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: This was one from my "Day In the Life of Ray" series.
TOM: Yeah, when you screw up something else. What'd you do? Drop a car off the lift again?
RAY: No, no, no. No, I remember this puzzler, actually. A few weeks ago, our vacuum cleaner broke and before throwing it out, I decided to take it apart to see if I could fix it. And this is a conventional, I think what you'd call a canister vacuum cleaner that's kind of on its own wheels. It looks like a torpedo -- has the hose on one end, and it's got the switch on top and the cord -- which gets tangled around every chair leg in the house -- comes out the other end. And the whole thing is made of plastic. In fact, it's fair to say, it's lightweight junk.
TOM: Hm.
RAY: Anyway, I take the thing apart, and I find the problem, amazingly: there's a broken wire at the motor. So I say, whoop-de-doo, I don't really have to throw it out; I can fix this thing.
TOM: Yeah!
RAY: While I'm fixing it, I noticed that attached to the base of this thing on the inside is a huge chunk of metal. I think it's iron. It looks like it weighs about two pounds. And I remembered years ago, when I took my stereo amplifier apart, I noticed it also had a huge chunk of metal. Otherwise, it was a big empty box and they put that in there so you wouldn't think it was a big, empty box with 65 cents worth of electronic components. They stuck in a big chunk of iron to make it seem like it had some heft to it.
TOM: Those evil marketing, it's the marketing people who do stuff like that.
RAY: Yeah. They made the thing and they said, are you kidding me --
TOM: Yeah. No one's going to --
RAY: No one's going to pay 300 bucks for this.
TOM: Exactly.
RAY: Add some beef to it. Where's the beef? So I say, those sleazeballs! They put this big hunk of metal in my vacuum cleaner to make it seem like it's not just a cheap piece of plastic. And I thought, wait a minute. Do I want my wife dragging around a vacuum cleaner that's two pounds heavier than it needs to be? I'll just throw this piece of iron out. So I remove it and I toss it out. You with me so far?
TOM: I'm with you, man.
RAY: And I put the vacuum cleaner back together. And I'm sitting at the kitchen table --
TOM: Feeling pretty smug.
RAY: -- smugly fixed something else, smugly chewing on an apple, waiting for my wife to finish her outdoor chores so I can have her come back to there. She was painting the house.
TOM: She's slopping the pig?
RAY: She's slopping the pig, painting the house, cutting the grass, so I could demonstrate to her --
TOM: That you had made it easier for her to take care of her indoor chores.
RAY: Anyway, she comes into the house and I proudly proclaim that I've fixed the vacuum cleaner and made it lighter --
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: -- and I invite her to press the button. And she does. And the question is, what happened? Well, I'm sure most of you would expect that the thing burst into flames or vibrated itself to death. But I gave a hint and the hint was: I was chewing on an apple and the apple should remind you of whom?
TOM: William Tell. Adam and Eve.
RAY: Well, one, yeah, three guesses. This is --
TOM: A doctor.
RAY: You get three guesses for a quarter.
TOM: I got three. I got the three most obvious things.
RAY: You got, what if an apple hit you in the head? Who would that remind you of?
TOM: Isaac!
RAY: Isaac Newton, there you go.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: And I was reminded of Newton's third, second or first law of motion. I think it's the third, which says, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
TOM: Oh, that's why you were eating the apple.
RAY: That's why I was eating the apple. It was a hint.
TOM: Oh, a hint.
RAY: And when she hit the switch, the fact that I had removed this hunk of iron made the vacuum cleaner behave in a peculiar manner.
TOM: Sure.
RAY: The motor started turning in one direction and the whole vacuum cleaner --
TOM: Turned in the other direction.
RAY: Turned in the other direction.
TOM: Started doing flips on the kitchen floor, right?
RAY: Ripping the cord out of the wall, creating all kinds of sparks at which point --
TOM: And a fire.
RAY: At which point my wife said, good work, Hon. So they had put the weight in for a reason.
TOM: Yeah, I guess so.
RAY: I guess so.
TOM: It wasn't the sleazeball marketing types; it was the sleazeball engineering department.
RAY: Anyway, so who's our winner?
TOM: Well, the winner is John Harding from Washington, DC who may be a lawyer or a politician, in which case he will not get the prize. But if he is neither of those, he will get a $25 gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division of the Car Talk section of cars.com. With that $25 gift certificate, John is going to get one and nine-sixteenths copies of our CD, Why You Should Never Listen To Your Father When It Comes To Cars, which by the way, makes a perfect Mother's Day gift.
RAY: Yeah. It also comes with a two-pound chunk of steel. So you won't be --
TOM: Which we happen to have left over.
RAY: -- getting a cheap plastic CD, yeah.
TOM: Right.
RAY: Anyway, we'll have a new puzzler coming up in the third half of the show, so don't slam off the radio in disgust just yet.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
