RAY: Back in the 1960s a mechanic I knew had a gas station / repair shop, which meant that many of his customer's cars were left outside in the lot overnight. He had some stolen and couldn't protect them from the hotwire thieves that came at night. Back in those days, hotwiring a car and driving it away was a pretty easy thing to do. So he came up with a quick, simple and effective way to discourage them.
He would pop the hood, reach under and in a few seconds render the car unstartable. The neat thing was that if anyone tried to start it, it would seem to want to start. It would cough and hit on an occasional cylinder, like vroom, vroom vroom, and even if they opened the hood, examination under there revealed nothing obvious.
The next morning he would reach under the hood and in 10 seconds or less have the car running. The question is, what was he doing?
The Extra 40 Pounds
RAY: This came from a fellow named Josh Kokendolfer who says, "This is a true story”:
It was a brisk December morning. A co-worker and I had a simple job to do that day: clean out a job site and take the trash to the local landfill. And we had an F-350 pickup that was outfitted with a dump-truck bed. We filled it up and headed out. When we arrived at the landfill we pulled the truck onto the scale that weighed our vehicle and the woman in the office waved us through.
We unloaded and headed back out to the scale. Once again our truck was weighed. Before getting into the truck I noticed that one of the back tires was low. I decided to stop at one of the local gas stations to check it out and fill all the tires just in case.
After lunch we loaded the truck a second time at the site and headed back to the landfill. Everything went just like the first time. After we were weighed on exiting, I went to pay the bill. My co-worker looked at the paperwork and noticed something strange.
The first time we left we weighed 6,480 lbs. And the second time we exited we weighed 6,440 lbs - a difference of 40 lbs. We were being charged for an extra 40 pounds of trash that we didn't have. I immediately complained to the office manager. She grinned and said, "There's nothing wrong with our scales." Well, if that's the case, what happened?
RAY: The reason the truck weighed 40 pounds less is that had burned 40 pounds of gas, or about six gallons.
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The Principle of Least Interest: He who cares least about a relationship, controls it.
In that time period, I have disabled cars 1 of 4 ways.
(1) disabled the ignition by (a) removing the wire connecting the coil to the distributor. There would be no spark, so the engine would crank but not start, or even flutter, so this is not the solution. Or(b) I ran a ground wire from one of the coil connectors to a switch hidden under the dashboard, that would also disable the coil. Same as above, no spark and no flutter or stutter.
(2) Disable the fuel supply. Possibly by clamping or disconnecting the fuel line near the fuel filter. But this is risky, since a clamp could cause damage, and a disconnected gas line could dump fuel into or under the engine compartment because some cars had / have a fuel pump at or inside the gas tank, in addition to the pump up front.
(3) open up the fuse box and pull out the fuse (or the relay) for the fuel pumps.
(4) shove a raw potato into the tail pipe to block the exhaust. No exhaust, nor fuel air mix getting into the cylinders. But the potato could get blown our of the tail pipe instead. And that's not under the hood.
My best guess is ....
Spoiler
he removed a fuse or relay.
__________________
The Principle of Least Interest: He who cares least about a relationship, controls it.
