How to Clean a Carburetor

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Chuck Orlandi here at Miami Shores Auto Repair in Miami Shores, Florida. O.k., in this clip we're going to talk about how to clean a carburetor on a car. Now today's cars, very few of them use carburetors, but we happen to have one here today that I can show you, that does have a carburetor. And let me show you where that's located. Underneath here, you would remove this, this is where the air cleaner is. And this is the carburetor right here, this is what supplies fuel to the engine. The easy way to clean it is to use a stuff like this, and our carburetor and choke cleaner has a two bonnet, put that here. And you would start the car up, let it run, you know, spray this in there as it's running. And that will clean up the carburetor as well as the valves on top of the engine. That's the easy way to clean it. Now if you have an issue where the carburetor needs more work, it's not working properly. Then you would remove the carburetor completely from the car, take it all apart, put it in a solvent and it removes all the deposits inside the carburetor. You put it all back together with new gaskets. So it's a bit of a tedious job and it usually it requires a carburetor specialist. And there are guys that still do it because a lot of the boats now use them. And a lot of small engines like lawn movers and all that, they use carburetor still. Most of the cars now use fuel injection which is similar but not the same because each cylinder would have a fuel injector and not a carburetor. And to clean that system we would use a different setup which is an item that you screw on to the engine to supply fuel injection cleaner, right straight through the injectors. But then again, back to the carburetors, when you clean one like this, the easy way, it's not a big deal. A can of this stuff costs probably 8 or 10 dollars. When you take them apart and send them out, it's much more, much more costly. This has been Chuck Orlandi, thank you for watching."