Always a good idea to try and stop things falling through the carb & into the engine! I think my breather is attached OK to the carb.... Shame the same couldn't be said for the stud that holds the airfilters on. Velocity stacks would probably have prevented this. They have since been fitted. If it wasn't for my breakdown policy it would also have cost me a holiday to the Isle of Wight.
You know, the little monkeys! But seriously these would work. They're only for a breather and no nuts can drop in.
I don't have washers on my stacks. Try to start engine...clonk...disconnect coil and try again just to be sure...clonk. Stainless washer so no magnets.
I dropped a washer down the hole your stud went. No damage but I did have to take the engine out and strip it down to get the washer out of the cylinder. I distinctly remember doing a lot of this as I went through all that.
I have some rules now... If I even slightly suspect I might have dropped something "down there"... Don't press the throttle! But if I do... Don't try and start it! Not that I'd do a thing like that of course.
I dropped a stainless washer down my alt stand hole putting the engine together, and only realised at the last moment. He was sitting on a ledge, just waiting to jump into my cam gears. Washers are best avoided I think, esp stainless ones.
@paulcalf The oil breather pipe in my experience puts a fair bit of strain on the filter top however carefully you root it and make the best of it's natural curve. It's a problem with the glued together filter's usually found on ICT carbs, enough to eventually pull the top right off. So I'm going to hypothesise that the strain from your oil breather pipe and it's vibration damping effect on the carb top in relation to the undamped bottom part combined to cause the failure. Mine's naughtily just poked through a hole I made in the corner just inside the engine lid bit not for thst reason. The first time I went to a rolling road, the old fellow disconnected it straight away and pointed out that stock plumbs it through the air filter and the kind of arrangement into the carb top does not filter it so my rings would wear faster. Not completely convinced but...it sounds logical enough.
I once dropped a whole box of washers into the big breather hole on a type-4 engine. Well most of them went in, I knocked the box of a shelf and it headed unerringly straight for hole upside down.
I was following you all the way until this last sentence. Can you elaborate, please? PS it's strange, my engine was rebuilt by the PO, an ex RAC mechanic, been in the job years and seen it all, probably. Had a Suntune (spelling) gas analyser in his garage. I keep wondering. Why would he have routed the breather hose to a separate filter?
Every stock crankcase breather is fed into the carb air supply before that air is filtered, so any contaminants are filtered out by either an oil bath of paper filter. Ours head unfiltered straight down the carb throat. Then again the type of filters we use are next to useless for fine particles.
