The Daimler SP250 left today for an 800 mile drive to its home in France. I have also been attending to the S.U. carburettors belonging to the Daimler’s stablemate: A Rover 105R which has been running poorly and flooding. It all seemed to be a straighforward job at first – the carbs were covered in light corrosion inside and the diaphragm jets and the float needles looked ancient (and in the case of one diaphragm, punctured). Clearly they hadn’t been attended to for “donkey’s years”. Throttle spindles and butterflies were excellent so I cleaned everything up and removed all the surface corrosion before centreing some nice new jets and setting the float levels correctly with new float valves. The car should run much better now and I thought no more of it until the owner collected them today. It seems that the carbs have been to pieces quite recently and one of the jets has already been replaced. I’m wondering now what happens to carburettors to make them look like restoration projects in such a short period of time and can’t help but turn my mind to the effects of high ethanol content in the French petrol. It looks like it may be wise to start using Ethomix additive to protect the fuel system and to see what happens.
This is the first time I’ve seen the possible effects of Ethanol and if that’s what it proves to be, then those effects are quite dramatic and could have quite some significance to UK petrol in time to come.