The Yamaha Virago Mailing-List and Archives

"I tried draining the carbs again,..."


Is the problem with one or both carbs?  Are you finding fuel coming out of
both tubes and only one, and are both carbs showing signs of flooding?  Even
if you did get a tank of dirty gas or stirred up stuff at the bottom of your
tank, you should have a filter at the petcock and little filters in the carb
inlets, so it would be strange for a big flake to get right into your carb.
Usually the big flakes block off fuel flow at the filter. Little pieces of
debris and varnish usually are what build up inside the carbs.

I had a float get heavy.  My bike is an 87 so the floats were old.  I've
heard of the plastic floats getting heavy over time (soaking up fuel, I
guess, don't know what causes that to happen), but never experienced it
before.  I can now tell you that it does happen.  Mine started running on
one cylinder.  Pulled over and to make a long story short I found the front
carb flooded, and it wouldn't stop flooding.  Not flooded as bad as yours
(no external leakage), though.  Called wife, brought trailer (good woman),
took it home and messed with it.  Didn't find anything.  Re-set fuel levels,
which seemed to set up OK.  That's strange, it's almost like the float gets
more and less fuel-logged.  Anyway, a couple weeks later it happened again
(in the exact same spot, weird, at least there is a parking lot and a
payphone I can use there).  This time I discovered the heavy float.  I put
it in a container of gas and it did float, but noticeably lower than the
other one.  Put in another float and the problem is solved.

Jeremy
___________________________________________________________________________
(un)subscribe info, archive: http://archives.itg.uiuc.edu/virago/