How a pull-up bar became a surfboard. (If you have an old house, you’ll understand.
SOMEWHERE THERE IS a world where homes are well-made, predictable, and built to code. You can imagine such a place. Framing lumber is 16 on center. Kitchen cabinets don’t open and interfere with adjacent kitchen cabinets. Back doors don’t stick. Showers don’t leak.
We don’t live in this world. For two of my sons, Mick and Willie, discovering this took nothing more than trying to install a pull-up bar.
Like many stories of minor disasters, this one begins with Christmas shopping. Late one fall, when Mick was 15 and Willie was 11, I was wondering what I might give them for the holidays. Mick had a job at a local surf shop’s beach truck, as a board stacker and surf instructor. He was at an age where he was growing fast and wanted to develop upper body strength to keep up with his rising height.
A pull-up bar seemed just the thing. I checked online and found a sturdy, multi-grip bar with knurled handles. Made for a ceiling installation, its mounting brackets were designed to fasten to joists 48 inches apart. This looked easy enough. Add four lag screws and a few minutes of crew muscle and the bar would be in place. Standard stuff.
I ordered the bar and hid it in a shed until Christmas Eve, when I put it under the tree. I figured assembly and installation would be a one-hour job the next day. Maybe an hour and a half, tops.
Our house, in a former New England mill and farming town, was built circa 1910. In its original form it was compact and laid out simply. As the town evolved into a bedroom community, a previous owner built a two-story rectangular addition off the back. Roughly 15 feet by 22 feet, the addition gave the small house a fourth bedroom upstairs and an eat-in kitchen down.
Esta historia es de la edición April 2019 de Popular Mechanics.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición April 2019 de Popular Mechanics.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
ONE OF THE 'GREATEST THREATS' TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK.
EXPERTS ARE PREPARING THE REGION AGAINST THE THREAT OF DANGEROUS VOLCANIC MUDFLOWS, KNOWN AS LAHARS, WHICH COULD INUNDATE THE COMMUNITIES SURROUNDING MT. RAINIER IN AS LITTLE AS 30 MINUTES.
THE WORLD'S TOUGHEST ROW
They rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, battling unpredictable weather, chaotic seas, and finicky equipment. But what they discovered gave them profound new insights into the power of the ocean.
HOW TO DIY OFF-GRID SOLAR
SPEND THE TIME UP FRONT AND PLAN IT CAREFULLY TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT
Are We on the Verge of an ARMS RACE in SPACE?
RUMORS OF A RUSSIAN SPACE NUKE, ALONG WITH OTHER SATELLITE-TARGETING WEAPONS, HAVE MADE GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS EXTEND INTO ORBIT.
Fresh Fingerprints on an Ancient Statue
A CLAY FIGURINE HAS SPENT MILLENNIA incomplete, waiting at the bottom of a lake for its long-dead craftsman to finish the Iron Age-era statuette.
Quantum Entanglement in Our Brains
IT HAS LONG BEEN ARGUED THAT THE human brain is similar to a computer. But in reality, that's selling the brain pretty short.
The Tools of Copernicus
WAY BACK IN 1508, WITH ONLY LIMited tools at his disposal, Nicolaus Copernicus developed a celestial model of a heliocentric planetary system, which he described in hist landmark work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It was a complete overhaul of our conception of the universe-one that, unfortunately, earned him the ire of the Catholic church for decades after his death-and forever changed the way we look at the stars.
Building a Sixth-Generation Bomber Raptor
THE GLOBAL COMBAT AIR Programme (GCAP)-a project by the U.K., Italy, and Japan to develop a sixth-generation stealth fighter-has been busy at the drawing board reshaping its vision of the future of air warfare. And judging by the new concept model unveiled at this year's Farnborough air show, that future has big triangular wings.
The Electroweak Force of the Early Universe
TODAY, THE UNIVERSE AS WE KNOW IT IS governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity.
This Ancient Fossil With a Brain and Guts
WE KNOW WHAT FOSSILS LOOK like. For example, typical dinosaur fossils are bones turned to stone and preserved from the passage of time, located, if we're particularly lucky, in large collections that can be reassembled to represent the beast they used to prop up in their entirety.
