More Carburetor Roulette

I’ve been struggling with very hard warm starts the past few months. It first, it was a fairly uncommon event, but lately I’ve been unable to start the car when it’s warm except with great difficulty. Last week, after a short 3-4 mile trip and two hours sitting in the parking lot, I cranked for 2-3 minutes with no result. I finally more-or-less flooded the carb by continuously pumping the pedal to get it running. It fired up eventually, but with enough white smoke out the back to worry the local air resources board.

Well, the car is hardly usable if I have to let it get ice cold between starts. (Cold starts are easy–go figure!) So, I took the car out of commission, pulled the Edelbrock off and—after hunting around in the garage for the miscellaneous small parts I needed—installed the Autolite I worked on a while back.

Mismatched carb stack
Phenolic spacer (yellow part in between) doesn’t quite fill the gap.

Starting it up yesterday, I found the same difficulty I had before. It runs, but only at high throttle. I sprayed a little starter fluid around the joint between the carb and the spacer, and it definitely has a huge vacuum leak there, which seemed a little odd since I just flattened and cleaned up the base.

Looking more closely, I noticed that the phenolic spacer I have under the carb is not a perfect match with the base of the Autolite. I haven’t pulled it off yet, but I’m betting that air is getting past the gasket where the carb overlaps the spacer.

Beaches in the carb
A little hard to see the details, but there are beaches forming in both bowls.

I don’t want to cut down the mounting studs I have (in case I reinstall the Edelbrock) and I couldn’t locate any replacements yesterday, so this project is still in the works. I’m hopeful, though, that I can get the Autolite working this week.

Oh, and the Edelbrock? I pulled the top off it and found bowls full of fine sediment. Chances are the whole carb is clogged up with this stuff! Given that there’s a massive paper filter in the fuel pump (or is there?), I have no idea how this happened. I’ll be installing an inline filter this week too, I guess.

One thought on “More Carburetor Roulette”

  1. I had the same exact hard-starting problems you described (and I have an Edelbrock carb). As soon as I installed the phenolic spacer, the hard-starting problems went away.

    Good luck

    John (VTCI member Sierra John)

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