New carb rubbers needed?

I’ll say so! The following picture says it all.

Replacing them both didn’t take too long to do – a couple of hours at most – but it was well worth doing. Both carb inlet rubbers seem to be exposed to the same sort of environment, at the back of the engine and above exhaust outlets. But for some reason, whereas the right hand rubber still looked almost new, the left hand one was completely shot. No wonder the engine was running rough. In fact it’s almost a wonder that it was running at all and am I glad that I switched it off so promptly when it began to shake.

I wonder if the last time there was a problem, it only affected the right hand rubber and someone just replaced that one, leaving the left hand one alone. If so, in my opinion it was a false economy because although these things are a bit pricey for what they are, it seems to me that they should be changed before they actually split, say every three years at most or every 300 hours, as Rotax recommend. That will be my policy in the future, although at my age who knows how many times I’ll get the chance to do so 😉

Although I won’t be using it, I took the panel that I’ve been working on to Malbec with me and put it into place to see how it will look.

I think that the layout works pretty well, but on this afternoon’s evidence, I think that I might need to move the central group of six gauges (two x 80mm, four x 57mm) slightly to the right to make sure that they clear the vertical panel supports. All I need now is for the new aluminium to arrive so I can get cracking on it.