Insight

I just had a surprising realization. It won't make me rich, thin, or grow hair back where it's pretty much departed, but what the heck.

I had read a post where a woman talked about a problem she'd had with her Saturn, in that it would occasionally just stop working -- sometimes while she was driving. After much pain and grief, she learned that the 'Crank Position Sensor' was faulty. I'm not really clear how that works (I'm not much of a car guy), but I gather that this is supposed to tell the ignition when it's okay to fire the spark for the first cylinder. When it fails, you don't get the spark, and the car's dead.

My insight? The crankshaft is probably named that because it's the shaft that the actual hand crank would connect to, back when a manual crank was needed to start the car.