1970 Harley Gas Cart No Acceleration

Blanoue

I've been working on bringing my 1970 Harley gas cart back to life. I've replaced the starter, points, and condenser and flushed the fuel tank. The cart now starts and idles smoothly but when I accelerate, I hear the carb open up but the RPMs do not change. I removed the governor and this made no difference. Is this a problem with the carb or could it be something else?
Thanks for your help.

BGW

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backyard

Its probably a clogged up carb. Which carb do you have?

Jack up the rear end, spray some starting fluid in it when you give it gas and see if that helps it.

Blanoue

Thanks for the response. I tried that last night with no difference. I'll probably pull the carb off tonight and see which one it is and give it a good cleaning.

chuckbaynham

Have you checked the compression? Sometimes, what appears to be an "idling" motor is just the starter/generator spinning it.
Good luck!

backyard

Yea its probably not the carb if you sprayed starting fluid in it and it didn't help. If you have spark and compression, the starting fluid should have at least cranked the engine.

Like chuck said, the generator may have just been spinning the engine over making it look like it was running, so you may not have spark or enough compression.

Pull the plug out and lay it on the head so its grounded and turn the engine over and see if you have spark. Then put in a compression gauge and check the compression.

73eldo

The word idle got my attention too. Lots of us make the mistake of thinking its running when its just the starter spinning it on our first cart.

Blanoue

Thanks everyone. You were right about the starter just turning the motor over. I checked for spark and there wasn't any. Replaced the coil and she started right up tonight. 90 lbs of compression and runs strong.

Blanoue

Now I get to learn how to set the timing and carb. Ive read the service manual and watched a few uTube videos. Any tricks I could use?

73eldo

My 2 cents

I do both by trial and error. Do what ever you have to do to get it running then make slight adjustments and test drive. Keep going till it gets worse then go back to where it was good.

For the carb I will go maybe 1/4 to 1/2 turn CCW from what seems to be the sweet spot just to make sure I'm not too lean. Lean burns stuff up, rich just slowly gums things up so its the lesser of the two evils.

For the timing you have to test forward and reverse. Usually one direction will be stronger than the other. Assuming the compression is pretty close in both directions its the timing causing the difference. Make slight adjustments till you get a fairly balanced feel between forward and reverse or if you want you can try and get a little more out of forward.

Lochlin

I hate timing so much that I converted my carts to electronic ignitions!

I have to agree with Eldo, the manual method of timing never worked for me. Only trial and error worked.

TEW makes a slick timing stop that he has posted about a few times. You may want to look for those posts.