RAY: Hi. We're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and the answer to last week's puzzler.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: The suggestion for this puzzler came out of cyberspace from a fellow named Michael Lydon and he writes, "I cut my mechanic's teeth, so to speak, as a pump jockey at a Sunoco station in the burbs of Cleveland." In other words, he pumped gasoline at a gas station and he adds in parentheses, "that's the one hint you get."
TOM: Ohhhh. I forgot that.
RAY: We don't know what the hint was actually. Was it gasoline? Was it suburb? Or was it Cleveland?
TOM: Yeah, we don't know.
RAY: And he writes further, "we had a guy who helped out holding wrenches, catching oil spills, holding up cars, and his name was Harley. Strong as an ox and twice as smart, we said. One day a friend came in with a Chevy 350 engine that he picked up at a junkyard and was going to rebuild, and he wanted some pointers on what to do and how to go about the tear down and all that stuff. You know. Then he asked, 'how do I get the engine to rotate in the other direction?' Now if you just picked up any old Chevrolet 350 engine, it would rotate clockwise but this fellow wanted to make it rotate counter-clockwise. Well, Harley was stumped as you might expect, but the question is why would you want to rebuild an engine so it would run backwards?" And the hint is Cleveland.
TOM: Cleveland.
RAY: Where is Cleveland?
TOM: Cleveland is on the Ohio River.
RAY: No. How about Lake Erie?
TOM: The Mississippi River? Yeah, well I was thinking about boats.
RAY: Well you were --
TOM: I knew Cleveland was near water.
RAY: Then if you were thinking about boats and you had two inboard engines, you would want one of them to go one way and --
TOM: One to go one way and one go the other.
RAY: -- one to go the other way. Otherwise, the boat would just go around in circles all the time. You want the props to wash in opposite directions.
TOM: So that would really make it go nice and straight ahead.
RAY: I would think so. I don't really know, but that's what they do, and I'm taking --
TOM: Do they do that now?
RAY: How do I know? I don't even own a boat. The rumors are all false. I do not own a boat. I have never made a boat payment in my life, so I wouldn't know.
TOM: Buy, why would it matter? I don't, I don't like it.
RAY: It could be bogus. I'm just going on blind faith --
TOM: Blind faith.
RAY: -- and it seemed intuitively obvious that you would want the props to go in opposite directions. For symmetrical reasons --
TOM: If nothing else, but I don't think it's necessary.
RAY: I don't either. I think it's bogus.
TOM: I don't think it's necessary.
RAY: Hey. Who's the one who submitted this? Mike Lydon. He's the one who is going to take the heat.
TOM: Yeah. Ask him.
RAY: In fact, we'll give you his email address if it turns out to be bogus. You can send the nasty emails to him. I fell for it.
TOM: By the way, it ain't easy to get it to turn backwards.
RAY: Well, no. It isn't. That will be next week's puzzler.
TOM: Yeah. And since there, and here is why I think it's bogus. Since there are lots of boats that have two engines, it seems unlikely to me that some of them are running backwards --
RAY: Like half of them.
TOM: Like half of them, because it's not easy to do.
RAY: And if you had one engine, how would you get that to run backwards and forwards at the same time? Figure that out.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: Do we have a winner? Did someone send an answer in?
TOM: No.
RAY: I didn't think so.
TOM: Why would we have a winner for a bogus puzzler? Yeah, we got a winner. The winner is John Wyant, from Carrolton, Ohio. Carrolton, Ohio. Right up the road from Cleveland. Of course, that's why he won. And for having his correct answer selected at random from all the correct answers we got this week, John Wyant from Carrotville --
RAY: Carrotville? Just read the thing.
TOM: -- is going to win a $25 gift certificate to the shameless commerce division at the Car Talk section of Cars.com, with which he can get our father's CD collection, just in time for Father's Day. Why you should never listen to your father when it comes to cars. You have to hurry though, we only have a few hundred million of these sitting in the basement.
RAY: Anyway, we'll have a new, I guess mathematical puzzler, coming up in the third half of the show, so stay tuned for that.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
