Started Wally…. Sort of….

So, thanks to the good graces of Littletractorgal and Kidlet #2, who amidst prepping for a birthday party for Kidlet #1 and helping take care of Littletractorbabe still allowed me some tractor time, I was able to get out to the back yard, gap the spark plug, set the point gap, drop some gas into the tank… then I took the time to pull the air cleaner off because it occurred to me that I would need to adjust the idle and high speed jets, and I can’t do that with the air cleaner on…. Then I turned the key and voila!Well, except for THIS little problem…

So I pulled off the carb and checked the float… No liquid inside of it, and when I put it into a pan of water and held it underwater, no bubbles and…

it floats… So, checked and set the tang, which I think was not quite right to hold the valve shut. IIRC, the float is supposed to be parallel to the bowl when its holding that valve shut…

So I strapped it back on, opened the fuel valve, and waited. When it didn’t appear to leak, I tried again.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get Wally to run consistently… For a while, he would run with full choke on, so I pulled the carb AGAIN and cleaned all the passages with carb cleaner… Still no luck. Followed the instructions in the tech manual about setting the high speed and the idle jet, still no consistent run….Tried until I ran the battery down…

So, here’s the question… Is it a carb issue? Should I perhaps swap Ernie’s carb onto Wally? When he DID run, he smoked a bit, but other than that, ran alright… However, didn’t ever seem to really get going… Maybe I’m not getting enough gas INTO the carb, maybe I over-adjusted the tang and its holding the valve shut before the bowl is full enough… When I pulled the carb for the third time, however, there was a fair bit of fuel in the bowl… Once I ran the battery down, however, I decided to focus a bit more on Ernie….