Flooded Carburetors for Dummies

Let us be perfectly frank about something: our staffers have learned (the hard way, perhaps) to pretty much assume that any freelance article dealing with internal combustion engines written by a J-school or English graduate is gonna be rubbish. That's for a couple of reasons, but mostly because they don't teach automotive mechanics in liberal arts courses. Sorry, folks: it is what it is. So when we saw "What are the Causes of Carburetor Flooding," posted by eHow's Angus Koolbreeze III, we figured it would be bushwa... and we were right.

Koolbreeze (yeah, sure, that's his name) opens by telling his readers what a carburetor is -- or what he thinks a carburetor is:

"The carburetor is one of the main parts of a vehicle. Its job is to regulate the speed of the engine. It does this by measuring the amount of air necessary for the speed at which you wish to travel: it pulls a small amount of air and fuel for low speeds, increasing that amount as you speed up."

Right away we knew Angus was in over his (her?) head: "main parts of a vehicle"??? then why are almost all cars today fuel-injected? and is the carb more "main" than the brakes? the transmission? the camshaft? Of course not: what "Koolbreeze" apparently didn't know is that carburetors are pretty much restricted to small engines these days, like lawnmowers and string trimmers. Let's move on, though, to see how "Angus" defines flooding: no, wait, he never does! so here goes: flooding occurs when the air-fuel mixture passing through the carburetor is too rich for the engine speed; meaning that there is more fuel than necessary to maintain combustion. Too bad "Angus" never said that...  By the way, here are some common reasons for flooding...

When it comes to the causes of flooding, Mr. or Ms Koolbreeze did little more than reword information found at a couple of websites. Even that is a little too much for Angus, however, as it is painfully obvious that he doesn't know what a carburetor float is -- which is probably why he tells his readers that the cause of a float problem is probably

"...the defective float problem develops when the tang (the metal adjustment on the float) is too long and catches on the webbing part that supports the stanchions on the float pin. To solve the problem, shorten the tang, then readjust the float drop..."

...which Koolbreeze reworded from a Porsche enthusiast website: in the real world, carburetor floats are fabricated just fine and are much more likely to develop a pinhole than to have a tang-stanchion mismatch. Dumbass.

By now it should be obvious that Angus (whatever his/her real name is) has no idea what flooding is and probably couldn't spell "carburetor" before claiming this title at eHow. We hope that realization means that it's also obvious why Koolbreeze is the Dumbass of the Day for today.

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