Good Vibrations

Time for this week's new puzzler. And it is new this week, I'm happy to say.

Years ago, an older gentleman came into the shop. And he gave me this puzzler. He said he thought we could use it. So here it is.

He was driving his old car, an old Chevy from the 60s or 70s, so a really old car. He is driving along out on the highway. All of a sudden, he hears a noise like he's driven over something in the road.

And he thought, "Oh my god, what was that?"

Immediately after that, he feels this incredible vibration from the engine. So he slows down to about 5 or 10 miles per hour. The vibration is still there, but it is reduced because he is going slower now. After a bit, he tries to speed up, and the vibration gets worse. It is shaking like crazy.

So, he stops the car. He turns it off, opens the hood and everything looks okay in there. He looks under the car and everything looks okay there too.

So, he slowly makes his way to the nearest gas station. The gas station attendant looks at the car and can't find anything wrong with it. He has the guy start the car, and then says, "Shut the car off for a second." The owner shuts the car off. Then the attendant says, "Ah ha! I see what's going on here."

The attendant spends about 30 seconds under the hood of the car. He takes something and throws it in the trash. Then he says, "Okay start it up. I fixed your problem. The vibration is all gone."

And the driver says, "Am I gonna make it home okay?"

And the attendant says, "Yes, if you don't get stuck in traffic for too long. Make sure to get it fixed when you can though."

What was wrong with the car?

And the hint is, the car was from the 60s or 70s. But it is unlikely that the car was from the 90s.

Good luck.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Endless Synonyms

This week we are again giving people a chance to come up with more automotive synonyms.

This is a word puzzler with many, many answers. So we are letting people continue to figure out good answers for this. We thought that we didn't give everyone sufficient time to really get some good answers sent in.

So we are restating this word puzzler again.

As we all know there are 1000s of automotive terms, words associated with automobiles, like car parts, car names, car lingo. And what we're looking for are pairs of car related words whose non-automotive meanings happen to be synonyms. And the example we gave last week were 'tire' and 'exhaust.'

There have been a few good ones sent in over the past week. We want to see how many we can get.