There’s a great scene in Slingblade – you may remember it. The title character, a mildly retarded man played brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton, is known locally as a kind of genius when it comes to small engine repairs, lawn mowers and such. A guy brings him his mower to look over; he says it won’t start. Slingblade looks it over and quickly finds the trouble.
“It ain’t got no gas in it.”
Well, neither did my ’75 Kawasaki S1 250 – Little Stinker. It took me about a week of intermittent trouble shooting to discover the problem. It turns out the problem was with my memory, apparently. Either that or there are Gas Goblins in my garage. But let me rewind a little bit.
A few weeks ago, I finally got around to paying some attention to Little Stinker, which I hadn’t touched since last fall. It wasn’t running well – it wouldn’t hold an idle – which was due to the year-old ethanol-adulterated “gas” I’d left in the tank. I hadn’t intended to leave it; it just happened to get left because I got busy with other things and – just like that – nearly a year came and went. By which time the ethanol-adulterated “gas” had either attracted water/separated out and/or reacted with the alloys and rubber/plastic materials in the 50-year-old carbs, clogging something up inside one or more of them.
So I took them off the bike and took them apart for a thorough cleaning. One of the three, as it turned out, had a stuck throttle valve slide, which is a tubular (totally!) looking thing that moves up and down within the carb’s bore kind of like a piston does in a cylinder. Sometimes, these seize up and once that happens, you’ve got to replace them; cleaning won’t do it and unless you have a precision lathe, good luck shaving down just enough material (while maintaining concentricity). Best to just buy a new one, which I did. Astoundingly, critical wear parts like this are still pretty easy to find for a fifty-year-old antique bike like my S1 250. How likely is it you’ll be able to find a critical electrical component for a 2026 bike or car in even 20 years’ time?
Anyhow, I cleaned the three carbs up and reinstalled them on the bike. I remembered having drained the gas tank and also refilling it with ethanol-free unleaded, which I bought at the store int own that sells it. I turns out my memory was party right. I absolutely did fill the 5 gallon jug with ethanol-free unleaded. And I absolutely did drain the S1’s tank – as I figured out after a week of trying to get the bike started again after reinstalling the carbs.
How did I finally figure that out?
Well, after going back and carefully checking the carbs to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to adjust some critical thing and then all the wiring and fuses to make sure there wasn’t a disconnection somewhere in the spaghetti – and confirming a hot spark at each plug (which confirmed all three coils were good) and popping off the access cover to check the points (all three of them) to make sure that none of them had somehow gotten so badly out of adjustment the engine wouldn’t even try to start, it occurred to me to check the fuel tap.
I remembered it worked when I drained the tank, but maybe something had gummed it up after I drained it, such as big flake of rust maybe. So I pulled the off the main ribber fuel hose that feeds gas to the left side carb and put a cup underneath that and turned the petcock handle from S to O (for On) and got . . . nothing. The R (for Reserve) and got the same.
It ain’t got no gas in it.
How could this be? I remembered putting the fresh, non-ethanol gas in the tank. I was certain of it. It had to be the petcock! Well, it wasn’t. I got my shop light – not a match – and popped the cap and looked in the tank. Bone dry. I had apparently not remembered to put gas in it. I just thought I remembered I had – and because I thought I remembered I had, I didn’t check to see whether it had any gas in it. That cost me a week as well as embarrassment, which I am sharing with you now!
Lesson: Even if you think you remember having done something, it’s always worth double-checking to make sure you remembered right.
. . .
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