Carb Cleaner Chronicles

Carb Cleaner Chronicles

LEANINGS

peter Egan

ACCORDING TO MY ILLUMINATED CLOCK, it was 3:23 a.m. when I suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. A primal alarm bell had gone off in my head (which is nothing but a vast warehouse of primal stuff) telling me that something was wrong.

“Wazzamatter?” Barb inquired, without enunciating properly.

“I smell something...” I said. “A furnace or chemical smell or something...”

I sniffed the air and then realized it was just my hands. Carb cleaner and old gasoline.

Ah, yes. After working in the garage that evening, I’d showered and cleaned my fingernails with a painfully stiff brush, but it still wasn’t enough to eradicate that weird combination of odors, a blend that conjures up images of a Superfund cleanup site, or the rich soil beneath an ancient automobile wrecking yard after a rainstorm. In the springtime.

It’s a terrible thing when your own hands wake you out of a sound sleep, but there it is. I’ve been doing a lot of carburetor cleaning lately. It’s almost an epidemic, by normal standards.

It started with my black 1981 Ducati 900SS, the bike I bought back from my friend Tom Barbour in Colorado (see “Ducatis & Cigarettes,” page 88).

When I picked it up two months ago, it ran pretty well in the high mountains near Fort Collins. But when I hauled it downhill to our home in Wisconsin, where the air is dense and all the children are above normal, the engine started missing at around 6000 rpm. Tom had ridden this bike only occasionally in recent years, so I suspected carb gumming in some form. Time to pull my handy Snap-On roller stool up next to the bike and remove those great big Dell’Orto 40mm carbs.

This is a pretty easy job on the Ducati, as the carbs stick out from the heads like alien eyeballs on stalks. Only BMW airheads make it easier.

On a Beemer, you could probably repair your carbs while riding down the road, if you were only more dexterous with your toes. But, alas, many BMW owners have evolved away from that primitive state. And so have their bikes, which are fuelinjected and now repairable only by scientists or smart people.

Anyway, I got the Ducati carbs off and carefully disassembled them over a pair of aluminum cake pans. I have to be extremely methodical and talk to myself like a child when I take carbs apart so I don’t lose parts or mix them up. I say things like, “Okay, now I am taking this little O-ring from the throttle-stop screw and placing it in the upper right-hand corner of the cake pan, so it will not dissolve in the carb cleaner and I will remember where it is two hours from now.”

I also count the exact number of turns out on each adjustment needle and write it down, so I have some starting point when it’s time to fire up the bike. As a mechanic, it’s important never to overestimate your own intelligence or memory. Humility is an asset-and I have much to be humble about, as Churchill once said about someone else.

Gratifyingly, I found some strange green sludge surrounding the needles at the bottom of both main jets. Many particles of carburetor grit are so small they fall out while you’re disassembling the thing, so you never get the satisfaction of saying, “Ah-HAH!” Which is half the fun.

So the Dell’Ortos found themselves sinking beneath the brownish waves in my can of carburetor cleaner like a pair of small U-boats. An hour later they surfaced, all clean. I washed them off in our kitchen sink (which now smells curiously like an ancient junkyard after a spring rain) and put everything back together.

The bike started right up. When it was warm enough, I disconnected the sparkplugs one at a time and adjusted the airmixture screws and idle speed and synched the throttles. I went for a test ride, wearing my green shop coveralls and old tennis shoes (which you never see in Ducati brochures.) Amazingly, the bike ran perfectly. Success.

I took the Ducati for a long afternoon ride, then came home and decided to give my DR650 Suzuki a little exercise, as it has knobbies on it and doesn’t get much street use any more. My dirt rides are “widely spaced,” so it sits a lot. The Suzuki, of course, would not start.

It would fire once or twice, spit back a few times and then die. Choke, no choke; it didn’t matter. I’d seen this before. The DR has a pilot jet with very small drillings and seems especially susceptible to carb blockage whenever it sits for more than about three weeks. I’ve had the carburetor completely off the bike three times in the past two years.

I’ve never actually seen any debris in the carburetor, but this is a ritual I have to go through to appease the carburetor gods, like a witch doctor shaking a rattle-gourd at a volcano. You gotta do what works.

And I did. Cleaned the DR carb, squeezed it back between the cursed rubber intake manifold and air cleaner, and fired the bike up. It runs fine now.

But of course my hands woke me up in the middle of the night, as mentioned. I got up and put on some of Barb’s lightly scented hand cream, but it didn’t work. Hopeless, like using English Leather on your horse.

So rather than waste the moment, I decided to go out in the morning and rebuild the clogged carburetor on my 1973 Jacobsen snow-blower, which had also failed to start this week.

I did the job and now it runs.

The next day, I made a complex trade deal to get back my old 1977 Harley XLCR Cafe Racer. Which has been sitting in an unheated garage for seven years. I figured once you’ve got the carb cleaner out and are radiating stink rays in all directions like a beacon of liver damage, you might as well keep going. My hands should be back to normal by summer.

It may take that long. We went to the movies last night (Across the Universe) and I actually noticed the couple seated ahead of us sniffing the air and looking at each other, as if puzzled by something.

I was tempted to lean forward and say, “You oughtta hear that Ducati run.”