At 4:30 PM 3/9/95 -0500, Allen Bachelder wrote:
>My limited experience would also indicate that HS4s and HIFs are equally
>easy to rebuild and set up. Do I dare state, in a public forum, that I've
>never had any trouble with SUs on the MGBs if they're in decent condition.
>If they're hard to tune, it means they need rebuilding.
I've observed that 80% of what most people perceive as wrong with
SU carbs is probably traceable to the age of the carbs, not their design.
Swapping from old SUs to new ones on The Green Car cured the
stumble off-idle, the rough idle, the tendency to hunt, and even
the dual-idle situation (high idle with clutch out, low idle with
clutch in).
Of what's left to complain about with SUs, 80% is typically due to
user ignorance. Ignorance, just for the record, is distinct from
stupidity. I'm ignorant of the mechanisms by which automatic
transmissions work, for example; if I were then to go about
pouring Lyle's Golden Syrup into a Turbo-Hydramatic 350 in an
attempt to improve its off-the-line response because "well, hey,
syrup is STICKY, duuude," that would also be stupid. And while
ignorance and stupidity often go hand in hand, there's no inherent
connection between the two.
This, I have observed, is why so few Volvo owners in the Sixties
(or since, for owners of old Volvos) complained about their cars'
SU carburetors, while owners of LBCs experienced legendary
tales of carburetor woes.
I think it's for this reason: LBCs appeal to people who like to mess
around with things, and furthermore to people who have always
hung around sports cars and sports car types. And one of the
pieces of oral tradition that you pick up from Sports Car Types
is that you have to mess around with the SU carbs all the time if
you want the car to run right. So we, back in the deeps of time when
we were ignorant novices, immediately began messing around with
the SU carbs no matter what went wrong. Car pulls to the left under
braking? Twiddle the front jet half a turn. The wiper motor won't
shut off? Re-center the needles. Starter won't engage? Put a little
oil in the dashpots. We did this because we lived in a culture
that said you have to mess around with SU carbs because they're
always out of tune. And if you mess around with SU carbs without
knowing what you're doing, sure enough, they'll always be out
of tune. This is how cultures perpetuate themselves.
Volvo owners, by and large, did not live in the same culture.
Old Volvos existed in a culture that said cars weren't terribly
interesting, yet they needed periodic attention. So you find a
lot of early Sixties Volvos, like the one my wife drives, in absolutely
impeccable condition because the owners didn't mess around with
them. They took ours in for regular, meticulous service from trained
people, and as a result it's 32 years old and still runs perfectly on
its original engine and transmission -- and on its original, unrebuilt,
never-out-of-sync HS6 carburetors.
As the resident Zen master (well, for the original Britcars list, so I
shall step into that role here as well), I must point out that this is
the mechanism by which one's fears can rule one's life. Living in
fear calls into being that which you fear. If you live in fear of your
SUs getting out of tune, then you will mess with your SUs and they
will always be out of tune. If you let go of your fear, you will achieve
balance and be open to the reality beyond SUs. Or to paraphrase
one of my favorite koans, "Dashpot is not moving, needle is not
moving; only mind is moving."
>(I've just broken
>corollary #0251 of the fundamental law of random perversity: proud
>exclamations regarding component- reliability inevitably lead to failure of
>said component.)
That law, BTW, applies to more than just cars, as we found out once
when my wife commented on how little time our children spent in
the doctor's office compared to some of our nieces and nephews...
I think we spent more in the next month on antibiotics than we did
on car parts.
>The
>pooint of all thie is that your choice of carburettors may be determined by
>which manifolds you have or can easily acquire.
Well, they're dependent. Buying carbs to fit the manifold you've got
sounds like buying a car to fit the cover you've got in the garage...
And while nobody has mentioned it explicitly, I should point out that
if you're planning to move up to a larger carburetor for performance
reasons -- say, to install some of those HS6 carbs off my old Volvo in
place of the HS4 carbs that come stock on the MGB -- you'll need to
change the manifold as well because the larger carbs require a larger
manifold throat.
|