unfortunate series of events
Posted: Mon Jun 19, 2006 5:28 pm
I have been working on setting up an old holley bugspray to run on my 1914, and following up on some suggestions, I removed the top of the carb for probably the 5th time within the last couple of days, upon reinstalling it, it appears that I put pressure on the float and changed the setting enough that it would not shut off fuel flow (the carb is a tight fit with the fan housing, and I have modified the housing to fit, but its still tedious to remove or install the carb top), not knowing that I had messed up the float setting, I started the buggy for a test run, backed down the driveway, the engine stalled, and as I tried to restart it, the accelerator pedal dropped to the floor, thinking that somehow the cable had come loose, I got out to investigate, and thats when I discovered my engine was on fire, grabbed an extinguisher, and quickly put out the fire, I felt lucky as i appeared to have done minor damage. The fire burnt/melted the plastic fuel filter, scorched primary wires to the coil, and from the compufire inside the distributor, it also melted the foam prefilter, and burnt the K & N beneath it, scorched some paint on the intake manifold, and heated up the return spring so it would no longer spring. I rinsed off the extinguisher powder, and left to dry. I had other matters to attend to that day (Saturday), so my son and I pushed the buggy up the driveway. Sunday morning I replaced all the burnt wires, fuel filter, all hoses, reset the float level, made sure that was working, and tried to start the buggy with my son standing by with the extinguisher, it would not crank over, so thinking dead battery, I hooked up the charger, charged the battery, and it would crank over, but acted flooded. Thats when a friend drove up, and noticed my engine was leaking from the front pulley, no leaks from the carb anywhere, and thats where I was looking. Turns out that having left the buggy parked uphill, allowed the fuel to siphon, to the point that it was high enough, that when I removed the dipstick, I could see it. At this point, I have drained about 1 1/2 gallons of oil/gas mixture that looks like it would run an old outboard, refilled it with 40 wt oil, removed the spark plugs and cranked it over to hopefully squirt out any excess fuel trapped in the cylinders. The plan is to start it, idle for a while, drain all the oil and refill, and hope I have not damaged any internals from trying to compress large amounts of fuel in the cylinders. At this point, I have not been able to start it, could be severely flooded still, or for some reason, no spark, but I will have to wait until later to investigate that, have to get to work. I can only hope my luck improves today. And after all this, the carb might still not run right. Will have to wait and see.