dwerbil wrote:For my '84 RS, I've got carb kits coming in from Bing and have a spare crock pot for hot soaking the carbs. What do you all recommend for a safe and effective cleaning solution?
Randy, I personally am not a fan of dunking a carb in a cleaner of any stripe. My big reservation is that you can never be sure all of those tiny passageways really got cleaned. And when they haven't, you have to do the whole thing over again.
My alternative approach is to use as soft and stiff a thin wire as I can find, and mechanically loosen the crud with spray carb cleaner.
There are "schematic" diagrams of the Bing CV carb passageways somewhere on the internet. (IIRC from the Bing Agency.) They are a clue as to where the passageways go and what functions they connect. But my best method is to hold the carb in hand and look at the bumps on the casting for the drillings, and also the plugs that block off the drillings where they have to be blocked.
Then I will squirt some carb cleaner in the passageway and watch where it is supposed to come out. And when I see it I am assured that the passageway is open. I use the soft wire ensure that the passageway is fully open. (Pay a lot of attention to those itty bitty holes both in front of and behind the butterfly. Also the passageways having to do with the idle jet.)
(Actually I'm not afraid to use a piece of guitar wire to run through the passage. It has the virtue of being stiff. I will take the end of the wire to a grinding wheel and make sure any sharp corners or points are blunted first, before using.)
Actually I used my "technique" a few years ago to clean the carb on one of my Dad's farm trucks. It was truly running rotten. He handed me a kit he bought and said something to the effect of, "Here you go son!" Well, I was trapped. I had to deal with a carb I didn't understand much beyond the accellerator pumbs. But I carefully took it apart, making damned sure I could figure out how to put it together again, and then cleaned all of the passageways by examining the drillings and having a foggy idea of what drilling did what.
Frankly I was surprised when the damned truck started right up and ran like a champ. I still wonder what those itty bitty steel balls and springs do inside the carb.
You are good with detail stuff Randy, and I'm guessing this approach might be right up your alley.
And now I'll quit selling my method. Well, OK, not before a horror story. One of my project bikes, a R100S, has carbs with the plastic tags/caps literally melted a bit from carb cleaner. I'm guessing that a previous owner thought the thing to do was to find the most aggressive carb cleaner and then "boiled" the carbs in it for 40 days and 40 nights.
Ken
