.Accounting Offices Drive Right Up to Your Door
Bookkeeping on wheels is the odd and profitable business that makes a good living for C. M. Harris, of Los Angeles, Calif. Harris owns a fleet of light trucks, each manned by an expert accountant and outfitted as a rolling office with a typewriter, calculator, bookkeeping machine, and other necessary office equipment.
.‘Dust Bowl’ Truck Has Air-Conditioned Cab
Not only the drivers but the Diesel engine itself breathes conditioned air in a truck built for travel through the “dust bowl” of Kansas and Colorado. Since comfort for the drivers during stifling dust storms was essential, a mechanical air conditioner was installed in the cab.
They sure liked the suffix -matic at the time. Liquamatic, Hydra-Matic, Turbo-matic, Electromatic, Simplimatic, and Vacamatic all appear in just this article.
.The Lowdown On 1942 Cars
Exactly What Have War Conditions And Shortages Done To Your 1942 Car? Here’s Detroit’s Answer To The Challenge.
by Frederick C. Russell
CALL them the 1942 cars if you like, but the glittering dreams that are rolling off the Detroit assembly lines along with tanks, bomber engines and the exciting implements of this bewildering era are, in reality, the latest models of American ingenuity.
.BULLET BOUNCER ON CAR SAVES POLICE FROM THUGS
Bullet bouncers are now in use on cars of the San Francisco, Calif., police department to protect members of radio patrol crews from the gunfire of thugs. The contrivances are sheets of quarter-inch-thick steel plate, equipped with shuttered windows and hinged to the top of the windshield frame.
.Toilet Kit for the Automobile
Here is a toilet kit which you can build for your car, at a total expenditure of about $5.00. It will be found ideal for long: trips and also when it becomes necessary to change a tire on the road.
.Mechanized St. Bernard
A new breed of St. Bernard is making news for Steamboat Springs—a western Colorado winter resort—by rescuing skiers lost in the high Rockies. This latest hero of the snow, however, is not a canine but a cat—a novel, snow-traveling tractor invented and produced by Emmitt M. Tucker of Medford, Oregon, and known as the Sno-Cat.
.WHAT TO INVENT
In this installment of this series of articles, the author presents some new problems for inventors. The right solutions and subsequent exploitations should bring the designers wealth and fame.
By Raymond Francis Yates
DURING the two years that I have been writing this department for Mechanics and Handicraft, many hundreds of letters have been received from readers.
This is one of Vonnegut’s earlier published stories. Interestingly a few years after the story was published he opened a short-lived Saab dealership in a town that sounds a lot like this one.
.The Powder Blue Dragon
She was romance, beauty, a dream for a lifetime. He had to have her, no matter what the cost.
BY KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
A thin young man, with big, grimy hands, crossed the sun-softened asphalt of the village street, from the automobile showroom to the drugstore, his self-consciousness thinly disguised by his pretense of being on important business.
Well, that certainly looks… er. Rugged? Actually it seems like something you’d see at DisneyLand.
.THE WONDERFUL RAT
THE Rat is an amazingly versatile Canadian vehicle developed and built by Canadair Ltd., Montreal. Only 1,500 lbs. in weight, the aluminum buggy can tote 600 lbs. of cargo while towing another 1,000 lbs. on sleds or toboggans. The unique tandem vehicle has a small gas engine in the front section with a takeoff to power the cargo section. It runs in water, over snow and has climbed a 50 per cent grade. It is for use with troops in northern Canada.
I just can’t understand why this isn’t standard on all vehicles…
.This Roller Safety Device Sweeps Away Fallen Pedestrian
TRUCKS equipped with the new safety device shown in the photo at the left will literally sweep a fallen pedestrian before it and thus save him from being crushed to almost certain death beneath the heavy wheels.
