Time for an upgrade

As Freddie Mercury quite rightly pointed out in the 1975 song I'm in love with my car: "rather buy me a new carburetor". Well, I almost certainly need to replace the carburetter on the Rising Star. Given infinite time and resources, I could try all sorts of remedies to fix the existing one*, but real-life constraints mean that's just not practical. As the 30mm item worked really well, I would be inclined to stick to that size, rather than "downgrade" to the original spec 26mm. I would normally consider nothing but an original Amal, but these have become seriously expensive and my pockets are only so deep, especially for a bike that I must admit I might use once or twice a year at the most if I'm lucky. So, against my own beliefs, I have decided to go for a much cheaper version and bought a Wassell "evolution carburettor"; this ended up being exactly £100 cheaper than an Amal. I did this only because quality of the actual carburetter body appears to be identical (aside from the finish) if not better. Fitment was hassle-free. The fact that any Amal parts actually interchange with it**, tells me these copies are made well enough and the difference in price is down to labor costs and a smaller overhead rather than quality. This is an important point, and I would consider using the words "alternative product" rather than "cheap knock-off" when describing the Wassell carburetters. This time, the Orient wins, sorry Britain.

I have to pay respect to this old carburetter, which I made up from a bunch of used parts in not-so-good condition to begin with, and yet it ran really well. This thing took a lot of abuse before it was finally time to replace it and I'm sure most other brands would not have been as sturdy as the Concentric.

Fitting the Wassell was very straightforward and presented no challenges. Starting at first was hard but more to do with fouled plugs (from previous monkeying around trying to get the bike to run) than anything else but, once running, throttle response is very smooth, consistent, crisp even. There seems to be no hesitation during pick up, and it idles fine just on a standard setting of the air screw (1&½ turns out) and with the idle stop so that you can just begin to see light through the slide. I am going to try it as is for now, with all Wassell parts and think about any changes to the jets and other components in the light of my next test run.

*In my attempt to free the blocked pilot jet bush, I ended up reaming it out of size, with the result that the whole thing now provides way too rich a mixture and is no longer tunable. My fault.

**With the exception of the slide: the Amal anodized slide that I already have does not fit in the Wassell, it is too tight a fit.