If you watch old war movies, like The Battle of Britain, you can see that a fighter diving to take the enemy from above invariably begins with an up and over swooping manouvre. Pete reckons this is to keep downward (centrifugal) force working on the float.
Provided it works I'm not going to change anything, swapping housings means dismantling the carb again, might end up with more leaks than ever. If the Black Bullet had rear suspension it would tip the whole frame forward and my new carb might then line up, normal to the ground. Maybe that's where the cant comes from - this carb has been designed for a bike with its tail up.
Last night an old friend dropped by and checked out the bike. Jonesy has plenty of experience with cars, a bit of a boy racer in his youth. After swapping carb-mare stories – he recently gave up trying to set up a pair of Dellortos on his son’s mini – he held up an Amal float for inspection.
“There’s quite a bit of play in the clip,” he said bouncing the float on the needle, “are you sure the float level isn’t adjustable, by bending the clip? If you push the float down it will close the valve earlier, which might stop it flooding.”
I shrug and tell him my thinking; “There’s only one indent on the original needles. The new replacement I bought before I started work on the original carb has two but I’ve installed the new float at the level corresponding to the indent on the old ones.” I assumed one indent meant one level, i.e. no need to adjust, and that the new parts were designed to be as generic as possible.
Jonesy reckons it’s worth s squirt and when he’s gone I lift the tank and unscrew the top of the float chamber to change the setting. It takes a few minutes and strikes me that I probably could have completed the whole repair like this, if i’d known what the hell I was doing.
While I’m at it, I use the stability provided by the carb being securely bolted to the cylinder block to check the tightness of the various nuts and bolts. Good purchase and no need for a vice in this condition.
Incredibly, the bike starts on the third kick and apart from being a bit lumpy, there’s no, I repeat, no signs of fuel leakage. I’m trying to stop physically jumping for joy as that peculiar elation that comes with successful problem solving builds up in my chest. I want to do a rebel yell.
Almost immediately, however, I’m thinking about why it’s running so lumpy. It’s as if my thought processes got stuck in an infernal eddy current the moment the throttle housing gave way in the vice. And as soon as the resulting problem, or trail of problems, is solved, I’m freewheeling and back in the mainstream. I want to get back to where I was, I want to solve the lumpiness and get riding. It’s not the problem solving I’m doing this for, not really.
