Sunday, September 13, 2009

I Just Wanted To Make It Look Nice

Dateline – Sep 4 – 12 – Over the summer I have been parking the car in the garage when I got home and have really noticed a bad gas smell after it sits. With the new Methanol mixed gas, this smell is really noxious and that much gas vapor in the garage can not be a good thing! So I decided to rebuild the carb, assuming that there is gas leaking out of the carb into the engine, since I could not find gas leaks anyplace else.

I pulled the carb and tore it completely apart, including removing the butterfly valves and linkages. I then spent about seven hours polishing the entire carb body with aluminum wheel polish and a toothbrush, then using NeverDull to give it a nice polished look. Of course, during reassembly, I forgot how some of the linkage went back together (should have taken pictures!) but finally got it together and back on the car. Boy does it look nice (see pictures)!











The problem then was the

car ran horribly! I spent about three hours troubleshooting, adjust the floats, playing with idle speed,

mixture screws, etc., but could not get it to run well. Seems like it was either running rich on one side, or lean on the other! So, I pulled the carb off the car and disassembled it completely…again! I checked to make sure that the butterfly valves were installed correctly and closing completely (they may have been slightly off), the metering jets were in the right place on both sides (.098 primary, .095 secondary), which they were, and blowing out with carb cleaner and compressed air every passage and port on the carb. I assembled the carb again and put it back on the car, and voila, it ran like a top! Not sure what the problem was, since everything looked correct before disassembly except for the butterfly valves being slightly off, so perhaps that was it, or maybe some junk in a port that I could not see. At least it is running now and no longer smells of gas when I let it sit in the garage.