@Gordon Nichols posted:Sacto-Sage Mitch wrote:
"If you've ever looked at a cutaway drawing of a carburetor and tried to figure out how it all works, you quickly realize that it is a mostly Rube Goldberg contraption. They started out as straightforward devices, but as one limitation after another became apparent, more and more kludgy fixes were added to compensate and correct for shortcomings in the basic design. If everything is brought into a tenuous balance, if it's all kept surgically clean, if nothing is allowed to wear or to leak, it sort of works. It was the best we could do with purely mechanical solutions."
If that ain't the perfect description of a Quadrajet, I don't know what the heck is......
No wonder people hate them.
Carbs were always voodoo to me until I bought a MotoGuzzi V-50 Monza. The original owner had taken off the air cleaners and replaced them with K&N pods and it had a flat spot between 3500-4,000 rpm. I bought a Dellorto book and about the third time through it, it dawned on me:
"Carburetors suck, fuel injection blows."
By the time I got that rejetted and pulling strong from idle to redline, I had a pretty good grasp on how a carburetor works. TBH, it's Rube Goldburg Voodoo, but it works.
Imo, the most fascinating thing about a carburetor is how specific gravity of the gasoline you're running, air pressure, the Bernoulli effect related to float bowl height all relate to the volume of gasoline that hits the airstream. And without that float bowl height being nearly perfect, you'll never get the rest of it dialed.