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[Reg]

Afternoon all, I went for my first ride of the year yesterday, Rudyard being in hibernation for the past five months. He started easily enough after a few kicks, despite an initial lack of compression which I put down to a sticky decompressor. A spray of WD 40 seemed to sort that OK. Anyway, after five miles or so of faultless running he coughed and spluttered and finally stopped running, exactly as if out of fuel, the level of which I had checked at commencement of journey. I switched to reserve anyhow, as a matter of course, but to no avail. On coming to a halt I smelt petrol and observed the overflow pipe from the Micarb in full flow. After a bit of head-scratching I removed the float bowl and checked the state of play therein. All appeared to be in order, with the float shutting off the flow when operated manually. With the float bowl back in place all was working as it should and the bike fired up straight away and ran perfectly all the way home. So, as the symptoms were so obviously fuel starvation, why was the carb flooding? Or am I being a bit dense? Bike is 05 Bullet 500. Thanks in anticipation.

[Adrian]

A bit of dirt from the tank found its way down the pipe got lodged under the float valve, which was then unable to regulate the fuel supply, result, carb overflowing. Dismantling the float bowl dislodged the dirt allowing the float valve to work normally again. I had this on an otherwise excellent Mikuni carb fitted to a BSA some years ago. Flush out the fuel line, fit a decent fuel filter in line between the fuel tap and the carb and it won't happen again. The fuel starvation symptoms were probably kicking in as the float bowl was starting to empty with the main tank running out.



A.