G’DAY, AND WELCOME TO THIS, THE NEW ISSUE OF BSH!

The days’re now an hour longer (well, the daylight hours anyway), the sun’s getting warmer, more and more bikes’re appearing on the streets and, as I sit ‘ere slaving away over a hot keyboard, a whole load’ve just growled past my window on their way to somewhere interesting no doubt.

You’ll be glad to know that this’s the time of year when folk’re finishing their winter projects, and the BSH email account’s forever pinging with pics of cool chops an’ bobbers an’ stuff. It does mean weekend days off are, for me, now a thing of the past as I can, pretty much, plan where I’m going to be every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from now until the middle of October. That may sound a bit of a bind to some, but I’m looking forward to it – miles and miles of warm roads unencumbered by slimy leaves n’ shite; long summer evenings in far-off fields with similarly silly people; being able to just jump on the bike and ride, rather than having to spend 20 minutes each time putting warm kit on. Summer 2022, I can’t bloody wait!

I don’t know if you know, but the best-kept secret of carb function is that inside each carb are thousands of tiny gnomes, each with a small bucket. No, honestly. As you open the throttle, you see, more of them’re allowed into the float bowl, where they fill the buckets, and climb up the carb’s passages to the intake where they empty the buckets into the air stream.

Most people’re vaguely aware that, if you don’t ride the bike for a while, bad things can happen, but they don’t really know why. Let me enlighten you. If you don’t run a motor for a while, tiny bats take up residence in the chambers of the carb and, before long, the passages get plugged up with bat guano. (Don’t worry though, there’s no chance of catching Covid from it.) This Chiroptera poo creates a gnome traffic jam, meaning not enough bucketfuls of fuel can get to the engine. Sometimes this means that the gnomes simply give up and go take a nap, and that means the engine won’t run at all at this point. Sometimes, though, you’ll have a single gnome who’s dedicated to his job, which is why the bike’ll occasionally fire as he tosses his lone bucket-load down the intake.

There’s been some research into using tiny dwarves in modern carbs instead of gnomes – the advantage being that, unlike gnomes, dwarves’re natural miners and can often reopen a clogged passage. Unfortunately, dwarves have, understandably, a natural fear of earthquakes, as any miner should, and in recent tests, engine vibrations from some machines caused them to evacuate various Harley-Davidson test vehicles at speed, and make a beeline for the nearest BMW dealership. Sadly, BMWs’re fuel-injected so the poor dwarves met an unfortunate end in the rollers of a Bosch fuel pump.

Bat poop blockages aside, other carb problems can also occur. If the level of fuel in the float bowl rises too high, it’ll wipe out the poorer gnomes living in the lower parts of the carb. The more affluent ones build their homes in the diaphragm chamber, you see, and so are unaffected. This’s why a bike’s said to be ‘running rich’. Similarly, if the fuel level drops, then the gnomes have to walk farther to get a bucketful of fuel, and so less gets to the engine, and because the gnomes get quite a workout from this additional distance, this condition’s known as ‘running lean’.

The use of the device known only as the ‘choke’ has finally been banned by PETG (People for the Ethical Treatment of Gnomes), and replaced by a new carb circuit on modern bikes that simply allows more gnomes to carry fuel at once when the engine needs to start or warm up. On the grounds that this is a family magazine, and we try not to glorify violence, I won’t explain how the ‘choke’ operated… you’d probably rather not know anyway.

Anyway, basically, look after your gnomes, and they’ll look after you.