Black smoke and flames!

Well, I just finaly started the bike after 8 years and the carbs are rebuilt. It's running rich, blowing black smoke and shooting flames out of the exhaust when I release the throttle. The choke has no effect whatsoever. I pull it up and nothing happems.. What could cause this. The bike ran fine 8 years ago, lol.. I did adjust the floats though, could they be set too rich to cause any of this? The flames are valve related on a rich condition? It also takes forever for the rpms to come down after I hit it.

I'd suggest checking for vacuum leaks and/or binding in the throttle linkage.
You might also want to check your points and advancer to see if they are are working properly, and also if the timing is set where it should be.

how does the choke setup work? Mine is very hard to pull up... When I pull it it goes right back down and has alot of tention on it. I'm not sure but it feels broken. Could something be stuck inside the choke mechanism? When the carbs are apart, each choke seems to work good when I pull them individualy, but when all together something feels like it's binding somewhere but I can't tell where.

I had a similar prob with the carbs on my ZN700, except it was the throttle not the choke.
It turns out that when I re-installed my carbs, one of the screws on the clamps that holds them to the intake manifolds was interfering with the throttle linkage and causing the engine to over-rev.

It wouldn't hurt to check them just to be sure.

I got it.. It was the choke linkage.. The little clips were upside down.:blink:
The flames were because I have fuel screws and air mixture screws on my VM24's.. The fuel screws need to be turned all the way in. They were out about 1/3 of a turn causing it to run way rich.. Run's pretty good now except I'm getting slight backfiring through #1 carb sometimes.. Anyone know how to remedy that? I'll look up some posts and see.. Pretty minior though. Runs pretty good after 8 yrs. of storage..