifold vacuum to operate sim-ple diaphragm activators. These, in turn, open and shut blend-air doors. When the rubber and plastic parts get old and start to crack and leak,
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the system becomes less responsive. Compound this with blend-air door hinges and linkages that become stiff and downright recalcitrant, as well as disintegrating foam rubber seals, and you’ve got trouble. Your prob-lem may be a single rubber vacuum fi tting that’s split open, or it could be dozens of similar parts slowly failing because the rubber has gotten hard and no longer has the compliance to grip the vacuum lines. Sorry to say, you’ve got to get under the dash and start chasing leaks. PM
Check our Web site for more Car Care. popularmechanics.com/carcare GOT A HIGH-MILEAGE CAR? We’re looking for readers who have managed to maintain their vehicles so well that they don’t ever seem to wear out. Forever is a long time, but if your favorite ride has rolled the odometer over more than
a couple of times, please share it with us. Just use the addresses below. DO YOU HAVE A CAR PROBLEM? Just ask Mike about it. Send your questions to Auto Clinic, Popular Mechanics, 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019-5899 or to [email protected]. While letters, faxes, phone calls or e-mail cannot be answered individually, problems of general interest will be discussed in the column.
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A standard single-layer recordable DVD can carry 4.7GB of data, which may seem like a lot, until you notice that a stand-ard store-bought movie DVD has up to 8.5GB of data on it. That’s because Holly-wood has been pressing movies onto high-capacity dual-layer discs for years.
The bottom recording layer of dual-layer discs is semitransparent, and burn-ers and players make a minute adjustment in the focus of the laser’s lens to read the upper layer of the DVD through the bot-tom layer. There is a difference between Hollywood’s factory-pressed DVDs and burnable dual-layer DVDs. Pressed DVDs use a refl ective layer stamped with physi-cal bumps that represent the digital 1s and 0s that make up a movie, whereas burn-able DVDs use an organic dye that chang-es its opacity when exposed to heat—
mimicking the bumps of pressed DVDs.Now, you may be wondering, if a
single-layer DVD has 4.7GB of capac-ity, why doesn’t a dual-layer disc have 9.4GB? A representative from the DVD Forum explained to us that extending a DVD player’s laser beam to the upper layer of the disc requires larger pits and bumps (or lands) to ensure clear readability—reducing capacity by about 10 percent.
I’ve found that dual-layer discs I’ve burned usually work in my standard DVD player, but there’s no guarantee. The situa tion is similar to when CD burning came of age a few years ago—older hard-ware will be less likely to read homemade discs, while newer hardware probably will read it just fi ne.
At this point, dual-layer DVD burners are nearly the same price as single-layer
Tech Clinic
Double- Decker
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I’m interested in a new DVD burner and I’ve noticed that many new burners are dual-layer drives. How do these things work and will the discs play in nondual-layer drives and DVD players?
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burners, so you should defi -nitely get one if you’re in the market. Sadly, dual-layer blank DVDs are more expensive than single-layer ones. As with every-thing shiny and new, manufac-turing capacity and demand must increase for prices to fall.
Map QuestI recently bought a small, stick-to-the-window naviga-tion system, and I use it all the time. But I travel a lot and I am wondering if it will work in foreign countries. If so, where can I get the map data?From a hardware standpoint, the basic GPS unit should work anywhere in the world. (It is “global” after all.) There is a chance that you cannot add new map data, but most mod-ern GPS units let you load new maps in one of two ways.
Higher-end models—includ-ing, I suspect, the stick-to-the-window unit you bought—have an SD fl ash memory card slot from which they pull map
information. Loading another map set would be as easy as pur-chasing a new set of maps (cost-ing anywhere from $75 to $400, depending on make and model) and popping in the card.
Other models use either built-in fl ash memory or an internal hard drive. In that case, you’ll have to order a CD from the manufacturer (the price is about the same as that of an SD card) and copy the map data over to your unit from your PC.
European map data is avail-able from almost every GPS manufacturer, while map data for Asia, Africa and other re-gions (with place names in English) are not as common. Garmin’s Web site has a list of third-party MapSource devel-opers that sell maps covering areas that Garmin does not.
It is possible to add custom-created data compiled by GPS afi cionados (as long as you trust their skills). If you own a Garmin GPS unit (or one that uses the company’s MapSource
You’ll notice a change to the side of your next laptop. The PC Card expansion slots that you know and love are disappearing in favor of a new standard: ExpressCard.
According to
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Richard Shim, an analyst at the technol-ogy market research firm IDC, ExpressCard is predicted to be in about 18 percent of new laptops by the end of the year.
ExpressCard trans-fers information at up to 2.5 gigabits per second (more than twice as fast as a PC Card), making it ideal for graphics and video. It comes in 54mm and 34mm widths; both siz-es fit in the same slot. One thing that won’t fit in ExpressCard slots, however, is your old PC Card. — Glenn Derene
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standard), you can access a vari-ety of free maps at mapcenter.cgpsmapper.com. You can even use the freeware tools at cgpsmapper.comto create your own maps from pub-licly available topographic maps.
If you get really plugged into GPS map creation, Rich Owings, author of GPS Mapping: Make Your Own Maps, runs a nice blog on the sub-ject at gpstracklog.typepad.com.
Clean SlateI don’t like to leave temporary Internet fi les, cookies and brows-ing history on my computer after my Web surfi ng sessions. Is there any automated way to clean up after myself when I shut down my browser?In Internet Explorer, automatically clearing your temporary Internet
fi les is simple. Select Tools from the menu bar, then click on Inter-net Options. Inside the box that opens, select the Advanced tab, then scroll to the section labeled Securi-ty. Check the box that says “Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed,” then click on the Apply button. Easy as pie.
Firefox makes it pretty easy, too. Simply select the Tools menu, then Options. Click Download History, then the Settings button in the low-er righthand corner to bring up the Clear Private Data menu. There, you can choose to clear almost everything automatically, including browsing history, cookies and tem-porary Internet fi les (called Cache in the Firefox parlance).
But let me point out something: Cached fi les speed up your browsing
experience by obviating the need to redownload content from fre-quently visited Web sites. Sure, if you have several gigabytes of tem-porary fi les, it could start to clog up a slower machine’s browser, but clearing them out every time is probably overkill.
If your concern is less about browsing speed and more about privacy issues, then you might want to go whole-hog and consid-er something like FoxTor (cups.cs.cmu.edu/foxtor), a package that combines Firefox, Tor (The Onion Router), and Privoxy to completely mask your browsing habits. PM
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T H E D I G I TA L I C E AG E(Continued from page 97)
is in the midst of its own preserva-tion project, and many universi-ties are scrambling to build systems that capture and retain valuable aca demic research.
But the programs in develop-ment for government and academia won’t help find the lost e-mail of an individual computer user. Some experts believe that this is the result of simple market forces: Con-sumers have shown little interest in digi tal preservation, and corpora-tions are in the business of meeting consumer demand. Others say cor-porations are only concerned with selling more new products.
“Their interest, it seems to me, is creating incompatibilities over time, not compatibilities,” Rothenberg says. “Looking at it cynically, they have very little motivation to bur-den themselves with compatibility because doing so only allows their
customers to avoid upgrading.”Nevertheless, there have been
encouraging developments. In late 2005, Microsoft announced it was opening the fi le formats of its Offi ce suite, including Word and Excel, to competitors in order to get Office certifi ed as an international stand-ard. By ceding proprietary control of the formats to third-party devel-opers, Microsoft greatly increases the odds that those formats will be accessible for future generations.
Meanwhile, the International Organization for Standardization recently certified a modified ver-sion of Adobe Systems’ popular Port-able Document Format (PDF) spe-cifi cally for long-term archiving. It’s called PDF/A. In essence, PDF/A preserves everything contained in a document that can be printed while excluding features that may be useful in the short term but problematic in the long term. For example, the new format does not allow embed-ded links to external applications,
which could become obsolete, and it doesn’t allow for passwords, which can be lost or forgotten. “It is all about creating a reliable presenta-tion down the road,” says Melonie Warfel, director of worldwide stand-ards for Adobe, who worked on the project. Adobe is also working on archiving standards for engineering documents and digital images.
I F H I S T O R Y I S A guide—and that, after all, is the point of preserving history—we know the future will offer the means to manipulate digital information in ways we cannot yet imagine. The trick is to keep moving forward with-out leaving too much behind.
“It goes beyond this notion of ‘important records’—it goes to the things that are important to us,” says Warfel, the mother of two children. “My mom had shoeboxes full of photographs, but we don’t do that anymore. I have hard drives full of photographs.” PM
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5 ROLLING ROAD Penske’s 16-ton testing platform features a com-posite belt controlled by rollers and a 300-hp motor. One roller regu-lates belt tension, while another directs the belt. Penske’s road can yaw 8 degrees to simulate cornering or crosswinds.
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A RON OAKLEY breaks 100 mph in his FordFocus Midget racer, but the 28-year-old is used
to higher speeds at his day job. As the aerodynamics engineer for Penske Racing’s NASCAR team, Oakley oversees wind-tunnel testing at the team’s Mooresville, N.C., headquarters—and in tunnels across the country. The subtle design changes he sug-gests can make a big difference. “After we tested Ryan Newman’s car, he went out and broke a track speed record,” Oakley says. “It’s great to be a small part of that.”
1 PENSKE TUNNEL The closed tunnel seen here uses a 500-hp electric motor to drive a 12-ft .-wide, nine-blade carbon-fi ber fan at 400 rpm. Tubular steel with a 3⁄4-in. birch plywood skin frames the 54 x 35 x 27-ft . chamber. Wind speeds hit 110 mph.
2 STINGS Posts that hold the model, known as stings, support load cells—sensors that measure all the forces acting on the car.
3 CAR MODEL The shell and tires on Oak-ley’s 45 percent scale models are made of car-
bon fi ber. A hydraulic sys-tem steers the car, while another system adjusts the model’s height to with-in a fraction of an inch.
4 SMOKE WAND To visualize airfl ow, engineers use either a smoke wand or tiny helium bubbles illu-minated by a black light.
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Mooresville, N.C.Years on Job: 5
