When we last left our intrepid hero, he was struggling with his massive giant-like strength and how to stop breaking off important bolts. With the luck of the gods he was able to acquire replacement bolts and using his impressive collection of tools and mental prowess, he was able to remove the sheared off bolt from the caliper. Flush with victory, our gallant hero referred to the service manual to ensure that future attempts would not cause metal failure. Locating the important data.... or so our hero thought... he proceeded to install the NEW caliper mounting bolt. But once again, the Fates were against him, for he had misread the the torque specs and his own massive godlike strength ripped the bolt in twain once again. A loud cry was heard for miles around. Small children cried and wet themselves. Animals refused to leave their borrows and barns for fear of the fierce scream. Women wailed and gnashed their teeth as the men cowered over them attempting to alleviate their fears but the men themselves being overwhelmed with fear.
Finally peace descended once again onto our hero as he regained control of his epic anger and attempted to collect himself. Setting aside the tools of this task, he instead focused on things he had control over. He knew that he must check the internals of the carburetor before the beast could be awoken. Upon inspection of the secret openings into the heart of the beast, our hero discovered thick muck and crystallized fuel. Knowing that he could not even attempt to bring the beast to life with it's very heart full of ichor, our hero set about the desperate operation required to clean out the heart of the dragon.
Ok... now that I got that off my chest.
So yeah, while attempting to install an ebay/used caliper bolt, I managed to shear that one too. I looked up the torque specs for that size bolts and it said 36ft/lbs. Well, once I sheared off bolt #2, I dug further and discovered that their is a special bolt torque listed for the caliper bolts... 27ft/lbs!?!?! Sigh... So instead of giving up, I decided to see what else I could try to get cleaned and fixed while deciding if I was going to buy new bolts or try ebay again. I opened the float bowl drain and nothing came out, which was expected. What I saw inside was trouble. On the end of the plug/bolt there was a thick glob of crystallized gas. Inside, I could see the munge going up into the carb float bowl. I buttoned up everything and put away my tools and headed inside to see what my options were. I decided to order the basic carb rebuild kit from V4Marketplace along with a stainless steel screw kit and some other odds and ends. Then I went and tried a couple of more things on the Jeep, which I will detail in a separate and shorter post.
Skip to a week or so later, give or take a couple of days. The parts had arrived within a few days and I waited until I had a free day to work on it. In the interim, I had collected all the posts, documents, and photos that I might need to do the carb rebuild. Heeding the wise advice of several posters over at the V4musclebike.com forums, I took lots of pictures as I disassembled everything. Getting the carbs out of the frame was a bit easier than everyone said, but then most of them were working on the bigger bikes of the family line. Once out, I collected the tools I would need to do the rebuild and went inside with my treasures.
Following the steps in the tear down process, I broke the 4 carbs apart, again taking pictures each step of the way. I did manage to get ahead of myself a couple of times and would later pay for that indiscretion with wasted minutes puzzling over the parts. I did follow the advice of keeping all the parts in separate buckets marked for each carb, however at some point my labeling of which was #1 and which was #3 and so forth ran afoul of the proper process. I did not discover this until reassembly day. For the sake of what I was doing, it did not matter initially. Each carb was then fully disassembled and the bigger metal parts were dunked for a few hours in carb cleaner while I worked on the smaller bits and the parts that were not safe to soak in carb cleaner, like plastics and rubber bits. #1 and #3 (rear) carbs seemed to be a bit dirtier than #2 and #4 (front) carbs. I chock this up to fuel going into #1 and from there into #3 and on to #2/#4. Regardless, none of them were as nasty as I had thought from the sight of the float bowl screw. Though they were plenty nasty. don't get me wrong. Cleaning went pretty smoothly with all my internal parts looking pretty good for the most part. None of the diaphragms were torn, the floats were solid and really only the float bowl valves themselves being stuck on three of the four carbs. I was able to get the three valves working smoothly in no time and the fourth flushed just to be sure. Reassembly went smoothly for the most part other than me forgetting to check the float bowl height on the #1 carb until I realized it while reassembling the float bowl on #2. The new stainless steel allen head screws came in handy with me having to reopen things as I went and remembered bits I had missed each pass. I also had to finagle the float bowl cover gaskets into place since there were brand new and not pre-formed. Using small clamps, I was able to get them into shape and they stayed that way long enough to get them bolted to the carbs.
Reassembly of the carb rack is where I ended up spending the most of the time on this project, to be sure. It was during this step that I realized that I had somehow jumbled up which carb was #1, which was #3 and so on. Thankfully I was working on each carb as it's own entity and put things like the valves and jets and pilot screw back into the correct one each time. But once I started to try to connect all the linkages, that's when I realized the flaw. I was able to refer back to photos and diagrams and found that the service manual I was going off of decided to change what they called carb #3/4 halfway through the process. This was the cause of the mis-ordered carbs and caused me at least an hour of wasted time going over schematics and photos to figure out which was which. Thankfully each one had a little something that made it unique to the others. Eventually I had them all in the proper placement and started hooking up linkages. It was at this time that I also found homes for the various springs and bits that had dropped out of place prior to me even starting photos of the disassemble process. Thankfully, diagrams and photos helped and I got it all reconnected correctly.
Following the instructions for a bench-sync of the carbs, I got them all basically back into sync and connected back to the plenum plate ready for reinstall onto the motor. Then the second part of the fun began...
The trick, or so says lots of posters on the forums, to getting the carbs back on is either using brand new carb boots or to soak the old ones in hot water and let them get soft that way. Use some grease/oil/lube and you can wiggle them onto the block. However, 30+ years of exposure and heat/cool cycles hardened those bastards into hollow hockey pucks. I tried a couple of different things, but to no avail. Finally I gave up and took everything back inside and packed up the tools for the day. I decided that the $40 for all new boots was worth avoiding the pain and time needed to make it work otherwise. On a plus side, the place selling the OEM boots also sells the replacement caliper bolt I needed making the $4 purchase not so bad with shipping covering the boots too. ;)
The goal this week/weekend is to work on flushing and replacing fuel lines and do a final flush on the tank. Flush/test the fuel pump to ensure it is working and start reassembling the components needed to power and start the bike. There is a guy on the V4musclebike forums that is making a new replacement spark module/controller and he needs my model of bike for testing. I will be sending him my spark modules to his tests and he will give me a big discount on replacing them... which will wait until I get everything else running. But at least I will know mine work and that I have options to replace them with technically better (not just newer) models. That all should take a week or so which gives me plenty of time to complete the laundry list of stuff I still need to do.
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