It’s been a heck of a summer between me and my Powered Parachute (PPC). Between the carburetors clogging and the machine losing power every time I climbed steeply I’ve been struggling to gain trust in my machine. It seems it all boiled down to dirty gas. Well, old gas actually. I let the gasoline sit in the tank for more than 8 months and many of the additives began to solidify and clock the narrow ports in the carburetors. After many times removing both carburetors and cleaning them I finally got the machine to run reliably. I also added Sea Foam to my tank and soaked my carbs in it. Pro tip: If you’re going to let gasoline sit in your tank for extended periods, add this stuff to it prior and let it run through the entire engine before you let it sit. You’ll be glad.

So the last issue to tackle was the engine stopping when climbing steeply. What the heck was causing that? Well a friend looked at the carbs and asked, “Should they be angled like that?”

Well… no. No they shouldn’t.

If you look at #24 in the above diagram, those are the two carb floats. They float in a pool of gasoline in the bottom of the carburetor. They are independent of one another and both work to lift a lever that closes the float valve (#26), it looks like a little pencil. When the fuel reservoir in the bottom of the carb gets too full, the floats will push the valve closed, as the level of the fuel drops, the floats drop and allow the valve to open up and allow more fuel into the reservoir (bowl).

Well, the carbs were oriented vertically on the ground. What this mean is that when climbing steeply the fuel in the bowl was staying level, because that’s what fluids do. The rear most float was higher than the front float and was therefore closing the valve, causing the engine to start to die. When I leveled out, the fuel in the carb bowl leveled out and allowed the valve to open again and the engine would again run normally. The solution was surprisingly simple, to rotate the carbs on their mounts so that they would be a little more level in a climb than they were before. Sounds strange but it worked like a charm!

The last thing I did was finally select a name for my flying machine. I think it’s perfect.

Now with Chemtrails!!