How to Clean Your Carburetor

What do you need?

  • Any kind of carburetor
  • Carburetor Cleaner (we like Barrymans or Simple Green)
  • White Lithium Grease
  • Old Toothbrush
  • Rubber Gloves
  • Crocus Cloth
  • Safety Glasses

Clean Your Carburetor

Before you start

Make sure to remove all rubber and plastic parts while taking the Carburetor apart, because we are using chemicals that could potentially damage your parts. I already did it a few times and nothing happened, but just to be on the safe side.

On top of that, you might also prepare a pan that you can dip into the bucket for all the smaller parts because nobody likes to go fishing in chemicals!

Cleaning Your Carburetor

Step by Step Guide

You will notice that carburetors have a lot of very little passageways. These are easily plugged with dirt and/or ethanol residue. So, in every little passageway, you should spray some spray carburetor cleaner thru. Use the type that includes the straw so that you can spray into the small hole. Spray in one end and look to see that it comes out somewhere else. This will help eliminate the heavy deposits before you put it into the dip. It is not recommended to clean the whole carburetor with the spray cleaner, but it is kind of a heavy-duty cleaner that will help very much in the process.

First, prepare your carburetor by cleaning it with a cleaning spray, depending on the dirtiness of your carburetor it might also be a good idea to brush the heavy stuff off with an old toothbrush.

After your first cleaning session is done, your parts are ready to take a bath in our Chem-Dip! Make sure that you don´t rush it and if it’s necessary do one part at a time!

Note: Rust cannot be removed by putting it into a carburetor dip. That might require a brush, or even a bead blaster.

When you feel like there is more than enough space in the bucket, feel free to add your pan with all the smaller parts. The next thing we need to do is leave it in the Chem-Dip overnight, to see the results! Be careful if you have aluminum stuff,
like the carburetor from a 2100. Motorcycles in general have a lot of aluminum which you should not leave in there for more than four hours if that, if you want to avoid damage and discoloration of your parts!

Once it has been on the dip for some time and you consider it is time to take it out, you should use the toothbrush to get the rest of the carbon off.

With that done, you can proceed to wash it off and that’s when you will realize how much it has changed from how it was at the beginning of the process. 

The next part is the most important one!

Take your carburetor cleaner and blow out every single hole. Make sure that it goes all the way through! If you don’t have a carburetor cleaner, it is not the end of the world. You can use whatever you have, compressed air also works wonders! Do whatever you have to do but get these holes clean!

To make sure every single hole is clean, look through them into the light! Feel free to blow some more compressed air or carburetor cleaner into it to remove leftovers.

If you want to get a nice outside look, you can use a bead blaster (if you have one); put baking soda in there and that will give a pretty good look. Anyway, this is not a “must do”, so once you have made sure that the passageways are clean, you have finished your carburetor’s cleaning process.

Bottom Line

It is not hard to clean a carburetor on your own and you will almost definitely receive wonderful results. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

You can find my social media links at the bottom of this page!

If you want to watch my video to get a better understanding of what I´m talking about feel free to do so!

Updated on 04/13/2022

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