CARBURETORS!!!!

Today I came home from work a little early to deal with our webernets.  We are switching internet providers, since our internet breaks obnoxiously frequently.  Of course, it didn't go well.  I had to call Comcast to activate our connection, and their robo-directory ended up sending me to the billing department.  After 10 minutes on the phone, the gal at the other end said, "Ooooh, we need to send someone out to set up your connection"... which is especially annoying, since they told us we didn't need that.  So, someone coming out on Friday to set up our webernets.

After that, it was time for some relaxing with the Model A Ford.  Last week, I had found a short in one of the headlight bulbs.  Essentially, the contacts that are supposed to touch the bulb were also touching each other -- resulting in a short.  Looking at the design, it seems to me that this must happen all the time... the contacts are long and flexible and not that far apart.  I couldn't see a way to keep them apart other than shoving some electrical tape in between them... which is what I did.  This evening I tried to turn the headlights on and the short was back, so I replaced the old electrical tape with a slightly bigger piece, which did the trick.

After some checks in the garage to verify that the new fix was working (turn the headlights on, whack the bucket to see if vibration caused the short to come back), I set off for a short high speed jaunt along the Snohomish river.  I like this stretch of road, the speed limit is 45, and Kingsford maxes out at 45 MPH indicated (which I believe is more like 50 actual, given the speeds folks drive on this road and the fact that I don't hold up traffic).

I had also adjusted the brakes slightly, so when I got to a parking lot near I5, I pulled off to make my checks.  The water pump continues to have a slight leak -- I believe the shaft is scored so the only way to fix this is to rebuild the water pump and that's a kind of obnoxious amount of work when you can just live with the slight leak.  The brake temperatures were reasonable, but gasoline was POURING out of the carburetor (steady drip/small stream where the air goes in).  As you might recall from the facebooks, I had this problem the other week when I forgot to turn the gas off.  I had figured the float was stuck, but a few days ago I ran it in the garage for 10 minutes with no noticeable leak, so I figured it had fixed itself.  Clearly not, now that I'm 20 minutes from home and it's getting dark...  On the bright side, headlights continued to work great!

I didn't want to disassemble the carburetor in the parking lot (and if the float was sunk or something, what was I gonna do?), so I decided to get back on the road and make a beeline for home.  On the road, I could tell something was different -- I couldn't break 40 MPH and whenever the throttle was more than 3/4 open you could tell that something was not right.

When I was about 3/4 of the way home, magically it all got better.  I could once again hit 45 MPH, and the weird sounds/vibes at full throttle went away.  Yeeeeehaw!  I made it home without any further incident (headlights continued to stay out without shorts!).  Once in the garage, I checked and the air intake for the carburetor was now dry...  There must be some sort of intermittent seal issue or something causing the float to occasionally not stop the flow in the bowl?  I bet if I take it apart, I will see nothing wrong & and it will continue to do this intermittent garbage to me.