Lotus Europa Community
Lotus Europa Forums => Garage => Topic started by: Bryan Boyle on Wednesday,May 07, 2025, 06:42:55 PM
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Installed Curto-overhauled carbs today.
Freshened (hot soak, bead blast, high-temp silver engine paint) the intermediate throttle body (which I gutted years ago.) Came out nice...well, better than how it started, anyway.
New viton sealing rings, adapter to mount clearance set (.07"), new brass “T”, new hoses, sync’d carbs. All back together. Four hours start to finish.
The test drive went ok; even though I sync'd the carbs at 1K RPM, putting the air box on with the vapor extracting rig I built, turns out with it all together, the idle is a little low (500 RPM...edge of stalling). Has a new filter in the air filter can, fwiw. Thinking the crank vapors have an effect; so adjusted idle screws same for both…half turn each brought idle up to smooth 950; probably minorly out of sync now, so thinking, based on loosing 300-400 RPM (didn't happen when I was just venting the crank to a bottle stashed in the tail near the rear lights), taking apart the airbox and resyncing a little higher (1200? 1300?) to account. FWIW, testing the needle setting (they're new jets and needles set to spec by Curto) as called for in the book gave me the result the book called for...so going to do a highway run and see what the plugs say.
Just locally, though, good acceleration and pretty smooth idle. Better than what was on there before which was a fast self-overhaul. New seals, gaskets, floats, jets, needles...has an effect.
Someone pointed out I had a plastic fuel filter; picked up an aluminum body one from NAPA, will swap that out tomorrow. Pulled negative battery cable as I normally do...and closed up shop for the day.
Maybe now with fresh O/H rigs...won't have to fill the dashpots every time I go out for a run, right?
I think it turned out pretty clean. Now I have a set of CD carbs sitting on the bench. What to do with them?
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Wel done. They look great.
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Beautiful work Bryan and I'm sure it all works as well as it presents. Allot of labor on the cast aluminum parts...if you haven't already, you might want to try vapor blasting. I had the radiator cooling fan mount done by vapor blasting and I'm really happy with the original look. I did a minimum of prep and asked them to not overdue the blasting so as to keep it looking like a factory fresh part. If they wail on it, they can really make it shine.