In my continuing efforts to get a smooth-running bike, I'm wondering if adding a couple ounces of a carb/fuel system cleaner such as Gumout might help. I'm not at technical skills place where I feel comfortable tearing the carb down and cleaning every orifice. Gumout seemed like it might help clean orifices that might be coated but not plugged. I've had good results with these products with several cars. Anybody here tried it with their bikes?

Good thing this is rubber side down and I can totally dissagree with Serowbot.  

If the carb is clean, you use fresh gas, and ride every week, he is correct.  However, if you let it sit up, especially if it is 10% ethanol, crud starts to build.

There are two fuel additives I consider very good, and both work differently.

Techron - This is a high concentrate detergent.  It cleans very well, but does not suspend much.  Good for some hard clogs.  Add too much, and you get nothing, as it has no energy itself.

SeaFoam - This is like magic pixie juice!  An amazing solvent, and it has some energy.  You can actually (kinda) run the engine off it with no gas at all.  (It will stumble and stall, and that is if it is not in gear)  Also, it seems to be very stable, especially with 10% ethanol fuels.

If you get on the MIG forum, you will see lots of folks singing the praises of seafoam.  One use that I can personally say works is when you have badly gummed up carbs with occasionally sticking floats.  Get it running with gas, than (using a diner catchup bottle or something) fill the carb with pure seafoam.  You will have to work to keep it running, and after a short time, let it die.  Let the seafoam sit overnight, and the next day, drain the bowl and start it up on gas.  After a few seconds it will clear out and WOW!  I have put up to a quarter can (3x the recommended amount) in a tank on my Marauder and ran it through.  On the next tank of clean gas, you could feel the difference.  (I used to travel for work and my bike might sit up for a month or two)

If you're using an additive in such strong concentration that your engine will barely run on it,.. it's possible that it will strip the oil seal from your cylinder and cause damage to walls and rings...
This stuff don't disappear in the carb,.. it travels on...

It's very popular to do this, and create huge plumes of smoke out yer' exhaust... Youtube is loaded with these videos...
It's not a smart way to clean a carb...
It's kinda' like washing your bike by riding it into a swimming pool... ...

Serowbot wrote on 12/06/12 at 12:12:42:



Agree.  The overly-strong solutions as mentioned above are a bit scary for today's seals, eh?

Anyway, using solvents like this is about 1/100th as effective as:
-- taking the carb off,.........................10 minutes
-- disassembling the carb,..................20 minutes if you don't get hung up with stuck screws
-- cleaning the carb and all its bits......30 minutes
-- reassembling and installing.............30 minutes

An hour and a half.  Tack on an hour if this is the first time you've ever done it.  Tack on a week if you have never done it before and do not have a manual.

verslagen1 wrote on 12/06/12 at 12:35:31:



Actually it takes me more than a 1/2 hour for the cleaning now, because I use an ultrasonic cleaner.  That adds in some delays where I have to go find something else to do while the microscopic bubbles try to seperate the crap from the carb surfaces.  I would guess from start to finish it takes 3 hours, but some of that time is used for some other chores.

DavidOfMA wrote on 12/06/12 at 14:22:56:


How about getting a Savage carb from eBay or some such, and rebuild it at your leisure?  Then when it was convenient you could swap it for the carb on the bike.  A spare carb is nice to have, anyway.  If you botch the job on the extra carb, you will have learned a lot, and the bike will still be intact.

Do you have the tools for this kind of job?

DavidOfMA wrote on 12/06/12 at 15:03:29:



Good on ya!

Quote:


Bob, is it possible your roommate was treating the engine with fogging oil? I agree with Serowbot that any solvent strong enough to eat through the crud in a dirty carb is probably strong enough to eat through the oil protecting the cylinder, but maybe at least he was trying to take some measure to counteract that effect.

Either way, that sounds like a really unnatural thing to do to a bike.

I probably know just enough about this kind of thing to get me in trouble, so I hope someone can correct me if what I say next is complete and total rubbish:

It seems to me like if you run solvent through a carb to get some gunk out of it (and the process actually works), wouldn't that just move the mess on down the line? I think of old cars that have a lot of rust and sediment in the bottom of their tanks, and they're just fine until you try to fix them, then the sediment gets stirred up, goes through the fuel line and gunks up everything. If you're dealing with a solvent the mess would be dissolved instead of suspended, but I feel like you're going to get little chunks of stuff going through your jets, etc., and then making a mess when it burns in the cylinder.

But again, I'm operating on basic knowledge and my instincts here. I'm hoping that one of the veterans can speak to the accuracy of my hypothesis.