The Crusty Phenomenon

A few weeks ago we had a puzzler about spark plugs and the large air gap between the end of the plug wire and the spark plug. My mechanic, Crusty, had a flooded engine, and he pulled the plugs almost all the way out, creating an unstable connection, and it started right up. Remember this?

The question was about, "How come this works?"
And the Carl Sagan worthy answer was something about how the highest voltage appears across the highest resistance. This is true.

Now, here is this week's question.

After I explained it to our friend Stanley, he said, "Well, if that's the case, why wouldn't you want the hottest spark all the time? Why wouldn't you leave the wires dangling like this all the time? How about if you just made the spark plug gap bigger?"

He had an old jalopy, like a '63 Dodge Dart, whose spark plug gap was supposed to be 32,000-35,000th of an inch. If you were supposed to have it at 35,000, what if you increased it to like 90,000?
Then, it would really be the highest voltage appearing across the highest resistance, right?

Then you could take advantage of what we are now calling the Crusty Phenomenon!

Then you would have a really strong, heavy spark all the time.

Your car would start all the time, rain or shine, flooding, non-flooding... And you get obviously improved combustion because you'd have this more intense spark.

This is a good question. The Crusty Phenomenon could, in fact, be extended to the Stanley version of the Crusty Phenomenon...

So the question is, why don't we do that?

To be clear, we currently have bigger spark plug gaps on some modern cars, but why couldn't you increase the spark plug gap on this 1963 Dodge Dart?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Useless Information

Hi all. Puzzler time again. This is going to be a real short puzzler this time. This one is excellent. It is very good.

A while back, one of our guys was replacing the head gasket on a car. The head gasket is the one that goes between the cylinder head and the block of the engine. It was a four cylinder car. I think it was a Ford Escort or something. And you could easily put the gasket on incorrectly. Especially if you're an automobile mechanic!

So they had written on the gasket the following letters.

T.O.P.

And I was walking and saw where the T.O.P. was written. And I said to my mechanic, "Well, that's a useless piece of information, isn't it?"

He said, "I beg your pardon. I beg to differ."

So here is the question.

What did I mean by that?

Find out here »

Congratulations to this week's
puzzler winner:

EdMazurek
Staten Island, NY

Congratulations! This correct answer was chosen at random by our Web Lackeys.

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Thursday, May 26, 2022

Can you solve this week's puzzler?

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Useless Information

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Carl Sagan Worthy

New puzzler time!

Now, I don't want anyone to think that I'm ripping any puzzles off, because this one does bear a striking resemblance to the puzzler from last week!
But I'm sure that's fine. As my brother would say, not a single person on this fair planet, including our own mother, would ever listen to this show twice. Certainly not twice in a row!
When I called the house, she'd say, "Ray who?" She always liked Tom better!

Okay, the sort of new puzzler...

Some years ago. Crusty old mechanic. Beat up, worn down Buick. Comes in. The engine is flooded. This is probably ringing a bell for anyone who read this last week!
Anyway, the engine, it's flooded. I told the mechanic to look at the spark plugs.
He said he wanted to try something. And he took all the spark plug wires off the plugs. He left them halfway on. Instead of taking the wires all the way off, as I said, he left a distance between the ends of the spark plug in the metal part of the spark plug wire. So there was a big gap where there had been a good metal-to-metal connection, which conventional wisdom tells us you need to get electricity to flow from one place to another. For example, you wouldn't screw your light bulbs halfway into the socket.

So he wants to try this. He turns the key, and it starts right up. Amazing. And when that happened in the garage, there was a chorus of, "Oooooh. Amazing!"
This was roughly 100 years ago that this happened. Over the years, we have had many opportunities to verify that this technique absolutely works. So empirically, we have proven that this works. The question I asked last week was, is this possible? Is it possible that this technique actually works? And the answer was, yes.

But this week's question is, how is this possible?

What's going on here? I want the real technical explanation, please! You must have the real, scientific answer. We want the Carl Sagan worthy scientific answer to this week's puzzler.

Good luck!