[Jehos]

Ok, so after the work from my previous thread, I pulled the carbs out of my bike and gave them to my dad to take home and clean out. He used his compressor to blow them out and presumably did some cleaning. He came over to my place on Friday while I was at work and put everything back together. On the upside, it looks like the carb cleaning fixed the problem where one cylinder wasn't firing all the time. On the downside, after he hooked everything back up he said that when you turn the fuel petcock to "on", fuel starts dumping out of some overflow hose coming off the carbs. He thought there might be something wrong with the floats to where they don't shut off fuel from the tank when the float bowls are full. I never saw the problem or how he hooked everything back up, so my question is this:

Could there be a problem with my floats now, or is it possible he just hooked something up wrong? Here's the weird part, he said that while it was dumping fuel, the bike was still running. I didn't understand how the float bowls could get flooded without flooding the rest of the carb and therefore the engine. Any suggestions on where to start looking for the problem?

 

[fog]

Yes, yes, yes. I don't know what your dad Blew into or what with /how much pressure. but generally that was a bad thing to do. All you needed to do was to clear out the pilot circut. If he didn't do that he did nothing but mess up a float valve. Remove the carb and take off the bottoms, No Fear, there's nothing scary in there. you'll see the float and the little valve connected to it. get them arranged in proper order. so that when the carbs are held upright the float travel freely and the valve shuts off the flow of fuel when the float it up.
Remove the pilot jets and look through them they are tiny and plug easilly you must see light through them. They are located down deep in the counterbores next to the main jets. You may need to grind a screwdriver to fit , but you must, MUST!!!! one more time you MUST remove the pilot jets.

Holding them upright lift the float till the valve just shuts and check the float height. it should be 17mm (11/16") from the bowl cover surface. if not bend the little tab that touches the valve needle.

To all,
Never soak your carbs in anything , never use compressed air for anything except to blow the dirt off the outside. You have to take them apart to fix anything. 99.9% of the problems with Ex carbs is plugged pilot jets.

FOG

 

[MaximX]

Also - one trick that I learned on my old bike. The first time you put your carbs back together after cleaning, the float needle valves may stick. So, don't panic. Take a screwdriver, and tap on the float bowl with the handle of the screwdriver. If it was just an initial hangup, this will free the float and the valve will seat. This actually happened to me on my old bike the first time or two that I gave the carbs gas, but they sealed perfectly fine after that.

FOG - why not use compressed air to blow out passages? The carb body is just a casting, if you are using relatively low pressure air, how could it hurt? I don't know about these carbs, but on my Mikunis, some of the circuits had three outlets. So the ONLY way to clean them was put your thumb over one hole, and blow out the other, then switch your thumb, and blow out the second hole. Otherwise, you could have a clogged fuel circuit and clean air circuit and not know it until you put it back on the bike.

 

[fog]

Also - one trick that I learned on my old bike. The first time you put your carbs back together after cleaning, the float needle valves may stick. So, don't panic. Take a screwdriver, and tap on the float bowl with the handle of the screwdriver. If it was just an initial hangup, this will free the float and the valve will seat. This actually happened to me on my old bike the first time or two that I gave the carbs gas, but they sealed perfectly fine after that.

FOG - why not use compressed air to blow out passages? The carb body is just a casting, if you are using relatively low pressure air, how could it hurt? I don't know about these carbs, but on my Mikunis, some of the circuits had three outlets. So the ONLY way to clean them was put your thumb over one hole, and blow out the other, then switch your thumb, and blow out the second hole. Otherwise, you could have a clogged fuel circuit and clean air circuit and not know it until you put it back on the bike.

I was refering to what sounded like an attempt to cure some malady by blowing them off with compressed air. If you have them apart and wish to blow off the cleaner , thats fine. The best way to clean out drillings or passages is to use a squirt can of carb cleaner. then you can see the fluid come out were it is supposed to.
Like I said any attempt to effect any sort of repair when the carbs are all together is futile.

FOG

 

[Jehos]

Just wanted to follow up on this:

I took the float bowl covers off the carbs and went about trying to adjust the needle valves as FOG suggested. The right-side float was perfect, but the left one was off by about 1/16". When I took out the float/needle to bend the little tab on there, I noticed a piece of gunk about the size of a small grain of rice sitting right there on top of the needle. I wiped that off, put the float back in, re-measured, and it was perfect. Put the bike back together and no more fuel dumping all over the place. Thanks again FOG for your advice.

So two pieces of advice to everyone:
1. Listen to FOG, he knows what he's talking about
2. Air compressors are not carb cleaning tools