Mech

I use engine oil but if it was a very porous sort of foam filter(or an old sock) I'd use chain bar oil.. nice and sticky.

Ya know.. cobbler's shoes.. I am pretty slack about the maintenance.. Actually.. I'm worse than slack !

Oil traps the dust and stops it working it's way through the filter or cover.. Engine oil is fine. It does need squeezing out because too much oil can make them run rich. If you give it a good oil and work it through with your hands, then put the cover in a rag to soak up the excess when you squeeze it in your hands it will come out about right. Just squeeze it, don't wring. And I was just kidding about the old one looking fine.. Even I would change that one.

That filter looks like mine and just fine to me.. but I'd oil those pliers !!

Both styles of throttle cable are availiable aftermarket, but when they say it fits your bike, or even if they say it's for your bike, it is never set up right. For a given size venturi we can calculate the air volumes and fit jets, but if the fuel or compression or cam or exhaust is different on different bikes, just to name a few factors, then they really need different jets to suit the particular combinations the bike and market has. These aftermarket carbs are just set up with some combination of jets and needles that will give a fuel mixture that's ok and will burn, but they seldom accelerate well. They sell the same carb for commuter and sport bikes and quads. They say it fits them all. I doubt it runs well on any of them. If you do find an exact copy of your original you can sometimes swap all the jets and slide needle and the new carb will run fairly well, but it's never guaranteed that the old jets will fit into the new carb. Different carb manufacturers use different threads for their jets, and some of the aftermarket use threads of their very own.

Yeah you're right there Gw.. You do need to get the carb onto a nice flat surface.. Do be careful if you're using the impact driver Kawasig. It's easy to hold the carb and the impact bit in one hand though, and tap the bit to seat the bit in the screw.. that's safe.

If it has a diaphragm on the side and it's stuck in place you grind the end of a feeler to a sharp edge right around the end of it and use it to gently prise and work the diaphragm off.

I think it will be flooding. Some carbs that drain screw drains the water from the bottom of the bowl and out that nipple, but the nipple is actually attached to a brass tube in the bowl that goes up high and drains fuel if it gets too high.. Or to explain it differently, the nipple goes to a tall overflow tube, and the drain screw just lets fuel bypass the top of the overflow and go straight into the tube from the bottom. Hope that makes sense. And yeah, the fluctuating speed and all could definitely be caused by changing float level.. Once you have it off then you can give it a good clean and know it's good. I'd do it. And.. I take heaps of carbs apart, clean them and put them together again without changing a single part, and they are all good. The only problem is if the rubber gasket between the bowl and body is old and shrunk or swollen and doesn't want to stay in it's groove when it's time to put it back together.. Then I fit it all carefully all the way around holding it down with a 25 thou feeler gauge to hold it flat and in the groove till I've pressed the bowl into place, then I slip the feeler out. Everything else goes back together easy. Take every brass bit out and clean them. Clean the tiny holes in the sides of the emulsion tube the main jet screws into and that the slide needle drops down into. Take the float needle seat out and check the O ring or gasket that seals between it and the body. People seem to assume it's only the seat and needle that play up and leave the seat in.. Bad plan.

Thanks P5..

You are trying to get the screws out, the ones that hold the float bowl on ? Get an impact driver bit, it's called a No2, and tap it with a small hammer before you try turning it, that seats the driver and loosens the threads, then use the impact driver if you have one, or use a spanner on the bit while you push the bit down hard. If all else fails use channel lock pliers and get them out or cut a slot and use a conventional screwdriver. The screws are just a common metric thread. I'm pretty sure they will be four mill. An engineering supply or auto supply shop should have a plastic box with a range of metric bolts that will do the job, they sell them individually, or a bike shop will have some laying around probably. Four mill is the outside diameter, and what they get described as..

Ha. Very good Geezer. It still doesn't really explain why they applied the Yanky bit of the old dutch lyrics though.. But, by the sound of it Yanky is generally accepted as a friendly enough moniker now. We N.Zers are happy enough to be known as Kiwi, which is a rather strange looking shy bird that can't fly !

The blackness will be the oil. The glass doesn't normally get so dirty you can't see in. If you could see into the glass before you added the oil and can't see into it now, it's oil you are looking at. Try jacking the bike up on that side and watch the glass. The oil will run to the other side of the bike and you should see the level drop.

If you can take the pull start cover off you will be able to turn the crank by hand or a socket, or, put it in a forward gear and gently nudge the bike forwards so it turns the engine over. If the timing mark goes right past the hole then you'll have to nudge it right round two whole turns of the crank so watch carefully and nudge it gently. If you have the spark-plug out it will turn easily, and if you have the cam cover off(if it has one) you will see when it's getting near the right place before the mark gets into the timing hole.

No worries. I was pretty surprised they'd made one too. And so tell me, is it an insult to Americans to be called Yank ? On another forum the other day someone was denying being a yank.. not to me, to someone else. A couple of them seemed to think it only applied to some northern, and I think north eastern, states..

Water shouldn't really get into your tank. With steel tanks moisture in the air condenses on the cold steel and settles to the bottom. Plastic tanks don't do that. I'd be suspecting the water was in the fuel before it got put in the bike. I'm in the far north of N.Z. and we have a climate they describe as "marine" and "semi-tropical", and my humidity hardly ever gets below about seventy percent, mostly it's over eighty and it hovers near ninety-six for weeks at a time sometimes, and it goes up to ninety-nine just before it rains sometimes. But as long as I buy clean fuel, and store it in plastic jerry cans, I don't get water in my fuel. I always pour most of the fuel out of the jerry can into the bike, then leave a little in the can, or peer in there looking for water. The gas stations are pretty good these days though and it's rare to get water in the fuel. Once it was really common.

The model you want are out there, but no after market carb is set up as well as the original was, for your bike, for your fuel. They nearly always need working on and re tuning to get them to run as well as the original. It's better to repair your old carb unless the body where the slide runs is badly worn. Everything else is repairable. What's wrong with your old carb ?

Nah I looked it up to see what they were like and there was a flat six. And air cooled. Very tricky and not what I'd expect for yanky engineering. (I did see a post somewhere the other day saying that not all of America is/was yanky, only a few states ! ).. My bad. Over here we used to say that pommy cars were built by idiots for experts to work on, and yanky cars were built by experts for idiots to work on.. haha. It was pretty much true too. All the pommy cars needed two mechanics, one to hold the twenty little hard to get at bolts on one side, while another mech undid the nuts. Yanky stuff just had four bolts and they were easy to get to. A flat six air cooled turbo charged engine sounds very un-yanky !

You can also get isopropyl alcohol which does much the same job. Both quite common household or workshop products. In cars we used to put about a cup full of meths i and it would generally stop the water getting into the carb and blocking the jets. If it wasn't enough, you added a bit more. It's not so much how much fuel there is, but how much water you want to absorb. If you've already cleaned the tank it should only have a trickle of water left at most so probably a half or quarter cup would do. If you put a lot in the engine runs a bit lean and weak. It's alcohol though and burns cool.. It might make the bike a bit gutless but it won't over heat or do anything bad.

Purple/blue coloured alcohol for domestic use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol

I've always just used methylated spirits.

I never knew corvair was air cooled.. Not that we got them here.. That's very interesting.. Would it have been a copy of a Porche engine ?

You are right about the high detergent oils Geezer. We (mechanics) were warned about it in the seventies..

So you saying it was going before you replaced those parts, but now that you've fitted the parts it won't start ? And you fitted all the parts in one go ? And what were the problems you've been chasing for the last year ? It sounds like the no start now must be something you've done if it was going before you fitted new parts.. A wet spark-plug sounds like you have a weak or no spark. Have you checked if there is spark at the plug ? Have you gone back and checked all the wires you touched, or near where you were working ? If the bikes been sitting for a long time, has it got fresh fuel ? Stale fuel will make it hard to start and can flood the spark-plug.

This what you have ? https://www.partzilla.com/catalog/suzuki/atv/1989/quadrunner-lt160e Partzilla says the plastics fit right to 92.. Click on a part and it takes you to a new page where it tells you what other bikes the part fits.

Good one.