Remove the Carburettor from the bike and clean the outer surfaces off, we use a tooth brush with a bit of the petrol from out of the carb and then blow it dry with compressed air.
Remove the float bowl, turn the carburettor upside down, remove the 2 securing screws and then gently pick the float bowl up from the back right hand side first (as you are looking down at the carb in the upside down position). You need to lift this corner up by about 5mm with the carb upside down, then the float bowl should gently come right off, be warned it isn’t easy till you’ve got the hang of it and don’t force it as you will bend the floats or the overflow pipe.
The float height is critical to the way your bike runs, setting the floats further away from the Gasket surface shuts the fuel of earlier leaving the level of fuel in the float bowl lower which in turn weakens the mixture of the carb. Setting the floats closer to the gasket surface allows more petrol in to the bowl and therefore richens the mixture of the carb slightly but you risk losing more fuel out of the overflow pipe at the base of the carb. Because of this you can use the float height as a extra way of tuning your carb but to help keep things simple we recommend keeping the floats set at the same height while you get a good base setting.
Many people complain about the amount of fuel these carbs leak and they nearly all mention that the Dellorto carburettor doesn’t ever leak, this is because the Dellorto PHBL, as fitted to many trials bikes, does not have a overflow pipe so if the floats stop working for some reason it will flood your engine instead. If you really want to totally stop your carburettor leaking you can block the overflow pipe off, you run a slight risk of flooding your engine when dropping your bike or parking it up at a silly angle while walking a section but we have run a bike with the overflow blocked for 5 or 6 years without problems, another bonus of blocking the overflow is the brass overflow tube that stick out of the floats can be removed making it much easier to remove the float bowls.
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