Holley/Weber carb drama's .....

Ok, I need someone to call the men in white jackets please! Or at least slap me and yell "pull yourself together man"!

My Holley 5200 (180 Holley) which is more or less a Holley branded Weber 32/36 is dumping fuel through the venturi's as soon as the fuel pump turns on.

At first I thought it was flooding and I had a needle and seat issue or something like that. Nope, needle and seat are only a year or two old and after cleaning and inspecting, seem to be working fine. Whilst appart, I double checked the float setting, and all is good there.

I thought maybe I had too much fuel pressure, nope, it won't even hold 2 psi. Which lead me down the path of perhaps my float was suffering from fuel soak (it's a known problem) and wasn't providing enough seating force for the needle. Ended up finding a float, and after comparing the weight between new and old floats, there's about half a gram in it (just shy of a 5% varience.)

So after a few half baked attempts to figure out what's going on with it I decided to fill the fuel bowl manually with the top off the carb to see what's going on and see if I'd missed something.... What I saw was that the fuel bowl steadily drained it's self down to about half way as I watched fuel freely flowing out of the venturi's.

Perhaps I'm completely missing something, and hopefully someone comes up with something really simple like " hey dumbass, that'll happen if the top gasket is faulty", or "your power valves E36 M3 the bed ya idiot"

Yeah... I'm probably being a bit rough on myself.... But man it's driving me crazy that such a simple Carby has me stumped and obviously missing something that should be standing out like a sore thumb.

If the float is doing its job, the float bowl should never be completely full.

With the float attached to the underside of the air horn (if I remember correctly, it's been years), and the air horn is upside down, does the float sit horizontal? Gently bend the tabbies so it is.

With the float sitting horizontal, and you blow through the fuel inlet, does the needle and seat actually seal? If not, I suspect the needle and seat.

You're right, it shouldn't go as high as I filled it, and maybe me overfilling it highlighted that I have an adjustment issue. I've checked the float height a couple of time, and if anything its slightly lower than spec.

But visually, and if I measure the gap between the front and the back of the float, it seems to be slightly out of parallel to the air horn. I'll have a bit of an adjustment and see if I can get it sitting a bit flatter and slightly lower than before.

I did my best Louis Armstrong  impersonation with the needle and seat and it feels airtight to me, also just ran the fuel pump with my finger very gently rested on the float and it held fuel fine.

In reply to SkinnyG :

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

Got the float parallel to the air horn, it made a slight improvement. I went a bit further, it got better still. All up, it's ended up pretty much set to the brass float spec as opposed to the plastic float spec, but its behaving now.

Moral of the story, if it's behaving like a float level issue, keep adjusting the float level. 

Thanks for saving my sanity, you're a legend!