Well in spite of the instructions that came with the Quicksteel, about it being impervious to chemicals, it's not...gasoline in the float bowl quickly softened it and it came apart. So this material and solution does not work. Sorry to get anyone's hopes up.
Just tried again using real thin safety wire and using a drilled hole in the mount as anchoring point. NO GO as well. Even though when I manually move the float up and down it seems free and operation, as soon as I put the bowl back on, turn on the gas, it overfills the bowl and starts leaking out of the carburetor! Tried a couple ways, no go. Back to the old drawing board.
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I'd written before about finding a damaged/missing end of the portside mounting post on the left-side BING carburetor: LINK
Today I tried for a while to use safety wire to rig some kind of support cradle for the free-floating end of the floats support pin. No luck.
So, I decided to try what a member of the airheads email list suggested. He'd suggested JB Weld as the material to use, but I tried Quicksteel since I had it on hand from before, did not involve me removing the carburetor and inverting it to pour the stuff in and JB Weld was $13 for a kit that was way too much more material than I needed. Worth a shot anyways. Thanks Bud H.!
I cut off a small piece, kneaded it till it felt warm in my hand and applied it, Cutting / molding / pressing as needed onto the mounting post. The instructions said you could sand it, drill it or whatever after one hour but I'll wait till tomorrow to do anything further to it. I made sure I could put the float bowl back on before it hardened and it's a good thing I did. More trimming later while the stuff hardened, and the bowl fit back on just fine.
I made the sure the floats still move freely up and down, totally unhindered by the Quicksteel material.
Does not look too bad eh? Tomorrow I might sand it a bit to give it a smoother look using a dremel tool, or I might not. Depends on whether it remains stuck to the remnants of the mounting post when I give it a good tug in the morning.
For the long run, I'll keep my eyes open for a used carburetor body on Ebay and such. I hope this repair works until I find something more permanent.
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