Popular Mechanics South Africa

IF, WHEN I WAS A BOY, someone had told me that I would be a magazine editor when I was grown up, I would’ve probably given them a strange, confused look. While English was definitely one of my favourite subjects, I never considered a career in media or working on magazines. I was obsessed with sport, and I think all I really wanted to do was play county cricket in England, and then represent South Africa playing for the Proteas. I also loved animals, so a plan B was to maybe become a vet, or perhaps a game ranger… Which young person in South Africa doesn’t dream of one day being a game ranger? I didn’t quite make it to the top level of cricket, I didn’t have the heart, stomach, or…

WRITE TO US popularmechanics@ramsaymedia.co.za WINNING LETTER I really enjoy reading Popular Mechanics, particularly the DIY articles. My daughter is a music teacher, and we jointly make gifts for her students each year. She also runs two extramural music groups – ukulele and marimba. In the recent Eisteddfod, her TVC Ukulele Society achieved an A++ grading as well as Best in Category, so we decided to make them some gifts for their achievement. We decided on stands for the ukuleles that could be easily dismantled to be stored flat in the ukulele bags. Hinges would’ve made the folded stands thicker, so we decided to go with a slotted fit-together approach. We looked at various ideas on YouTube and the closest suitable concept was from cardboard. No details were given, so we adapted that to be…

1 MAY 1953 They Call It Spin Fishing The photo-realistic illustration on the cover of this issue depicted ‘the great sport of spin fishing’. The accompanying story explained how this new style of fishing was taking the United States by storm, mentioning that ‘within 10 years Americans will be a nation of spin fishermen, bar a few die-hards who refuse to try anything new’. We’re not sure if that happened, but the full-colour illustrations of 70 spin-fishing lures, the photos of rod and reel variations and the detailed explanations certainly shed light on this emerging sport. 2 JUNE 1959 Fence It Right Ever considered erecting a fence around your property yourself? The idea of the project might sound daunting, but this article, filled with detailed instructions, broke it down into manageable steps. It included clear…

A DAY IS 86 400 SECONDS LONG, EXCEPT that it never really quite is, not exactly. That number is an excellent average, but the Earth’s rate of rotation is in constant flux. After 2020 clocked some of the fastest days on record since 1960, scientists are considering subtracting a second from an upcoming calendar with a 59-second minute, or negative leap second, to align our UTC (the Coordinated Universal Time, used to set clocks around the world) with the time set by the rotation of the Earth (UT1). In 1971, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) set a standard that the UTC would never be more than 0.9 seconds ahead or behind UT1, says Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist at Masterclock, a precision timing system company, and former chief scientist for time services…

TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH on this page. NASA captured this image of a mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in 1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The space agency refers to the strange entity as item STS088-724-66 in its catalogue of space junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 2 000 km). Jerry Ross, an astronaut who took part in that mission, says that the object is a wayward thermal blanket that broke loose while his team tried to attach an American module to a Russian module on the ISS. But for a small, devoted following, it’s a 13 000-year-old, artificially made satellite known as the Black Knight. So, could this peculiar object really have come from ancient aliens? Or is it just…

HOW CAN OLDER FIGHTER JETS STAY ALIVE while flying the deadly skies? With a little help from lasers. The US Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin on a defence system called Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD), a pod-mounted laser that will protect fighters from incoming air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles. The system, which the air force wants to place on planes by the mid-2020s, will likely initially protect older fighters that can’t take advantage of stealth to hide from the enemy. Lockheed is also working on a separate weapon, Tactical Airborne Laser Weapon System (TALWS), that will use program data from SHiELD. Today’s fighters are largely limited to passive defences against incoming missiles. Pilots can try to take evasive action by flying outside an incoming missile’s sensor arc, launching flares…