A Hunk of Burnin' Oil
Time for the puzzler. I have several puzzlers which I've been tempted to use. We have had a rash of non-automotive puzzles and I thought it'd be nice to have an automotive puzzler.
So I thought that I would use an automotive puzzle this week. And the dilemma is coming up with a good one.
But I got it. Here you go.
A fellow came into the shop. He was complaining about his car. I don't remember what kind of car it was. It could be any kind of car that burns gasoline. And he was complaining that all of a sudden, the car began to burn oil. The car had about 75,000 miles and until this moment had been perfect. He was changing the oil every 3 or 4 thousand miles, as we had suggested. He'd been doing this faithfully and all of a sudden, he's driving along one day and the oil light comes on.
He said, "Oh my god, I've run out of oil. I must have a leak of some kind." He pulls up the dipstick and... half his oil is gone. Out of the four quarts he had, only two were left. So he put two quarts of oil in. He immediately drove it to the shop and asked them to check for a leak, being sure that he had one.
They assured him that there was no leak. Two weeks later, the oil light comes on again. He is down two more quarts of oil and now, he's convinced that he's burning oil and he wants to know why. What happened? Why did this happened?
Well, you might say, "Well, some catastrophic thing occurred." But nothing catastrophic occurred. This thing didn't overheat. It wasn't abused. But what is the chain of events that occurred here that caused the car to go from no oil consumption to rapid oil consumption?
My brother had the very same thing happened to him with his wonderful '67 GMC Suburban. But the reason for it was he broke a ring. He went from burning no oil to burning all of it. However, nothing of that nature happen in this case.
So, what is going on here?
