One of the issues I had on this build was that the carb set I bought had been dropped and one of the float bowl pins was broken. I took it to Jim French and he welded that and fixed it for me (by the way, SUPER guy and he does incredible work at very reasonable prices). However, once I had new jets and installed them into the cleaned carbs and reassembled the carbs, I realized that the float bowl on the opposite side carb from the broken pin had also received a dent in it during that same drop.
I considered taking it back to Jim to have him microweld the area and do a build-up and I will do that if this method doesn't work. But the documentation online for JB Weld says that petroleum products, ie gasoline, do not degrade JB Weld and since this is in an area where there should only be gas to this spot when the bike is leaned way over to the right, my first inclination was to try & fix it using JB Weld.
Here's what the gap looked like before:
And here's what it looks like now:
In close-up magnification like this, it looks a bit rougher than it is. After seeing the photo, I took the carb bowl back off and filed down the sides a bit more to make it look smoother there although it really wouldn't have affected the performance and wasn't apparently obvious from anything over a foot away anyway.
Tonight, I'm going to do the wintergreen treatment on the carb boots and hope to get the carbs and pods mounted onto the bike, along with the exhaust pipes tonight. It should be ready at that point to hook up the temporary gas bottle and see if we can get this thing running in the next day or two.
