6 ms·

Seems to be very dated. Plenty on adjusting carburetors, in fact adjusting all sorts of no-longer-needing-adjusting parts.

• jsingleton 11y ago
  It will be even more dated when electric vehicles take over and internal combustion engines become as niche as steam engines. But then they still make manuals for those: http://www.haynes.co.uk/thomas/ http://www.haynes.co.uk/thomas/
• anon4 11y ago
  Given that there's a lot of dated cars, I don't think the advice is unwarranted.
  • gregpilling 11y ago
    GM stopped putting carburetors in vehicles in 1985 for the US market, which is 30 years ago. When can we let go of old tech?
    • realusername 11y ago
      There is other countries which are using cars other than the United States (shocking I know !) and I have a car which has one.
      • marincounty 11y ago
        Good for you! I will never understand the mostly American tradition of buying a new car every few years? Cars that are so complicated; the owner is forced to bring it to the shop for every hiccup. A lot of cars/and trucks from the late 80's to around 2008, are pretty easy to work on, and with the proper maintence can last 300,000 miles. And if your not afraid of getting your hands dirty--you will never have to pay a mechanic $120/hr to work on your vechicle. These newer vehicles are so complicated--a lot of shops do a lot of learning on your dime. (I have a Toyota with a 22R engine. It has one 350,000 miles and it's never seen a mechanic--except for smog checks, and never failed once. Actually it did fail once, but it was due to an error in a Motor Emmission publication. If you have an older car, and need a Smog check; make sure your smog shop has access to Mitchell manuals online(OnDemand5). They are highly accurate! My dad gave me some good advice years ago. He told me to buy a year specific service manual for every automobile you ever buy.
        • bluetomcat 11y ago
          It's due to the perceived wisdom that every car suddenly becomes a lemon after hitting 100k miles. The "low social status" attributed to driving an older car is also at play. Here in Europe, it's not uncommon to see cars in good shape which have over 400k miles on the clock. If you think about it, a European or Japanese mid 90's car with no rust and a rebuilt engine will give you more trouble-free miles, for a fraction of the money.
        • rgbrenner 11y ago
          mostly American tradition of buying a new car every few years The average car on US roads is 11.4 years old: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-automotive-average-age-car-20140609-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-automotiv... The average car on EU roads is 8.6 years old. In fact, in the EU only Estonia and Finland keep their cars longer than the US on average. http://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/average-vehicle-age http://www.acea.be/statistics/tag/category/average-vehicle-a...
          • spydum 11y ago
            would be interesting to see vehicle age by geography. I suspect all the rural farmers are the ones skewing the average (it's not unusual to have a 20-30yr old truck out on the farm.. You can fix them with the same tools as your tractors).
          • lenocinor 11y ago
            And 6.6 years in Japan, in 2011: http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/12/02/are-cars-losing-their-luster-in-japan/ http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/12/02/are-cars-losing... Americans do a lot of silly things but selling cars too quickly isn't one of them (relatively speaking, at least).
    • harperlee 11y ago
      Even if all carburetors disappear from the face of the earth, it's still good to know they once existed, what purpose they served, and when and how they started being replaced. Extreme example: I once read a fascinating article about middle aged technology, where they commented on, among many things, how a high-quality cart wheel would have a hard, dense wood on the axis, another kind of wood in the spokes that was flexible, and a border made of a very stiff wood. I'm searching for it but I don't seem to be able to find it, alas.
    • Swizec 11y ago
      The last carburetors in the US were in 1994 ISUZU trucks. [1] Some motorcycles still use them for simplicity and the last NASCAR season with carburetors was 2011. And anyway, why are we still teaching people how a CPU without branch prediction works? When will we let go of old technologies? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carburetor#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carburetor#History_and_develop...
      • bnegreve 11y ago
        > And anyway, why are we still teaching people how a CPU without branch prediction works? When will we let go of old technologies? Fuel injection systems have replaced carburators. Branch predictors haven't replaced anything, if you want to compare them with any engine that would be turbo chargers (i.e. they're optional). I'm not sure comparing CPUs with engines makes a lot of sense though.
      • jjohn2 11y ago
        You can find them in the inboard motors on many not-so-old boats. My 10 year old Mercruiser uses one (although I think the newer Mercruisers have all shifted to EFI). I found the site to be very instructive. I'm always interested in learning more about how the engine in my boat works in case there's anything I can repair at home instead of taking it to the shop. I think a lot of the information on the site is transferable seeing as how mine is essentially a GM produced 'car-engine' mounted in a hull (minus a transmission and some other things).
      • fijal 11y ago
        Hi, I'm Maciek, I work on compilers. I would love to know how branch prediction in modern CPUs work, sadly they won't tell me (trade secrets). You should really improve your metaphors.
        • ectoplasm 11y ago
          Just search ACM for branch prediction papers at ASPLOS or similar conferences and look for corporate affiliation. IBM, Intel, and others routinely publish this stuff. It's usually patented first, so you can also check the USPTO.
    • thescrewdriver 11y ago
      There are many readers of HN who aren't in the US and plenty of older cars around. In some countries carburetors were going into new cars after 2000.
    • gchokov 11y ago
      GM is not the world. Just FYI
    • nicboobees 11y ago
      People will always use "old tech". "Old tech" often just works. Flawlessly. I have a dumper truck I borrow from next door. Crank handle, diesel. It just works. Starts every time. No battery, no crap to go wrong. "new tech" is often designed to last 5 or 10 years maximum. After that is anyones guess as to whether it'll work.
      • bloat 11y ago
        I was going to moan at you about how an old car would produce much more pollution than a newer car. But then I looked it up: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/green-motoring/11187483/New-or-old-which-is-greener.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/green-motoring/11187483/...
        • a3n 11y ago
          I bought a new Honda in 1990. I just now passed it on to my son, and bought a two year old Toyota. Think of all those cars that didn't get built because I drove the same car for 25 years. I thought about that often. The only time it didn't pass emissions test is the gas cap didn't seal properly. Bought a five dollar cap and was good to go. And it gets 35 mph in daily commuting.
        • michael_h 11y ago
          My first car was a 1974 VW Beetle (this was late 90's) - it got 65-70 MPG. I loved that thing. If you turned on the original heating system, you'd die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but I loved it.
      • dalke 11y ago
        You've a bit of survivor bias. Old tech that is still running is likely to last a while more. But all of the old tech that was designed with planned obsolescence in mind doesn't work any more, so you don't think of it. That is, "old tech" was once "new tech." There's also the old tech that wasn't designed to last long, like adobe mud walls. Some old tech doesn't work flawlessly. Steam power vehicles, like locomotives, cars, and tractors, require more maintenance than their new tech replacements.
    • gregpilling 11y ago
      For all those who have not liked my post: I rebuilt my first carb about 40 years ago, sitting on my fathers lap (age 5). He was a mechanic, I was a mechanic until I was 20. After that I spent the next 10 years selling tools and diagnostic equipment, as well as fixing a lot of cars - especially problem cars. I have worked on thousands of carburetors. I can re-jet the 2 carbs in my race bike in about 5 minutes (main jets only). Carburetors are indeed in use on millions of engines. I understand Bernoulli's principle, and I also understand that a carburetor is lousy at part throttle metering. What does that mean to you? Part throttle is anything that is not full throttle. Some people have a hard time believing that a fuel injected engine offers no full throttle advantage in total horsepower - it is the barely open part that matters. Fuel injection is massively more efficient and clean than carbs at part throttle. The part throttle issues cause all the emissions problems, cause all the pollution, cause all the smell when following behind a carb'd car. The electronic carbs of the 80's were a real nightmare. Take a mechanical device, put some dozen vacuum lines on it, each controlled by a solenoid, give it a dumb computer that you can't talk to, and no tech information anywhere. Not even at the dealer. Caveman tech, dressed up with bunch of patches and cruft. It was done to save a buck, not because the better way wasn't known. And the systems are horrible and should be sent to the crusher. It is fuel metering in the worst way; adding miles and wear just makes all the problems even worse, The EEC-IV systems used by Ford from 87-95 only had a 60 pin connector on them, the same number of pins that a Beagle Bone Black has. I have be thinking about how to use that as a basis to replace existing systems with an open source system that would be better and cheaper. But carburetors need to die. They are not great new, and get worse with age.
• Stratoscope 11y ago
  I used to love carburetors. Now there was technology you could understand: little needles and valves and levers and jets and gaskets, and if anything went wrong, you could just get a rebuild kit, tear the carb down down, clean it out, and put it back together with the new parts. In fact, rebuilding the carburetor on a friend's VW Beetle gave me the confidence I needed to take the next logical step: rebuilding her whole engine! I didn't have all the right tools, so we took the VW down to the Briarpatch Cooperative Auto Shop on Park Blvd. in Palo Alto. [1] [2] This was like a TechShop for cars: You could get a membership and take your car there to work on it using their tools or your own. Or you could have one of their mechanics help you with the work. I got the engine torn down, all the parts laid out on the floor, and started to think about how to clean it up and put it back together. Then I realized I was in way over my head and called the resident mechanic over to see if he could finish it for me. He did, but only after shaking his head sadly and saying, "This is the worst way to get a job." [1] https://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/dave-smith-transition-clothes-and-cars-that-last-forever/ https://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/dave-smi... [2] http://briarpatch.net/ http://briarpatch.net/
• Svip 11y ago
  Modern cars are very locked-in with computer systems. So fixing many aspects of modern cars is no longer possible for most car owners like it used to be. This seems like a neat site for people with older cars. Although, if you are owning a vintage car, then surely one should know a bit about maintaining that car without having to resort to such a site, but personally, it's nice to know it is there. I mean, its articles on break systems, suspension and steering are useless to me, because I own old Citroëns, but it's nice to know there is a site to go to if I am curious, because I definitely intend to own more older cars (they tend to be more interesting than modern cars).
  • dsfyu404ed 11y ago
    If you're doing basic diagnosis and repair it's pretty easy. ~/ examine problem | pull codes | Google codes | cross reference with original symptoms | perform repair Older cars are much easier to physically work on, mostly because there's less removing parts to get to what you need to fix.
  • mindcrime 11y ago
    Modern cars are very locked-in with computer systems. So fixing many aspects of modern cars is no longer possible for most car owners like it used to be. So true. And so frustrating. I grew up in a household where my dad built and raced stock cars, and was always building hot rods for street racing (sssshhhh, don't tell) and so I grew up working on cars, and for a big chunk of my life I did my own repair work. But as you say, newer cars are so much more challenging. It's not just the computerized bits either, it's the tighter clearances / less space in the engine compartment, the way you often have to disassemble half the car to even get access to the think you need to touch, the specialized tools you need for some jobs, etc. Coincidentally my truck (a 2000 Ford Expedition) died Wed. morning. I am thinking about just going on Craigslist, finding an old 1974 Chevy C10 pickup, or something of that ilk, and buying that. I can do everything on a truck like that myself, all the way down to pulling and rebuilding the engine if need be. because I definitely intend to own more older cars (they tend to be more interesting than modern cars). They certainly can be, in their own way. I mean, I like both, but old cars definitely have a certain special appeal to them.
  • 11y ago
• AlexMuir 11y ago
  Yeah, it's getting dated now and I'm planning on creating some new content shortly. That said, it's still highly relevant for most classic car owners, and large amounts of the developing world.
  • matrix 11y ago
    The old content is awesome and is never going to stop being relevant. I think the key to address the criticisms would be 1) Navigation - perhaps some sort of timeline that accompanies each article so that you can easily see the context that technology is in (e.g. direct injection <- fuel injection <- carburetor). 2) Edit the copy to ensure that old technology isn't identified as new. A quick glance turned up examples like: "Some high-performance engines do not have carburettors...". Good stuff overall though!
• douche 11y ago
  Carburetors are still prevalent on a lot of other small engines - think lawn mowers, tractors, snow-blowers, chainsaws, etc.