Carburetors are amazing. No matter how messed up they get, the car will generally run. Take this 1974 Scout II I bought last winter. The carb was a mess. It looked like someone poured sand into it when I finally opened it for a look. Sure it was a desert race truck, but I guess that’s what happens when gas evaporates. What do I know? I always ran BMWs with fuel injection – which generally runs if you hook the electronic parts up right.
This venturi crap is amazing because you pull air through it and the carb adds gas. And with an engine being a giant air pump it seems to work pretty well. But it also causes a ton of problems. Mostly because I don’t know what I’m doing. Apparently you’re not supposed to rebuild your carb at the beach? It seemed like a good idea at the time…
Carb’s are definitely black magic voodoo stuff. Like magnets. Like jet and needle sizes. How can that little change in the needle or jet actually change the gas going into the engine in a meaningful way? But it does. I do know that my carb was seriously messed up. I just got done rebuilding it and that story is coming soon but this video below is about starting a carb’d car that has a bad accelerator pump. Bad meaning non existent. Of course I had no idea what an accelerator pump is, I just know I needed to turn the idle jets way up to make throttle roll-in work. More importantly, I learned the Scout likes fuel in the morning. Lots of fuel. And this is how I used to start it before rebuilding the carb.
