4X4X8

Puzzler time.

So, imagine, if you will, there is an old man who lives way up in the mountains of New Hampshire. He lives in a very small town deep in the woods.

This man has a flock of sheep that he tends to. A lovely, happy little flock of sheep.

One morning, he comes back from the town and notices that one of his sheep is missing. His favorite sheep is gone. Her name is Elsie.

He decides to figure this out, so he talked to some of the neighbors and asked if they had noticed any strange cars in the area. He wants to know if someone had kidnapped one of his sheep. One of the neighbors said, "Yeah, I did see a car, but I couldn't tell you the make or the model, but it did have an unusual license plate."

So this guy decides to try to find this car. There are not many people who live up there, so he thinks if he has the license plate, he can figure out who took his sheep. And if he has the plate number, he can report it to the police.

So, he asked for the plate number, and the neighbor says, "It was 4 by 4 by 8, as in 4X4X8."

Upon hearing this, the man said, "I know what kind of a car that is, and I know who stole my sheep Elsie."

From that license plate, he was able to tell the make and model of the car, and who kidnapped his sheep.

And the puzzler question is, what kind of a car was this?

Good luck.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Short

Puzzler time. Here we go.

This one is automotive, from something that happened in the shop many years ago.

A customer came in to the garage a while back. Back many years ago now.

Anyway, she came in and she was complaining that she had a short circuit in her vehicle. She said that the fuse was blowing repeatedly. It was the fuse that ran like the tail lights, the dash lights, the courtesy lights...

She put a new fuse in, and sometimes five minutes later, it would blow, or an hour later, or whatever. She had been through this a few times, so finally decided to bring it in.

So I assigned this task to a kid named Manny, a young guy. He's got a little experience in electrical work, and I told him to hook it up to the short tester.

Now basically, the short tester is a device which is nothing more than a circuit breaker that resets, that you put in place of the fuse, and then the other piece of it is an ammeter that you go around and you try to find the weak part of the circuit.

So I go over after a few minutes, I had given him a chance to hook the thing up, and I asked him how he's doing. And he says, "Well, I know where the short is, but I didn't have to use this meter thingy to figure it out."

And I said, "Oh really?"

And he says, "There's something on her dashboard that tells me that the short is nearby, something sitting on her dashboard."

And I said, "Really?"

And here is the hint. Her vehicle was filled with stuff to go camping. Tents and gear, coolers full of beer. Stuff like that.

So what was it?