Carb rebuild part one
Today I went to the motorcycle supershow in toronto, saw lots of bike stuff and that got me all edgy to get my hands dirty. I decided that finaly, I would rebuild the carbs. I have a whole bunch of small tidbits to assemble but it should be a breeze.
One touchy parts is the floats. The old floats were dented, cracked and generally old wich may explain why the bike ran kinda rough. I got new floats and proceeded to adjust the height as per the manual.
Now interestingly, I noticed that the old floats were not adjusted correctly. In fact they were not adjusted at all. The adjustment tab was flat. This is the way the tab is on a new float, pre-adjustment. I double checked and indeed once correctly adjusted, the tab should look bent. I suppose at some point in the past someone replaced the floats, never bother to adjust them and the bike never ran well.
It take a while to get it right but eventualy I got the height set within tolerance.
After that I started putting all the screw thingies like the air screw and the idle screw. Problem! All the small cavities , threads and channels are gummed up with polishing wax and super fine metal dust. I tried to clean them with Q-tips and blowing air but that stuff is very waxy. I need to stop here and get a chemical carb dip to get everything out. Oh well at leat it looks nice for now.
Ready to go
Easy to loose stuff
Old float dingged and cracked
Old float tab, flat, never adjusted
New float with adjusted tab
By the book
The book
Nice must need to be taken apart and cleaned
Yan's GT380 
bummer about having to clean it. will that ruin the finish?
January 9, 2011 at 9:15 pm
That’s definitely a concern. I read up about it and apparently WD40 is an excellent carb cleaner with the added benefit of corrosion protection. Other carb cleaning methods tend to rely on acid or caustic fluids that will etch or dull out the metal. Since I have to remove a waxy residue (polishing compound) WD40 should disolve this nicely.
January 10, 2011 at 10:03 am
I really dig your blog! Thanks for sharing. I just got a gt380 and I love this bike. She needs a little work but is in great condition. I am about to clean the carbs but im a little nervous. I see you’ve fully restored yours.
February 5, 2012 at 4:16 pm