Carburetors for Dummies

Many of the staff at the Antisocial Network have never seen a personal vehicle that has a carburetor instead of fuel injection, although many have at least passing acquaintance with the two-stroke carbs on lawn equipment. Of course, making any adjustments to two-stroke carbs is likely to induce extreme frustration, so they'll admit to not having tried it (for the most part). We do, of course, have a few old-timers who've worked on pre-Clean Air Act engines, so the ItstillRuns.com article, "How to Tune & Modify Carburetor Performance" (penned by Cassandra Tribe) wasn't all that scary a topic.

There are gazillions of articles out there about how to tune your carburetor, and Tribe managed to find – and reword – one that covered the topic of tuning a carburetor quite well. Heck, even Joan or Lacy could have done that; we certainly hope that someone like Cassandra with a technical education could do that. Then again, we'd like to think that someone getting paid to write about tuning and modifying carburetors would have gone a little farther than, "...turn the idle screw... Turn the mix screw..."

We get it: she repeated someone's instructions for how to tune a carb (a single-barrel carb, FWIW). But when it comes to modifying a carburetor, here's what Tribe tells us:

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Yup: no mention of modifications, whatsoever. Nothing about jetting the carb. Nothing about supercharging the engine. No tweaks to the throttle plate. Nothing about air-bleed size, venturi boost, or any other possible modification to the carburetor; just someone else's "How to Tune..." reworded and the rest left blank.
If you ask us, that's definitely the quality of work that's gonna win you a Dumbass of the Day award.

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