Aug 19, 2023
New puzzler time.
This one is old. Short and old. But also quite good. Here we go.
A long time ago, when I was a younger man, around 1980 or so, this happened to me in the winter.
I pulled into the supermarket parking lot and parked beside a huge beast of a GM station wagon with a 400 cubic inch V eight engine. As I got out of my pickup, I noticed a young boy in the station wagon, pretending that he was driving like a maniac sitting behind the wheel. His parents were not in the car. The kid was in the car alone, windows rolled up. This would never happen these days. You can't leave kids alone for any reason these days. But it was the 1980s. Things were different then.
So, he's behind the wheel, pretending to drive. It looked like he was pretending to drive a race car or something. He was having a great time pretending. The car was off completely, he was just behind the wheel pretending to drive.
When I returned from the store, the kid's mother was there, and the hood was up. I asked if I could help. The car wouldn't start. The engine wouldn't even turn over. But the mother tells me that everything had been just fine before they got to the store.
What was the problem?
There was nothing wrong with the starter. There was nothing wrong with the battery. And there was nothing wrong with the engine. There was no mechanical failure. The car had run perfectly fine when she parked it. She goes into the store. She's gone for 20 minutes, she comes back and the little demon has wrecked her car. The kid did not have the key to the car, she had that the whole time.
What happened?
Hint. The little kid is not a red herring but an essential piece of the puzzle.
I'll give you another hint. This good samaritan was able to solve the problem by removing something.
Good luck.
Answer time.
The little tike was playing around in the car, and then, it wouldn't start.
So what happened? How did he ruin the car, while it was off, in just about 20 minutes?
If you were sitting behind the wheel pretending to drive as a kid, what would you do if you were if you were sitting there? What would you what would you be doing if you were pretending to drive your mother's car for example, in the 1980a? You'd probably be turning the wheel left and right. What else would you be doing? Hitting the horn, for sure. And stepping on the pedals. The gas pedal.
This kid was pumping the gas pedal like crazy.
And what did I remove? One of the spark plugs. The hint here was it was the 1980s.
So one cylinder had its intake valve open and when he sat there pumping the pedal, he emptied the entire contents of the carburetor, all the gas was in the full barrel carburetor.
So the cylinder heads were filled up with gasoline and when the mother tried to start the car upon returning from the store, it locked up because the gasoline was uncompressible.
Removing the spark plug allow that gasoline to be pushed out when the engine was cranked. And when the spark plug was put back in, the engine started right up, and all was right with the world.
That kid... wonder where he is now?
