Carburetors for the Dummy Landscaper

Though almost all gasoline-powered cars and trucks on the road these days have fuel injection, a lot of people still have a carburetor or two lurking in their garages: carburetors can be found on lawnmowers, trimmers, chainsaws and leaf blowers, for example. The carbs on either two- or four-cycle small engines are notoriously finicky, especially if the tool's not used on a regular basis. If your small engine's not running well, you'll probably head to the internet for some help (especially if your owner's manual was written and printed in China). With luck, you'll get help; if your luck's bad, you'll find Larry Parr, (a returning "expert") holding forth for Hunker.com in "How to Adjust Carb [sic] On Craftsman Leaf Blower" at GardenGuides.com. We say "bad luck," because the advice you get from Larry is pretty useless. Larry's sole instruction for adjusting the carburetor on a Craftsman Leaf Blower – or for any other small engine carburetor - is:

"Turn the adjusting screw on the side of the carb while the engine is running until the engine is running at peak performance."

That's it. Nothing else, not even how to determine that the engine is "running at peak performance." This instruction is followed by elaboration apparently written in the department of redundancy department:

2-stroke carburetor rebuild kit

"Turning the adjustment screw to either the right or the left (no more than half a turn at a time!) will either increase or decrease the air flow through the carburetor and will either make your fuel mixture leaner or richer."

After this cogent (though rather uninformative) statement, Larry goes on to tell you to buy a carburetor rebuild kit (see left) and install it, a process he claims is "relatively easy." First, the claim that this process is "easy" in any sense is sure evidence that Larry's never rebuilt a small-engine carburetor. It's pretty obvious that he merely reworded the instructions from a video he found on YouTube. Second, Larry doesn't answer the original question: that question was about adjusting a carburetor, not about rebuilding a carburetor! 

Like so many of eHow.com's babbling drones, Larry's more concerned about meeting his minimum word count than about answering the question at hand. In our book, that makes him a dumbass - the Dumbass of the Day, to be precise.

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DDIY - SMALL ENGINES