The Fuel Injector

Oh, hey, it's time for the new puzzler. I know you can't wait. I didn't want to get anyone's hopes too high which is why I always say it's a new puzzler coming up. But I didn't say a great puzzler, because you shouldn't raise people's expectations. So this is just a lousy old mediocre puzzle. But it's actually interesting.

A fellow called the garage the other day. This fellow called the shop, and he'd been working on his Jetta out in the driveway. And somebody said to him, some mechanic had said, you have fuel contamination, so you must flush out the entire fuel system. Because you have dirt and water and dead bears and all kinds of stuff in the tank.

So he does it, he drains the tank and he and he decides that he's going to go even further than that. And he removes from the fuel distributor, the tubes that run, they're flexible tubes that run from this thing called the fuel distributor to the injectors. And he takes them all off and he sprays carburetor cleaner into them and gets them all nice and clean. And he goes to put them back.

And that's where the phone call came in. He calls me up and he says, "I did an awful thing. I don't remember where they go."

This is equivalent to swapping the wires and the spark plugs. He's got all these tubes. And he says, "How can I figure out where they go?"

I mean, how many possibilities are out there? Well, you know the four factorial? 24 ways to do it. Is that right? That could be right.

Any one of the four could go in one place. Now my brother argued that since there are only 24 options, he should just try them all!

But I had a different idea. I told him to pick anyone. Wherever the lines reach, just hook them up and drive the car.

"Will it work?" he said, "maybe it won't run." I said, "Don't worry about it. It'll be fine."

The question is will it be fine?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Grocery Bag

Hmm, well here it's time for the new puzzler. Here's what happened. A fellow happened to go into his mechanic with a late model Toyota Tercel that was running poorly. And what it was doing is, it was jerking when it was trying to accelerate.

It was especially bad if the engine was warmed up. And the mechanic had done many things to it to try to get this, and several other mechanics had done many things. They tuned it up and added gas treatment to it and changed all, all the tune-up things. They added motor medic, motor honey, motor sweetie, all kinds of stuff and nothing could make this thing run correctly.

This is like a Humpty Dumpty story, isn't it? All the mechanics and all of his men couldn't put the Tercel back together again.

Anyway, this mechanic was checking out the car. And he happened to notice a bag of groceries in the backseat, and he was hungry and he was thinking about helping himself to a banana.

But then all of the sudden, something clicked. He remembered reading an article on this very car.

And he said to the owner, he said, "Gee, you have something in the backseat there, in your bag of groceries that can fix this car!"

Now I'm gonna give you the list of the things that were in the bag.

There were three bananas, a tube of preparation H, two containers of low-fat yogurt, a bag of Blue Diamond walnuts, and a tin of shoe polish (brown). And of course a pint of extra virgin olive oil.

Now it isn't a simple matter of you know taking the one item and smearing it over the air cleaner or pouring it into the gas tank something. There's a special process.

And seeing the item reminded him. It jogged his memory.

He said "Aha!"

So one of these items is the key to fixing this car. Which one of them is it?