It's alive!!!!!

[Justin B.]

Now that the sun's out I have made a bit of progress.  I pulled off the carb that insisted on making a mess, made sure there was no crud blocking the float needle, tweaked the float level a bit, and SAME THING!!!    I hate carbs...  

Sooo, I pulled the carb bowl while still on the bike, it was empty :-? I then saw the pinhole in the bottom of the carb bowl.  I knew I had had to scrape out a lot of corrosion, but didn't realize it was THAT much!  

Being rather disgusted with the whole thing I pulled both carbs, slapped on my spare pair of R100 carbs, and it cranked right up!!    Still killed every bug in site, but it actually idled good (about 1k) without doing any adjusting, and once warm starts by just touching the starter button.  After several start/stop/rest chcles the smoke is now diminishing considerably and I am feeling much better about the whole mess.

I had less luck with the gas cap.  It was frozen/welded solid into the tank.  I had been soaking it for about a month with liberal doses of PB Blaster, I put a large screwdriver in the handle last night, gave a good twist, and half of it remained in the tank. Guess I need to add a float bowl AND gas cap to my major "parts-to-scrounge" list which is now:
  
Float bowl
Seat pan
Gas cap
Rectangular front master cylinder
Headlight
R/H mirror

But, things are looking up and the Dyna coil seems to have plenty of juice to fire everything up just fine, AND the $48 generic sealed "Odyssey Clone" battery appears to have plenty of crank in it.

[Semper Gumby]

Justin,  When all else fails - pull out the Dremel and zizzwheel the gas cap!

Bill

[Justin B.]

Nah, gas cap is shot - rotted in half, and the tank is shot as well.  This is the first tank I've ever seen that had rust holes on the TOP.  It must have sat full of water for a goos 13 of those 14 years...

[Ed Miller]

Sorry, but somebody has to say this:  you can probably patch the hole in the float bowl with JB Weld or a similar epoxy putty.  

Are you going to buy a new tank?  I saw one on Ebay but I don't have the link handy.

[Justin B.]

Ed, already got another tank and the JB-Weld will be cured by morning...  

I actually found three holes in the bowl by the time I got done scrubbing it with a stainless steel brush.  I worked it into the holes, and let a good layer "flow" over the entire pitted part of the bowl.   [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]

[donbmw]

I tryed JB Weld in a float bowl and it didnot last very long at all.

Don

[Justin B.]

You never know.  I patched a couple of small holes in a 71 240Z gas tank about 10 years ago, the bro-in-law's kid now has the car and the tank's going strong...

[Semper Gumby]

Just don't get any on the idle jet in the corner of the float bowl!

Bill

[Justin B.]

No, it's clear.  Actually, it's a jet for the cold-start/enricher circuit that a lot of people refer to as the "choke", which really isn't a choke in our case...  Funny thing, about them, they are different between bowls.  On one of the bowls this enricher jet is threaded and can be removed for cleaning.  On the one that had "swiss-cheesed", the jet was pressed in.  Apparently one of the carbs or bowls had been replaced before.

[Justin B.]

Here is some proof that I haven't just been sitting at the computer all weekend:

This was from the first attempt to crank it up Friday evening.  Notice the puddle caused by the "holey" l/h carb bowl:

[Justin B.]

AND, this should prove that it actually ran long enough to snap a pic.  Strangely enough, this is the only Beemere that the charge light acts "normally", at least according to everybody else.  Once I got it up to 1200-1300 RPM it went out where both of my R100s will not have the light on at idle and the wife's will just flicker: