How to Start Your Carbureted Car after it's been sitting for a long time

this is a 60s era General Motors carburated vehicle if you own an early car that's carburated and you don't drive it very often you probably have a a situation where when you go to start it as long as the battery is healthy and in good shape it cranks fine but it cranks a long time before you can actually start it the reason for that is it's taken a while for that old mechanical fuel pump to pull fuel from the tank up into the carburetor fill the float bowls and finally start the car um I want to show you what I do to eliminate that problem this is a holly 4 barrel carburetor it uses two float bolts there's the front float Bowl here for the primary side there's the rear float Bowl for the secondary side fuel line comes from the pump and into the front front float Bowl there's a transfer tube you can't see it right now but it goes from the front Bowl to the rear Bowl the problem is the bowls run dry um if you let the car sit for a long period of time there are different ways of of starting a car that has a dry carburetor um you could actually pour fuel down the throttle BS if you want some people use a lot of spray starting fluid I don't like either one of those methods actually because you don't know how much fuel you're putting into it are you putting in too much or not enough what I like to do is I like to fill the float bowls manually without cranking um and then when I do crank the car um the right amount of fuel is going to be able to be entered into the engine and it should start right up and the way that we're going to put fuel into the carburetor are through the bowl vents this is a bowl vent uh this vents the front float Bowl this is a rear bll vent rinse vents the the rear float bowl and I'm going to use a syringe and I'm going to actually squirt fuel into those two B Vents and I'll show you how we do it I've temporarily wired the choke open uh the reason for that is I'm going to work the throttle and I want you to see there's nothing coming out of the accelerator pump nozzles so if I move the throttle nothing the reason for that is again the the float bowl is dry there is nothing in the float Bowl there's nothing in the accelerator pump reservoir so we're going to fix that these are onetime use syringes um this one actually says for veterinary use only they make various types um you can find them on Amazon eBay I've seen them on Teemu they're not very expensive I think the last time I bought a pack which was a few years ago I bought five of them for I think around $7 so they're pretty inexpensive um they're obviously not designed to be used with gasoline but I find they last quite a while before the uh the rubber plunger starts to dry out and go bad uh but I can use the same one for actually a few years um so they last a long time to do this I use a a cup of gasoline um I would use either a metal can or a a glass container AV void plastic with G gasoline and then I would take the uh the syringe um I like the 60ml size that's what this is 60cc or 60 ml uh same thing and then I just put it into the gasoline fill or at least partially fill the syringe and now we're going to fill the float bowl of the carburetor B vents will look different uh with different carburetors um just to point out a few um this is your typical Holly 4 barrel uh this would be a rear bow vent um this would be the front bow vent um this would be uh Carter AFB um which is pretty much the edel Brock carburetor today um to access bull vent you'd have one here and you've got one here um this is a old Rochester Quadra jet used on a lot of GM cars um that would be the bulb vent access right there and then this is a old aircooled Volkswagen uh Pic 3 solx uh there you'd find the bull vent right there so it varies depending on what type of carburetor you have sometimes it's pretty obvious sometimes it's not you might have to do a little bit of [Music] research also another thing to remember if you're going to buy a few of these um you usually have the choice to buy it with or without a needle you don't need a needle um it's fine just the way uh the tip is built I'm going to add this fuel to the front Bowl vent right here and then I'm going to refill this and I'll add some to the rear [Music] Bol really that should do it again we're not just pouring fuel down the throttle boards um we're we're actually filling the bowls just the way they would be fold filled by the uh fuel pump of the engine I've got the choke wired open again now we have fuel in the float bowl and if I work the throttle a couple times I think you can hear and you can start to see fuel is now squirting out of the accelerator pump down into the intake manifold and that's what we want uh next thing we'll do is we'll start it and remember this car hasn't been started in at least 3 or 4 months and the carburetor was definitely bone dry so let's see if it starts right up it should well it started I was hoping it was going to start on the first crank it usually does of course this time it didn't but it did start and it's a lot easier than cranking and cranking and cranking until the fuel pump can get fuel up into the float bolts but I did notice um that it's leaking fuel quite a bit of fuel right from this uh float bow plug so that's going to have to be fixed um and there's a good reason why you shouldn't let the car sit for months at a time between starting it and driving it because things dry out O-rings shrink gaskets shrink and that's not good um so the the best thing would be start it up at least once a week better yet drive it and enjoy it I hope this helped thanks for watching

Channel: Stuff About Cars

Views: 44,197

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Id: cEL-sD82A7A

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023