Jan 28, 2023
It is finally time for the new puzzler! After quite a long break. We finally have a new one. This is good.
This is challenging and interesting, folkloric and historical if you will. Historical because it's from the past, basically.
We are bringing this one out from the Crusty Files. We are resurrecting this one.
For those of you that don't know, Crusty was our employee at the shop in the early to mid-1970s. So, a long time ago now. When he first came to work with us, he was a rather methodical, organized fellow. When he came to work that first day, he brought with him two huge toolboxes and put them on either side of his workbench. And then, he hung up all his calendars filled with pretty girls, as they all had back then. And his own coffee maker. All that stuff.
And I noticed that when he set up his tools, on the bench was a large bottle of aspirin. And I thought, either this guy gets a lot of headaches, or he creates a lot of headaches. And over the next few months, the level of the aspirins in this big bottle kept going down, but I never saw him take any himself.
So one day, I was observing him at his work, to make sure he was doing a good job. He was replacing a thermostat in a customer's cooling system for one of our cars. I saw him take two aspirins from the bottle. And then I watched as he seemed to be somehow placing these two aspirins in the thermostat. The thermostat is a spring-loaded device which when the thing heats up, the spring gets compressed and allows water to flow from the engine to the radiator. So, here was Crusty. He was putting two aspirin in the thermostat and then he proceeded to put the thermostat in the engine.
I watched him do this. And I was so puzzled by this. And I thought, "If I ever figure out what he is doing, this will be a great puzzler!"
So here it is.
What was Crusty doing with the aspirins and the thermostat?
Good luck!
Well, our puzzler is officially back! And our answer is back as well, of course.
This one was resurrected from the Crusty files. Crusty worked for us back in the day. This was way back in the 1970's, if you can believe it.
So, on his first day at work, along with his coffee maker and his tool boxes, he brought a large generic bottle of aspirin. Like, one of those huge 5000 count bottles from the drug store. As time went on, I noticed that the level on the bottle was dropping, but I never saw him take an aspirin, ever. So, I was watching him one day, trying to figure out what he was doing with all this aspirin. Some might call it spying...
So, a few hours later, I finally saw him take two aspirin from the bottle. I thought he was going to ingest them, but no. Instead, he had a cooling system thermostat in one hand and the aspirins in the other. Then he proceeded put the two aspirins into the thermostat.
Pretty smart move!
Why did he do it? Here is the answer.
He took the thermostat which has a spring in it, and he compressed the spring with his thumb, and he put an aspirin on each size, and when he released the spring the thermostat remained in the open position.
Now some of you know that a thermostat is normally in a closed position until it heats up and then it opens and allows coolant to flow to the radiator. So Crusty takes these two aspirins in the thermostat to hold it open and then he installs it and puts the thermostat housing back on.
When I asked him what he was doing he said, "Oh yeah, I do that all the time because when the thermostat is installed in the engine and it's cold, it's closed. And you cannot fill the system with coolant properly because the air cannot be purged from the system easily." What he means is, on one side of the thermostat is the engine and on the other side is the radiator, and when the engine is cold, the thermostat is closed and coolant will not get all the way into the engine like it's supposed to.
What he was doing is putting the aspirins in there and then he would fill the cooling system with antifreeze and then when he began to run the engine, the heat and the water and everything would dissolve the aspirin and have no bearing whatsoever on the whole operation of the system.
