Re: 1955 Rochester 4GC

Posted by Craig Hendrickson On 2013/3/23 17:43:06

Over the last week, I worked with my local friend Lance on dipping and overhauling the 4GC off of his 1955 Clipper Constellation. He bought a generic Echelin overhaul carb kit from NAPA (number is in the site Xref now). It worked fine. The only significant problem we had was that I made the assumption that all the settings, in particular the float settings, were correct because Lance's father told me that the engine was running when he parked it in Lance's garage 11 years ago. BAD ASSUMPTION!

We tested the completed overhaul by swapping it onto my 55 Pat which of course is a known, working car. First try, it wouldn't start because the floats were so off that no fuel was getting into the fuel bowl despite the Pat having both an electric and a mechanical pump. Then I changed the float settings to those spec'd in the service manual, but I also used the old needle/seats (BAD IDEA) instead of the new needle/seats. This caused the carb to flood the engine. That was yesterday and we quit for the day at that point.

This morning, we took Lance's carb off the Pat engine and reinstalled the new needle/seats and slightly adjusted the floats to prevent flooding. SUCCESS! It started right up and a test drive proved flawless operation.

Lance is happy and he now has a known carb to put on his Constellation, which still hasn't run in 11 years (YET).

Craig