If you’ve follow the adventure of the carburetor of my dad’s Indian, you know it has been quite stressing, to say the least! Indeed, repairing the carburetor is an adventure on its own and this is part 3 of such adventure…
If you still have no clue what I’m talking about, you can check the main page for my Indian Scout adventure and / or check out the articles about the carburetor fix part 1 & part 2. Part 1, 2, 3… those are understatements, really, there has been more try and errors than that. So many that I can dismantle and rebuilt the carburetor with my eyes closed by now!
We’ll still call this part 3 of the carburetor fix, just to be consistent. You should know before I even start that there will be a part 4. But part 3 was amazing! See for yourself…
As I was heading to see my dad, last week end, I knew we would have to face off, once again, in a new work cession on the carb. Already while driving to get there, my mind was trying to figure out what to say, how to say it and how to manage what needed to be done: remove the throttle shaft bushings!
The day after my arrival, dad was in his garden, when I started preparing everything for the task ahead. The gas was drained, the carburetor was taken off the motorcycle and mostly dissembled when he arrived. I explained that I had received advise on how to remove the throttle shaft bushings. There was no going back… and he did not try to argue.
How to remove the throttle shaft bushings
If you recall, the carburetor fix part 2, ended u with me giving up on removing the bushings of the throttle shaft. Despite the wiggle of the shaft and the high suspicion of air leak, I had to give up.
But a pro explained to me that to remove the bushings you need to use a threading tap just a little bit larger than the bushings so it leaves a threading in them when inserted. Once inside, you just need to gently tap with a hammer, from the other side to push the bushing out.
Dad got his threading taps out and once the appropriate one was chosen, he started drilling into the first bushing.
We then turned the carb around, tapped with a long enough metal rod on the threading tap, and the first bushing came out. It was so easy, it’s crazy.
As it turned out, the hardest bit was to remove the bushing from the threading tap!
We did the same with the next one and finally, I felt like we were going to sort out the air leak issue!
Installing the new bushings was easy enough. We use a little wood piece to hammer them in, so they wouldn’t get damaged.
Done!
Putting it back together & getting upset… again!
We’ll, let’s just put it all back together, then.
Let’s first put the throttle shaft in…. And… damn, it is so tight, too tight. The throttle can’t rotate at all.
I started being upset.
My dad started sanding the new throttle shaft and when he kept on sanding, I left to cry and scream…
Seriously I was so pissed… once again… Yeah, let’s sand the throttle and recreate the air leaks we were trying to solve. No problem.
And I did the 2 things I had promised myself not to do. First I gave up once more. I let him sand the throttle shaft. Next I rebuilt the whole damn thing, and I put some sealing paste on each side of the shaft. Seriously, I didn’t want to do something like this but I was desperate. We installed the carburetor back on the bike & tested it quickly that evening, it didn’t work great. We were both tired & upset.
Removing the venturi
The next morning, I started early early again. We usually only work in the afternoon but the situation was desperate.
We had realized the previous evening that there was probably be a problem with the nozzle. Once again, I took the carburetor out and started dismantling part of it.
The nozzle came out easily so did the venturi, to my immense surprise! I had tried to remove it before but had not managed. The tapping on the bushing had made it come loose.
Dad was actually kind of excited. He had never seen the nozzle! Considering how easily I was putting things back together, he wasn’t worried anymore about that.
We aligned the venturi back properly, installed the nozzle back in place after having tested all the little holes.
I did the light test and realigned the best I could the throttle disk. The picture below shows a bit too much light coming in.
Once again we put everything back together and went to have lunch… and a little nap!
Testing the carburetor
The time to adjust the carburetor finally came!
We tried to turn on the engine. For some reasons, the ignition wasn’t great. We changed the spark plugs. The old ones seemed to do a better job than the new ones.
The engine started but it worked weirdly unevenly which made it impossible to tune the carburetor. I noticed bubbles in the gas line and dad realized there was probably not enough gas in the tank! A problem we often face!!
We added gas, kicked and vrooom! That was all the bike needed!
As you can tell on the picture below, the gas line of his bike was probably damaged at some point and part of it was replace by a plastic tube. What a blessing actually!!
After a short while, the magic happened!
I had started the tuning of the carb following the manual instruction: 1.5 turn to the left for the high speed needle – 2 turn to the left for the low speed needle.
From there, I tried what I had done in the past several times, turning both to the right. It did no good! However, turning both to the left did wonder!!
For the first time in months, the engine kept a slow and steady pace. I was so please with myself!! 🙂 My dad likes it to run slow, so I had tried my best. Well it seemed I did too well, as at one point, he said that maybe it was a bit too slow!
It doesn’t matter, there are so other things to handle on the bike before we can focus on the fine tuning of the carburetor. At this point, the needles are too opened and I’m pretty sure we are compensating other issues, by doing so.
It was still great and I ended up that day thinking: I can do anything!!
Yes, I should have removed the tennis ball we use to protect the handles!!
Want to help?
Yes you can help me rebuilt my dad’s Indian Scout and see me going on a road trip on it! Here is how:
Or you can just pin the below images!!
