Watch for falling debris....

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On Halloween my truck started stalling out at stop lights. This was my first experience with a flooded carb so I had no clue what was going on at first. It didn't happen all the time, just occasionally. It wasn't until a couple of days later when I went to start it in the morning and it wouldn't start. When I opened the hood, I had gas all over the intake manifold and top of the carb.

I took off the airhorn to check the float and needle. Reset the float and inspected the needle and didn't find anything worthwhile. Put everything back together and the truck ran great for a few days. Long enough to go out of town for the weekend in my husband's car and leave my truck with him. It got him to work but barely made it back home again. So it sat through the weekend until I got home to take a look.

I learned a nifty trick to find out if the carb is flooding by looking down into the carb with a flashlight to see if gas is dripping out of the venturris. Sure enough it was.
I took the airhorn off again, inspected the needle and verified the float again, just incase....still ran bad. So this ruled out the needle and float and left the solution to be some debris in the seat. Not having been able to see any debris, I called my dad to get his opinion before going further. He told me of a trick where you plug off the fuel line, start the truck and let it run until there wasn't enough gas in the carb and it started to die, unplug the line, and the force of the gas shooting into the carb may dislodge the debris. Did this and it seemed to work. Drove it a bit and no problems so I thought I'd double check the float level one last time before calling it good since I'm not very confident in my float setting abilities. Removed the airhorn, rechecked the float level, put everything back together, started the truck and it would barely even run!! Arghhhhh!!!

Pulled the airhorn off again...I'm getting really good at this part ...checked everything, finally shined a flashlight down into the seat and there it was....
A nasty piece of rubber that had managed to get through from my new fuel line, or old one...I'm not sure which. My guess is that it would shift around in the seat and was small enough to exit the hole at the bottom of the seat and then return on occasion causing my truck to run ok sometimes and not at all other times. I was able to get it out by removing the fuel line at the carb and blowing it out with compressed air.

Even though this whole thing was a PITA, I learned a lot from this. I have 2 new tricks under my belt and I learned that the first order of business when checking a flooded carb is to get down in there with a flashlight and take a look around..that was my 'duh' moment. If you just look at it without a flashlight to shine back and forth, chances are you'll miss it like I did many times.

Anyways, here's a pic of the little devil that caused this whole mess...