Topic: Idle air passage plugged, any ideas?

[Aaron J Williams]

I'm resurrecting a 73 Yamaha DT1 for resale and it is starting to get on my nerves. It has a Mikuni round slide carb and the air passage to the idle jet is plugged. I have soaked it in carb acid for 2 days and tried to blow air through it lots of times. I then tried to use torch tip cleaner wire to unblock the passage but the passage is down in the idle jet well and very hard to get the wire into. Once I get the wire in there I can't put pressure on it to get it down the passage. Right now I have the passage filled with simple green and the carb sitting on my heater in the shop. At this point I can either try to push a wire in for another few hours or try to remove the tiny ball bearing that sealed the passage when the carb was manufactured and then drill the passage clean. I have never taken any of those little ball bearings out before and don't quite know how to go about it. Any thoughts? Anyone?

[merc2dogs]

 a lot of but not all plugs are soft lead, and pulling them is the best way to realy clean the passages, otherwise, as you've noticed the passages aren't positioned to do a good cleaning.

 for re-plugging them, I've melted small beads of a harder solder pressed them in and used a softer lower melt temp solder to seal it. though if you want you can use almost anything to plug them. I've got a dozen different types of solder so it's just more convenient for me.

Ken

[Aaron J Williams]

Thanks Ken!
I drilled out the plug which was brass and then ran a tiny hand drill bit down the passage and pulled out an aluminum shaving! It must have been there from when they originally drilled the passage. I guess I know why a 73 DT250 has 1715 original miles on it, it never idled it's whole life. It's amazing the stuff you find in carburetors!

Since I'm not very good with solder I mixed up a little 2 part epoxy and plugged the hole with that, hopefully it holds ok. I've got the carb sitting on it's side so the epoxy doesn't run down into the passage and plug it up.

Now I can get back to polishing the bike up while waiting for my petcock kit to arrive and then it's off to feebay so I can afford to buy a Valkyrie.