Kelley et al.....
I (and many of the rest of you on here) am from the "Old School" of the pre-1990's Carburetor vehicles. We KNOW how to live with these little critters. For instance:
We KNOW that they need extra attention when they are cold, and let us know by coughing and puking a lot. We see this as an act of rebelling and take a Macho approach: We Choke the hell out of them!
We KNOW that they bubble over when they're hot and then make the engine hard to start, followed by a different array of coughing and puking, followed by a cloud of black smoke, just to show that they're pissed off.
We KNOW that they often get water condensed on the outside when run in humid weather, and that condensation attracts dust and dirt like a bear to honey, eventually making that small, metal device look like a large, black, featureless, fuzzy mass atop the engine.
We KNOW that a healthy carb produces a constant, steady hiss as the fuel is being vapourized, whilst an unheathy carb sounds more like scrambled eggs frying, with fits and pops and hisses, all mixed together.
We KNOW that an otherwise healthy carb will sometimes, for no good reason and with no intention of malice, "cough up" a large fuel-ball like a cat puking onto your new, white carpet.
We ALSO KNOW, that said fuel ball sometimes ignites within your air cleaner in a futile effort to make it's way to freedom. Often these events are contained within said air cleaner, but others are "Mega-Pukes" with the power to destroy air cleaners, engine covers, rear quarter sections and, sometimes, entire cars.
We SOMETIMES KNOW, that these "Mega-Pukes" are often preceeded by an obscure popping sound, often causing the driver to say to themselves; "hmmmmmm....Wonder what that was?" and then look all around their car, up and down the street, up and down side streets and into all of their rear-view mirrors, buying the "Mega-Puke" fireball time while it's eating it's way out of the air cleaner and heading for freedom.
Competent, experienced, carbureted drivers KNOW that, if they detect a "Mega Puke" fireball in action, that the first line of defense is to MASH THE ACCELERATOR TO THE FLOOR in hopes that the engine will suck it into the cylinder, where it belongs, and devour it. (Hey....works for me!)
We KNOW that no one (or, at least, hardly any one) under the age of 30 years knows a damn thing about a carburetor, nor can they figure out why anyone would ever want to use one when electronic fuel injection works so well.
We ALSO KNOW that those 30-somethings don't know the first thing about getting a carburetored engine to work, no matter if it resides in a car, a boat, a motorcycle or on their lawn mower. They'll sit and stare at it while trying to figure out why it's covered in a black coating of oily fuzz.
Lastly, we KNOW that 753 Bazillion cars, trucks, airplanes, lawn mowers, boats, weed wackers and sex toys have been produced with carbureted engines and THEY all seem to get along, ok.....and yours probably will too........
gn
One of the "Carbureted Speedstah Guys" from South Carolina
(Home of just about every Presidential Candidate this week -
Can you folks Please take them back?)
