Carb Clean After many years

My original plan was to soak my 12 years of sitting carbs in solvent(thanks to this site i didnt) and I was told that was a stupid idea. So what is the procedure for a thorough clean, remove top and bottom looks simple, do I need new gaskets when I do that? Also, can anyone reccomend a particular procedure for a good clean while maintaing the setup?

Thanks in advance you guys are great!

Go into the Archive section up top and do a search for Carb Cleaning, and check the box "search subject only".

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Post edited by: rstnick, at: 2006/02/05 21:47

There's a good article here www3.sympatico.ca/g.boudreau/CarbCleaning.html

Just keep rubber parts and O rings away from solvents. If take them apart then you will probably lose your current setup and will have to set them up again but dont worry - lots of help is available here. Rebuild kits from Z1 Enterprises or Sirius are a good investment. I would recommend them.
Good luck

.......................................................
Woodstock ON Canada
1980 kz750E1, 4->1, K&N pods

great thanks a lot. I am getting the 'new' bike tomorrow and will start to clean it up this week, before the Valentines day thing and my wifes birthday which will both sadly keep me out of my shop..... maybe we could do a valentines day cleaning? kinda hard to sell that one I think!

There is a great carb cleaning solution available from yamaha that is ideal for soaking carb bodies and internal carb parts. The instructions are for a "machine running" cleaning procedure but i find cutting the solution with 50% clean fuel and bathing in a container to work wonders. Do not soak rubber, paper, or any non-metal items.

Get a few cans of compressed air (unless you have filtered airlines). Just a thought.

Use these on the jets after soaking them overnight in seafoam/fuel mixture. Also soak the bowls overnight in the mixture as well.
I did this and WOW they came out great!

I went with the carb kits and I'm glad that I did. This way I got a jet selection and all the gaskets and rubber O - rings etc. You'll likely find that most if not all of your O rings are brittle and hardened, in other words, crap. Don't be afraid of taking your carbs apart, it's wasn't as bad as I imagined it would be. Get an exploded part drawing of your rack (check out the file section above, community, filebase), and an individual carb exploded view, you won't go wrong. Actually the needles etc. inside your carbs are probably fine and a guy can likely get away with just replacing rubber and gaskets (after a damn good cleaning, or two), if you want to cheap out. Another consideration would be buying stainless allan head bolts as a replacement for those dinky little panhead screws on the carbs. I bought a little jug of varsol and cleaned the hell out of everything using an ice cream pail, then I bought a couple of cans of carb cleaner (dismantle one carb at a time) and soaked/scrubbed everything down. I used a toothbrush and made sure that every orifice revealed daylight. Worked like a charm for me. Don't forget to reset your float height before putting the carb rack back onto the engine.