Hi All, I've just got back from my first foray into mainland Europe with Harvey - 700miles of miles of smooth running However I have noticed a small oddity. When I fitted the 36IDFs about a year ago, I set them up to idle at about 900rpm, but I made the mistake of doing this with a relatively cool engine. The result has been that once its fully warmed up the idle is up at about 1400rpm. I've figured that, since the amount of time I actually spend at idle on an average journey is probably less than 1% of the overall time, I'd leave de-prioritise it in favour of other more urgent issues. Anyway, now that he's got another 700miles under his belt, he is now idling (when hot) at about 1000rpm, but stalls when cold (if left alone) - though he only takes a few good pumps of the throttle to get him to idle nicely. On the face of it, he would seem to behaving correctly now, but I'd like to understand what could cause the idle speed to drop over the course of his trip away....is it going to continue fall? I can only assume that the idle speed and/or mixture screws have turned, or maybe that the 2 carbs are now slightly out of sync...? Could there be anything else at play? Could this be a symptom of something else entirely? cheers Paul.
It could be that the throttle plates have bedded in slightly and are shutting slightly more now you have used it for a while. I just upped the tension on my throttle return spring to try and control the idle on my progressive, changed little else and the fuel economy went up 5-10% it seems getting the throttle plate to shut properly so the engine runs on the idle hole under the throttle plate rather than sort of 50-50 between the hole and a variable gap is a good idea. My idle would stick around 1500 rpm unless I tapped the throttle to kill the vacuum momentarily.
