Mort's Tune-Up

This is the right season for this puzzler, and that's a hint actually. So pay attention. This particular car, I think can be a lot of different cars, but for the sake of this puzzler, it is a 1980 Chevy Malibu. Okay? And here's what happened. A fellow had the car tuned up at his local filling station. They had Mort tune it up.

"Hey Mort, throw a tune-up into this!"

So Mort tunes it up. And a few weeks later that the customer comes back and complains to Mort. He said, "Gee, since you tuned up my car, the brakes don't work." He says, "What do you mean the brakes don't work?"
"Oh, I don't know. There's something funny going on here. I step on the brakes especially now that there's a little snow on the ground, I stepped on the brakes and the car doesn't want to stop."

And of course, Mort says that it's impossible. "What could I possibly have done in tuning it up that would affect the brakes like this?"

So they take it out for a test drive. And of course, it's a nice dry day, the roads are dry. And Mort says, "there's nothing wrong with the brakes, you're nuts! Nothing wrong with the car at all!"

And sure enough, a few weeks or days or months or years go by, and the customer takes the car back in again on a slippery day. And Mort drives the car again and he says, "Oh, that's it."

So sure enough, Mort did something wrong. But the question is, what? What did he do wrong? And for extra credit, why didn't he notice it the first time?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Fuel Injector

Oh, hey, it's time for the new puzzler. I know you can't wait. I didn't want to get anyone's hopes too high which is why I always say it's a new puzzler coming up. But I didn't say a great puzzler, because you shouldn't raise people's expectations. So this is just a lousy old mediocre puzzle. But it's actually interesting.

A fellow called the garage the other day. This fellow called the shop, and he'd been working on his Jetta out in the driveway. And somebody said to him, some mechanic had said, you have fuel contamination, so you must flush out the entire fuel system. Because you have dirt and water and dead bears and all kinds of stuff in the tank.

So he does it, he drains the tank and he and he decides that he's going to go even further than that. And he removes from the fuel distributor, the tubes that run, they're flexible tubes that run from this thing called the fuel distributor to the injectors. And he takes them all off and he sprays carburetor cleaner into them and gets them all nice and clean. And he goes to put them back.

And that's where the phone call came in. He calls me up and he says, "I did an awful thing. I don't remember where they go."

This is equivalent to swapping the wires and the spark plugs. He's got all these tubes. And he says, "How can I figure out where they go?"

I mean, how many possibilities are out there? Well, you know the four factorial? 24 ways to do it. Is that right? That could be right.

Any one of the four could go in one place. Now my brother argued that since there are only 24 options, he should just try them all!

But I had a different idea. I told him to pick anyone. Wherever the lines reach, just hook them up and drive the car.

"Will it work?" he said, "maybe it won't run." I said, "Don't worry about it. It'll be fine."

The question is will it be fine?