Carb clean-up

As I mentioned in my last post, last weekend I nipped down to see what was involved in removing Our Trike’s carburettors and it was so straightforward that I actually came away with them. I decided that as today’s a Bank Holiday for us here (Good Friday, the Friday before Easter), it would be a good time to do the cleaning I want to do with the aim of getting them refitted tomorrow or Sunday (Easter Sunday).

So I got them onto a small table in my conservatory and stripped the first one. Then I decided I’d go and buy the cleaning solvent and other items that I needed to do the job. Usually most of our local shops stay open on Bank Holidays, but not today. I ended up driving miles to a motor accessory shop that’s always open and fortunately, as the first carb was already in bits, managed to get what I wanted.

I couldn’t take any pics while they were in pieces because, quite honestly, my hands were too dirty to pick up my camera, but there were some quite thick deposits in both of the float chambers that I removed. I guess these were as a result of the fuel evaporating time after time over the years and some deposits had fallen off to form small flakes inside the chamber bowls. So it was a job worth doing as these could have worked their way through and caused a fuel blockage. I also stripped all the other parts, thoroughly cleaned them with carb cleaning solvent and made sure the jets and any other holes were clean and clear by running them through, as far as possible, with a small strand of copper wire that I had previously extracted from a short piece of electrical flex.

The job went pretty well and here’s a pic of the final result – a pair of carburettors, lovely and clean, inside and out.

Now need to get hold of two new Jubilee clips to hold the air filters on as the ones being used at present are very poor quality and the screws are slipping before they are fully tight, which is totally unacceptable. Not a problem. Then I have to decide whether to wire-lock them on or leave it to be done later. I’ll probably do it, but although I’ll need to drill tiny holes in the filters to take the wire, I ptobably won’t drill holes in the carbs themselves. Having thought about it, a better approach will be to make up a tiny bracket for each carb to take the wire that will be held on by the float chamber screw that closest to the filter. If I choose the positions carefully, there will always be the option later of drilling an appropriate place on each carb (appropriate = drilling through a solid bit of the carb body and not into a passageway or something important!)

So that was it for today. Now looking forward to getting them back on and running the engine. Tuning them as a matched pair is likely ot be a bit more challenging, though 😕