All Fizzy, All Day

The puzzler this week came from my dear brother, Tom.

This one was about ginger ale. And this one requires a bit of storytelling. So, here it is.

When you buy a bottle of ginger ale, after a little while it loses its fizz, right? So my brother conducted an experiment. He thought that if you leave a bottle out of the refrigerator with the cover off, it would go flat, right? So, he went to the store and got two big identical bottles of ginger ale. He got home and labeled them with a marker, A and B.

Then he instructed his whole family on the rules of the experiment. He put a data sheet on the counter. Any time they got a bottle out of the refrigerator, they had to record the precise time they got the bottle out of the refrigerator, which bottle it was, when they took the cap off, when they put the cap back on, and when they put the bottle back in the refrigerator.

At the end of two days, he decided it was time to take a look at the experiment. He opened the refrigerator door and there were the two bottles of ginger ale. One of the bottles of ginger ale had no fizz at all. It was flat. Completely unfizzy. However, the other bottle was just as fizzy as the day he brought it home. All fizzy, all day.

So, he took a look at the data. Both bottles of ginger ale were half full at that point. When he looked at the data sheet, he discovered that both bottles had been out of the refrigerator exactly the same amount of time. When he added up all the times, they came out to be exactly the same. The amount of time that the caps were off the bottles came out to be exactly the same.

So, knowing that is the data from the experiment, how come one of the bottles is flat and the other bottle remained fizzy?

Good luck.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Timing Belt Teeth

This one is truly an automotive puzzler. Not a quasi-automotive puzzler, or a slightly automotive puzzler. A real, honest automotive puzzler.

Years ago we had a fellow come into the shop with a Mazda. One of those really little ones. It was a Mazda 323 I think, way back in the '90s.

The car had about 80,000 miles on it and it had a broken timing belt. If you're not familiar with a timing belt, it is a rubber belt that is flat and it has teeth on one side. The teeth wrap about sprockets and they go around the camshaft and the crankshaft and when they get old, they get weak and fall right off. All the teeth had been stripped on this guy's Mazda.

And we figured this was about the time that it would need a new timing belt anyway. So we put a new timing belt on. Then the guy tells us that he had just replaced the timing belt about 6 months before this. We thought this was strange, but you never know about the work that was done at another shop. Maybe they put it on wrong or something. So he left with a new timing belt. Then, about a week later, he comes back again. He needed a timing belt again. And again, the teeth had been sheared right off.

We were all standing around scratching our heads... So, we went ahead and replaced the timing belt again, assuming that the part must have been defective because we never make mistakes... Right? LOL...

So, we are extra careful when we put on the new timing belt. We check the tension multiple times. The installation is perfect.

Sure enough, a week later the guy comes back. The timing belt broke again. We couldn't believe it. The whole shop was moaning and groaning, just can't believe it. We are about to put on the 5th or 6th timing belt when one of the guys decides to take off the valve cover and take a look inside. He thought that maybe one of the valves was getting stuck, and maybe that was causing the breakage of the timing belt. So he checked it all out and nothing was wrong with any of the valves. However, while he had the valve cover off he noticed something that had to be fixed. He was able to solve the problem by removing a part. He took something out and said, "I guarantee you that this won't break anymore."

So the puzzler is, what did he do? What did he find in there that ended up fixing the problem once he pulled it out?

Good luck with this very, very automotive puzzler!