Foolish Medieval Remedies

It is time for a new puzzler! This is not one of those embarrassing puzzlers either, I'm happy to say. This is a good one!

There's a little bit of history woven into this one. Some years ago we had a mechanic that worked for us. Back when we were mere neophytes, back at the turn of the century... You know, way back in the late 80s.
And one day a car came in that had obviously been flooded. It was a cold winter day. And the owner of the car had tried to start it and the choke was stuck. And the thing was flooded. It was pretty obvious. We tried to start it and it made that wrrrrring sound because it was flooded.

We decided we were gonna take the plugs out, but my mechanic stopped me and said he wanted to try something first.
He was a great one for experimentation, this guy. He had always wanted to rebuild the transmission or two!
He took all the sparkplug wires off the plug. He removed them all and instead of taking the plugs out, he put all the plug wires back on but left a distance between the end of the spark plug. There was a distance of perhaps an inch between the end of the spark plug wire, the middle part of the wire, and the tip of the spark plug.

So in other words, the spark had to jump. It was as if the spark plug wires were about to fall off. He installed them in such a manner that they were about to fall off so that the spark could no longer make a smooth transition through a conductor from the wire to the plug. It now has to jump an inch across.
So instead of having what everyone would say is a good connection. You had what electricians would call a lousy connection.
So he did that to all eight plugs.

He does that and he gets in the car and turns the key, and guess what? It starts right up. It starts right up!

And the question is, do you believe this?
The mechanic makes a purposely bad connection. And BINGO BINGO the car starts right up.

Are these old wives tales or are these foolish medieval Alchemist remedies or is there some basic physics involved here?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Shocking Shocks

This is the case of the bad shocks!

The puzzler this week has to do with shock absorbers.

This woman goes to one of those speedy, super quick, fix your car in 5 minutes places. You know, one of those places we are always bad-mouthing and then getting nasty letters from...
Anyway, her car was running rough. And they told her she needed new shocks. The mechanic says, "Here, I'll show you." And he bounced on the rear bumper, up and down, up and down, to prove his point. So she agrees and tells him to put in new shocks.

He puts the shocks in and she drives away. Of course, as luck would have it, they were closing for the night, right as she left. She was very disappointed because the ride was terrible. It was much worse than it was when the old shocks were in there. It was like driving over cobblestone streets. Very rough.

So she went back the next morning and said, "There's something wrong with these new shocks. They're defective."

The mechanic looks at them, and there's nothing wrong with them. He did the test again, pushed the bumper down, and released it. It came to a stop. He said, "They're perfect."

She insisted he put new shocks in again and so he did. And of course, it made no difference. So after all of that, she came to us and said, "What is wrong with my car? What did they do to it?"

So the puzzler question is, what is happening here? Did they do something wrong when putting in the shocks? If not, what is happening here?