How Carburetors are Made (Basically Magic) - Holley Factory Tour | Smarter Every Day 261

hey it's me destin welcome back to smarter every day in a previous episode of smarter every day i went to visit my dad and found him repairing a carburetor on his filler after he told me how they worked we went away and made this a transparent carburetor you could actually run fuel through this thing so dad and i went to the garage we used a high-speed camera to see through the carburetor and we can actually see the fuel being atomized as it goes down into the engine [Music] i highly encourage you go watch that video if you haven't yet but basically we made the simplest carburetor possible it has a bowl down here it has a float and it has a venturi and you can see the choke in the throttle here this thing is technically a carburetor however a lot of people pointed out that it's not a real carburetor there's so much more that goes on in a carburetor to make an engine work which is why today we're going to look at an actual carburetor this is a holley carburetor we're going to open this thing up check this out it's got a smell to it it smells like gas all right so let's open this thing let's just look at it for a second sometimes that's good i can tell you this right now there is way more going on with this bad boy than what we've got we've got a venturi on ours we've got four holes here it looks like we even have venturi's inventories yo dog heard you like venturis okay lot happening there flip this thing over okay so we got some floppy doos here so let's uh turn okay look at that so when we turn this bad boy here there's a linkage right here can you see that turn that thing the linkage moves two stage floppy do action that is serious what else do we have oh look at this this thing goes all the way across and there's a rocker arm here can you see that when i operate the floppy dude look at that it's squishing something in there okay this is fascinating there's a lot going on here the other thing though i love manufacturing like my first two big boy jobs were manufacturing jobs cannot get enough of manufacturing so here's what i want to do today i want to take dad who taught me about how carburetors work i want to take him to the place where they made this because there's so much going on that we don't understand like every little place you see a hole or a screw or machining that obviously contributes to the operation of the motor vehicle otherwise they wouldn't spend the money to do it so this is fascinating so let's go to the plant where they made this let's take dad let's make it a thing let's go on a road trip with my dad let's go up to the plant where they made this holly carburetor let's find some smart people and let's try to get smarter every day about carburetors okay so got dad and mr shane weckerly are you're over engineering is that true no i'm strategic planning and acquisition stuff strategic planning and acquisition but he knows all the engineering of this stuff i've been talking within a while what we're about to do is we're going to build a carburetor from the ground up basically is that true that's correct all right and we're in bowling green kentucky and uh let's go let's go for it so in your carburetor video you had a lot of different channels and passages in your little mock-up carburetor and that was actually one of the main uh pieces of negative feedback i got is a carburetor is very complicated it is but we simplified it you did you did and you did a great job of simplifying it but this is really the brain of a carburetor so this contains all of the various passages that that basically tell the carburetor what it needs for fuel to mix properly with the air so this would have your idle circuits in it it would have your mid-range circuits and it has your main circuits in it has your idle adjustment needles and everything is in this one part so we take and on our higher end carburetors they're made out of billet aluminum so we take a solid block of aluminum loaded into this machine this machine robotically loads it into a cnc mill and it creates all of the passages and all the internal geometry that's contained within this okay so you said a few things you said idle circuit yep what else did you say so idle circuit the mid-range circuit or transition circuit and then the main jets which is your wide open throttle circuit okay and show me how i would control those you basically have fuel against this side and then you've got a gasket on this side and it creates passages here that the fuel mixes with air and gets discharged into the engine can i see it sure so it's these little channels here are they become passages once you put a gasket and pinch that between that and the main body of the carburetor so i can imagine the size of that passage the the length of the passage in fluid dynamics head loss and stuff like that matters that's correct so everything here is precisely engineered one of the things that people don't realize is a carburetor just doesn't inject fuel into the motor it actually atomizes fuel within the channel so you'll have a mix of air coming in here you'll have a mix of fuel coming in here and then it atomizes within this channel before it ever puts it into the motor so my video was a little bit misleading so where i had just fuel coming in you're talking about there's a there's some pre-atomization which doesn't mean it turns it to atoms right it means it just turns it into small droplets that's correct okay cool i'm with you okay so an idle circuit is when i turn the throttle down that's the circuit that keeps it running correct so when you're sitting there idling at a stop light or or you know wherever that's the circuit that would be running at that time when you start to accelerate you've got to add additional fuel through a squirter and the mid-range circuit and then that starts to transition in and then as you go to wide-open throttle you would have a main circuit that would feed the wide-open throttle characteristics and that's all we showed was the main jet yes correct so there's the idle circuit the transition circuit and the main jet yep so we're making the brain of the circuit here yep in here you've got a robotic loader and you can see it's got a bare aluminum block sitting there on one side of the pallet and then it's got machined ones right next to it the robot knows which ones it has pulled which ones it is loaded which ones it's unloaded what's it called panic i believe the way you pronounce it panic that's a robot yes so basically instead of having a human hit cycle start you're now having robots that's correct so this machine runs unattended all day long somebody has to load new pallets in it you know maybe once a day or a couple of times a day but other than that it runs unattended so what you see here would be an unmachined casting this one actually has had the first machining off here on the bottom but it'll it'll get some additional machining after this okay we also would have an unmachined base plate i'm seeing all these ports and things like that what's up with that well a lot of these speed vacuum passages um they they'll uh they'll feed vacuum to different parts of the carburetor they'll feed different uh like fuel out of transfer slots that'll be machined in later on so my understanding of a carburetor is it's a complex dynamic environment where like even the size of a passage matters because it affects the flow rate yes everything matters everything matters so it's a balance right that's correct and so we're going to walk through this line and probably can't go into too much detail because it's a dark art right it is yeah but let's go for it let's build it okay sounds good so the first stop is where the castings of the base plates are being machined down machining is when you use hardened tooling to remove excess metal from a part what plates they're machining here depends on what type of carburetors they're making on any particular day they fly cut the metal castings down to a certain thickness and then they drill very specific size holes in them so the part gets loaded here there's two tables to load parts come over here there's a check position here then you go into here and then you go into here right they do the same thing so you have slower operations and then you got the one finish up that's the finished part thank you very much so we've got two things going we've got the base plate and the main body correct main body goes through a similar type of machining operation machine in the boards the passages the venturis so that bore has been machined correct that's amazing so you get pretty close on your casting we do okay we don't have to take a lot of material out of it this is an example of a fully machined main body so you can see been machined on the inside this one just touched the inside here it doesn't machine the whole primaries as you can see you got a lot of different passages and holes a lot more than your carburetor you built made why is this housing up here like this this is where a choke flap would sit so this is where your choke seals off and then it opens up once the engine's warmed up four barrels yep the choke is only on two of them that's correct because all of your slow speed driving is only on the first two barrels the other two come in when you go to more wide open throttle got it that makes sense does that make sense to you absolutely so i'm going to take you to the start of the assembly line yeah sounds good i chase squirrels and there's too many operations at this plant for me to be trusted to be able to ask whatever question i want there's a lot of stuff going on there is main body assembly okay these are shinier these are shinier these have been through the tumbler okay so we make carburetors in a lot of different ways we make them shiny we make them a gold dichromate we make black ones just depends on the finish the consumer's looking for so this one is ready to go down the main assembly line here uh first operation is it will go in have some air bleeds put into it and then it'll start down the line having various components bolted onto it as it works its way down the assembly line so that's installation of the squirter nozzle these are two barrel carburetors being built here these are two barrels being built girls instead of a four barrel she she installed the what nozzle the squirter nozzle so we talked about that transition circuit the transition circuit is when you need to put in additional fuel to get to you know your intermediate when i hit the gas pedal unlike mine it's you can't wait on a main jet you have to have something ready you've got to have something to squirt in additional fuel so she installed the squirter that has two squirter nozzles that spray out and what's happening in this operation so this operation here she's actually putting in what's called the booster so i'll reach over her here where you had the tube that stuck up in your carburetor this actually is what we call the booster and our it's your tube but it's this way and then the fuel comes out the bottom so she is staking these into the main body so they can't fall out gotcha and so from here she does what so she's putting in these little they're called air bleeds basically they are like a jet but they meter air instead of fuel when i talked about the air and the fuel have to mix together to emulsify that air gets metered through that so we control how much air goes in and how much fuel goes in and how they mix so it's a very specific hole yes we're starting to create precise orifices correct all of these yep drilled holes aren't good enough you really need machined orifice why are they brass why are most of the parts that go in brass a lot of it is because the brass doesn't corrode and it can be broached very accurately so what's happening here she's installing a choke housing so this is the part that contains a little spring that actually activates the choke open and closed depending on the temperature when the vehicle is cold it needs richer air fuel mixtures than when it's warmed up the choke when it's cold closes and lets less air in which forces more fuel into the engine that little spring in that housing as it warms up it has electric current pass through it as it warms up it automatically opens the chokes and allows uh more air into the engine to normalize the air fuel ratio on the one we made yep we had a choke it was a flat yup your flap can think on its own correct that's correct that's what we're doing that's what you're doing there's more than we can talk about here you are witnessing the birth of a carburetor when this number is etched in it's like naming a new baby only a carburetor while this assembly line is running the main body of a two-barrel carburetor another line is working on the throttle assembly i was only able to get footage of them installing the flaps for a four barrel carburetor but you get the idea my favorite part of this whole process is when they use threaded fasteners to position the flaps in place and then they mechanically deform the screws so they can't be removed they're squishing it it's almost like they're using machine screws like rivets the sub assemblies from both of these two assembly lines will eventually merge creating the entire carburetor all right so what's going on here okay so you're getting down to a point now where the fuel bowls are starting to come in okay so we've done the venturi we started doing the choke stuff yep next thing is the metering block and the fuel bowl which will go on to this assembly okay so this piece here goes in okay look at that that's very complicated it has two jets it has a power valve it has a baffle got its gaskets wow that's amazing and you can see here some of the detail of the passages the brass restrictors that's a little bit different than what we did that's better than your carburetor yeah so this assembly will get mated to this one to create a main body and fuel bowl assembly so i have venturi here yep i got the body here yep i got the bowl here correct and i have a brain here which i didn't have correct okay you basically used a tube and an adjustment needle to create the brain okay got it understood interesting okay so how much how much engineering effort and human lifespan does this represent like we learned all this the hard way right yeah i mean uh you know carburetors have been around since the turn of the century but they have evolved uh immensely over the years racing engines have changed they've gotten bigger higher performance you know you want tighter air fuel ratios so the carburetor is a never-ending evolution even today that's amazing okay okay gotcha so you're thinking very hard about where to put this back yeah i want to make sure i don't screw him up so i'm going to give you that back got it okay so that was the bowl i didn't see a float is there float already in there i can show you that here he knew exactly what i was looking for he's on it this isn't his first tour you've done this quite a bit huh all right so this is a fuel bowl assembly it has a sight window in the side and the fuel level in the fuel bowl just like your visible carburetor actually shows on the side of this this is the float assembly this is where the fuel comes in through this fitting up in through this passage so you can actually see if if the float is stuck correct is that what's hot glass that's wonderful that's great did you ever have those on not me yeah so the float moves up and down with the fuel level and when it reaches the proper fuel level it will seal off and not let any more fuel come in where's the needle the needle is back in behind here underneath this nut and screw can you adjust the needle here yes you can so this particular one of the benefits of a holley carburetor is you can adjust the float level externally externally externally that's hard to do yep that's hard to do and you can see it in the window just like your visible carburetor well yeah that's amazing well are you adjusting the float level or are you adjusting the relationship between the needle and the float you're really adjusting the needle the relationship between the needle and the float which as a result adjusts the fuel level okay that makes sense now one other thing i'll show you on this we talked about the intermediate circuit and the transition circuit right this is a little diaphragm in here that's called an accelerator pump when you step down on that throttle it pushes down on this lever show me one more time please when you push down on this lever it actuates a little diaphragm in here and it squirts the fuel through the squirter that we saw being installed earlier like a like a water gun like a water gun really yep so there's a mechanical pressure correct okay got it can i just pause and look at how beautiful it is that this is what can i see that so all those screws are torqued automatically so this is coming along here so she's feeding parts this way he's feeding parts this way that's correct so she's there's separate lines that are feeding him and these other assembly lines down through here so he's a critical point he is okay you're smirking what are you smirking about he's good is this you were producing this part and you're transitioning to this correct so they've been making you know these carburetors all morning long now they're transitioning to two barrels line never stops it just transitions into the next q how long have you been here now benji 15 years 15 years that's awesome you like working here good place i love been here at 52 your dad over there 52 your dad's been here 52. you've been here 15. what do you drive benji uh 2007 trailblazer yeah is it stock he just he's not even gonna get into it no no no what are you doing right now i'm putting on the starter body body gas throttle body throttle body gas what are you waiting on you waiting on that part so you're ahead of production right now that's where you want to be yeah okay so as soon as it gets to you you're gonna execute you're gonna be looking at the next thing what are you doing there setting the pump so you you had it you you moved it until it closed and then you set you bent all those tabs till they touch yeah that's awesome so he's grabbing it up here what'd you say is that the automatic choke he said yes putting the choke mechanism on so i talked i talked about that thermostatic spring there it is that's a bi-metallic strip it's a bi-metallic strip you put you know power and ground into and then it heats this spring depending on the ambient temperature outside and how long the key has been on it will change the the choke block did you just tell me there's a heated bi-metallic strip you're electrically heating the biometallic yeah yeah yeah this is too much this is a vintage muscle car carb so this is probably either this is probably a 3-2 for a big block chevy um if it was 454 uh at 427. okay yeah so this would be like a 65 corvette carburetor we produced these when they were new and we still produce them today that's amazing how long has holly been here since 1952 wow so these are packaged ready to go yeah but there's one more step i gotta show you okay how y'all doing good morning so the carburetors come down the main assembly line the last step before they go in the box is a quality check one of the things that differentiates holley from everybody else is we actually wet flow test every single carburetor with gasoline with mineral spirits okay so it has the same specific gravity without all the flammability concerns but every carburetor actually is run is filled with fuel with mineral spirits run through the process flow test it 100 to ensure that all the settings pass wow so monita is testing the carburetors as they come off the line there's a machine behind me that i'm not allowed to show you but i can blur it yes okay so it's a machine where they actually test every carburetor correct yes so what are you doing well right now i preset other needle i press yeah i preset idle needle and i know how much i supposed to open you know you know exactly how much to adjust it yes i mean closed enough yeah almost so you open it then close it yes okay i closed all the way all the way down then i opened right now three quarters then i closed all the way down then i opened like three quarters and now i'm gonna try testing okay here's the blurry part i'm enjoying it you don't get to see it and now i have to finish this one first so this one's finished yeah this the fast test and then now i have preset that fast idle yes that's what's called fast idle so you got you got your data and then you're making an adjustment yes adjustment like for gauge the plate look it have to be 29 on this model yeah you have to add a little bit more it's like smooth and easy i have to gauge so briefly explain what a go no-go gauge is a go no-go make sure you're not undersized and you're not oversized if the gold gauge goes in there you're large enough but if the no-go gauge goes in there you're too large and that's what you're doing yeah that's what i'm doing okay and after that i make sure i um drain fuel like a draining all the way uh-huh i'm just to look at my face for a minute basically she's draining the fuel off the device okay she that was a good one so this this is not tested this is testing this is already okay so here we go check this out i can describe what i'm seeing there's a lot of now i'm testing computer working and waiting for wide open yeah when wide open fast now i can oh wow i see so she's testing different flow rates in different ways we're making sure we're getting different pressures okay if i understand correctly you're literally running liquid through it and running fuel through it and you're testing the pressures and you're getting real-time feedback on how it's doing correct and we're growing a vacuum on it right so it's simulating an engine running that's cool how long have you been able to do that as far as i know since since the 50s when this facility was set up pretty rad last step how are you today how are you doing good yeah doing good busy that's good so this is foam right you got to get the box closed before it blows up all right i don't know if you caught that i want to show that again that was really really cool this machine has a bag in it and it's got chemicals i don't know where they are there's chemicals either in the bag or something like that and when he brings it out it mixes those chemicals together and it's like that spray foam insulation and it stays in the bag and he throws it in the in the box and it forms around the part let's watch him do it one more time that was pretty cool so he's putting that in there so that's putting the foam in and squishing it and then it starts growing right it's like baking bread that's growing really fast thank you thank you for your time if you don't put it underneath that roller it will blow the box out and pop the top up oh so that's literally holding it together it is so this this right here is holding the box together yep so when you open the box it's custom formed right that's so [Music] top of the box too you can feel some heat in them oh it's warm yeah it's an exothermic reaction it is surely you haven't always done that that's like a that's like a finishing touch kind of thing they've done that for the 20 years that i've been here before that they used various cardboard and other structures in there to hold it in place that's the quickest and cheapest way to do it that's the best way it's the safest for the product so you do this all day every day that's a lot of carburetors dude i don't usually does i'm helping him out so so where is he going so he's going to basically to the back dock he will load it on a truck at that point and it will go over to our distribution center which is about three or four miles away that's a lot of carburetors dude it's a lot of carburetor so people are still putting carburetors on cars every single day why in all honesty they're a very simple device people know how to work on them they know what to do with them they're comfortable with them they're affordable and people like them yeah because they they they feel like a muscle car they don't yes exactly and you know you can fix them anywhere you know side of the road something happens you can get parts readily available and you can make it you know make it go again i love manufacturing now that you know how carburetors are made check this out you remember the metering block between the bowl and the throttle body here well i didn't know this but it actually gets input from way over here on the base plate there's a little slot down here this blew my mind and as you i operate the throttle here look at that that little slot opens up gradually and the size of that slot precisely controls the airflow that's going to the metering block that changes between all the different circuits it's like a precise dance between pneumatics and fluid dynamics it's an analog computer this is incredible and that is just another reason why i think carburetors are amazing what's you've got something in your ear or you should have something in your ear i'm just joking this is sponsored by raycon these are the everyday earbuds and you'll notice that when i open the box they're not in there because they're in my pocket that's two magic tricks in a row let me show you what these things are these are the everyday earbuds they're amazing you get over 32 hours of battery life and six hours of play time the way it works is you charge up this little pill this is a usbc connector isn't that nice and the pill itself charges up the earbuds i have run over 300 miles wearing these things this year and they are amazing they do not fall out of your ear every set of everydays comes with a customizable gel set of ear hole adapters look at those oh what is this we even got some lanyard action oh look at that these things are like half the cost of other premium wireless earbud brands and sound just as amazing let me do a little uh little yeah so one thing i love about these things is how seamlessly they connect with my phone you can see not connected right here if i can open this with one hand you can see as soon as i get that open watch it right there and boom connected you see that long story short you're smart you can tell if people are telling you the truth i'm telling you the truth i use these everyday earbuds by raycon all the time you will love them if you want them go to buyrecon.com smarter that gets you 15 off you're gonna love these things pick out whatever color you want i like the the blue ones and i like the white ones i don't think you'll need it but raycon has a 45 day free return policy every time you put them in your ear you hear raycon power on if you have these things you're gonna know exactly what i'm talking about check it out buyreacon.com smarter get you 15 off thank you for supporting the sponsor that support smarter every day holy cow was that a fun video i hope you enjoyed it i learned a ton thank you to holly thank you to dad how how awesome is it that you guys let me make videos about carburetors with my dad i just want to say thank you i'm grateful that you let me do that i cannot thank you enough thank you to everyone who supports on patreon and lets me do crazy stuff like this i have more ideas cooking and it's really really interesting the next step obviously after carburetors fuel injection it's complicated so if you're interested in that please consider subscribing to smarter every day that video is coming up as soon as i can get that thing out i think you'll really enjoy it anyway i'm grateful thank you to the patrons thank you for considering subscribing i'm destined you're getting smarter every day have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SmarterEveryDay

Views: 2,030,625

Keywords: Smarter, Every, Day, Science, Physics, Destin, Sandlin, Education, Math, Smarter Every Day, experiment, nature, demonstration, slow, motion, slow motion, education, math, science, science education, what is science, Physics of, projects, experiments, science projects, engine, carburetor, carb, fuel injection, lawn mower, small engine, engineering, how does it work?, How, fatherhood, parenting, Carburetor, Holley, Throttle, Metering Block, Throttle Body, Oxygen Sensor, Manufacturing, CNC, Machining, Assembly Line

Id: 1_hFKRDDP_o

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Insanereindeer]

I watched this last night. I thought it was great. You old guys can keep you carbs though. EFI all the way.

[u/jet_silver]

My grandfather was a diecast tool and die maker at Holley. The man taught me a lot about using machine tools and the hand work that was needed but I bet with all that he transferred less than 1% of what he knew.

[u/[deleted]]

I try to do as much of my own vehicle work as possible.

Always look at things like carburetors, drum brakes etc and wonder how anyone thought of them before what is currently used. They seem so much more complex compared to fuel injection and disc brakes.

[u/mvogel0311]

Destin is the bestin.

[u/Promise-Motor]

Magic indeed. Dark, heretical magic. Just like friendship.

[u/fordprefect294]

I love that this man is a literal rocket engineer, but still gets giddy and excited over the workings of the humble carburetor

[u/BuilderTexas]

Holly is still the best 🇺🇸👍

[u/iAmRiight]

I was so distracted the whole time I was watching this. All I could think of was where in the world are they selling that many high performance carburetors?!?!

[u/Honest_Cynic]

Manufacturing is amazing as to how low-cost something so mechanically complex can be. As example, until recently the Kawasaki Ninja 250 sold in the U.S. had a carburetor, whereas the same model in Europe had multi-port fuel-injection. The reason was to hit a lower price target in the U.S. where 250 cc is considered entry-level. Those were not trivial carburetors, having a vacuum-adjustable throat ("slide") for more efficiency (similar to "Predator" carburetor automotive after-market for racing) and many other components and linkages. I bought a new carburetor for my leaf-blower which costs only $15. Fairly simple, but still amazing they can sell it profitably for that price.