Yeah, they help. I think you'd be more successful making sure the air cleaners seal properly though. That dirt's comin' in from somewhere...
My opinion runs counter to conventional wisdom. We all fixate on the air side of the equation, and the Jet Dr(s) pretty much fix that, as does spraying the filters with K&N oil, coating the filter seals with Chap-Stik or something similar, etc.
I run the queen-mother of all fuel filters. I don't know what it's out of, but I stood at the Farm and Fleet Fram fuel filter display, and picked the biggest one without a thread (it's about 3" around, and 6" long). I then crossed the Fram number to get a better filter. I change it every couple of years.
My tank looks like the day it was new inside.
On a freshly rebuilt set of carbs, I never plug an idle jet. I went for 5+ years without ever looking at them.
But, as time goes on, they plug more and more. Just before The Smoky Mountain Hoo-Ha, I pulled a piece of black lung out of one of my transfer ports with a little needle-nose pliers. It was nearly 3/8" long, and looked like a black ringworm.
That little bit of love came from somewhere. Here's my theory:
Everybody hates on ethanol in fuel, but I've never jumped on the bandwagon. I feel like with a good quality E10, I can run more compression and get away with it, as compared with pure gasoline. Lots of really smart guys are building very high compression engines and running E85-- just jet for it and voila, poor-mans race gas.
But here's what I found when I tore the carbs apart to get that little bugger out of my idle circuit-- disintegrating floats. The resin what-not used to make them (as opposed to brass) being eaten away by 5+ years of just throwing sta-bil in the tank in October, and letting the gas evaporate out of the bowls.
The crap is coming from somewhere-- but I don't think (in my case, at least), it's coming from the air side (so a Jet Dr could take care of it), or from the fuel (per se)-- it's coming from the carbs eating themselves due to a fuel that (while it has many nice properties) doesn't play nice with the stuff floats are made out of.
My plan going forward will be to continue to run good quality 93 octane E10, because trying to avoid it means never going anywhere, and I'm already tuned for it. But, I think I'll run the float-bowls dry every chance I get-- at the end of the season for sure, but probably on final shut-down at the end of a "30 minute vacation" run. I'd love to find floats that liked ethanol better, but in the absence of that, I'll just figure on rebuilding the carbs every few years.
That's the plan for now, anyhow. If I were smart, I'd buy some throttle bodies, and start setting up for EFI, but I'm a hard-head that way.
