Both Hitchcocks and Amal have pretty informative websites. I particularly like the exploded views of components which allow for easier identification and pricing of parts. The Hints and Tips sections are also quite useful.
Forums are a bit more hit and miss and ‘submit your question to a qualified mechanic for a fee’ I find ridiculous. If the answer is in the question, and you don’t know the answer, how do you formulate the right question?
In fact formulating the right question is probably the closest you get to actually finding the answer yourself anyway. It’s often just a step from there, one fact missing, one observation overlooked. I start searching for the solution to the current problem by reading around the subject.
A distillation of the carb tuning advice I’ve gathered so far is as follows:
1. Get everything else right before you start;
2. If the bike has been standing, dismantle, check and clean the carb, and re-install;
3. Warm the motor thoroughly before making any adjustments;
4. Identify where in the range of the throttle the problem occurs, and;
5. Be systematic and make one adjustment at a time.
There are onion skin layers of more specific technical information as you drill deeper but let’s keep the story rolling.
Getting everything else right first, I haven’t got time for. This is an idealistic starting point and with the time (and ability) available I need to set achievable goals. Dismantling checking and cleaning the carb is fair enough but it also sounds glib to a man who started out with just this aim and only managed to crush the carb in a vice. There is no ‘don’t crush the carb’ caveat to this piece of advice.
Warm the motor I do with pleasure, it’s the best part of the job. Identify where in the range the problem occurs; it seems to be everywhere, and, make one adjustment at a time is common sense.
Richard was pretty blunt after I told him I’d changed the carb. Almost without a thought he said it would need adjusting. All along I’ve set the replacement up using the old one as a template. How far wrong could I go, I thought? But the flooding issue was solved by changing the way the previous float was adjusted, so I have to abandon blindly following the template of the old one and think it through a bit more.
I’m on my way out to Stratford this morning to witness some testing to the Olympic Park Media Centre. I’ll have to wait until this evening to get back to this train of thought.
