Pulpy gunk inside carb bowls?

Got an 82 XJ 650 Maxim earlier this summer, my first bike and in a somewhat restored condition. So with assistance form my mechanic bro we've been tackling problems as they come up. One month riding it, it died the same choking death lots of XJs seem to contract. I pulled the carbs and inspected, they didn't seem too dirty but I gave em a good cleaning anyways, then replaced the carb gaskets and installed a fuel filter. This got it to start again, but it was running pretty rough and dying easily. At this point we were looking into trying to tune it, but collective knowledge on here convinced me we were working too fast and should check the float levels first and be more thorough to rule out anything else. So we pulled the carbs again, and while they were off I took them apart to clean them out once more. When I did this now I find that inside the bowls on every carb are covered with weird pulpy crap; from what i can tell it looks different from the usual stale fuel gunk one would find inside a dirty carb on a non-running bike. Is this common/ any idea where this stuff is coming from? The carbs went on visibly clean and the fuel filter should have blocked new contaminates from the gas tank. We did run some heet fuel line antifreeze through the gas tank once everything was back together since we had it open for so long - any chance this was eating at the carb gaskets? Thats our best theory right now. got a blurry camera phone pic attached, and any insight is appreciated.

 

now i can see the hole yall were talking about in another thread. my 81 didn't have any holes in the bowl. it was nothing but a bowl.

looks like you got a lot of crap in the gas tank that needs to be flushed out. although i would think the fuel filter would plug up with that much crap.

it kinda looks like some type of tank sealer that wasn't installed in the right method and is flaking off. .

your fuel switch should have screens and your float seats should have screens also.

 

a hole-free bowl without drain screws sounds pretty awesome. finally managed to get the screws tapped out, they're in pretty shabby condition now.

figured there's no way around cleaning the tank out real good at some point, just was expecting stuff from the tank to be more of the flaky, rusty variety. Float seats have screens? haha newb here, thought I had the carb innards all ID'd, but I'll have to look that one up- we've got the carbs apart now and I probably should know what I'm looking at.

 

The picture shows that the fuel is sitting so long it drys out and leaves that brown gunk in the bottom of the float bowls.

If you leave the bike sit for any length of time you need to drain that carbs and fill the tank with fresh gas and add the proper amount of stabil.

Follow Rick's "old school carb cleaning" found on this forum and it will be running again soon.

MN

 

i wasn't talking about the drain screw holes.

i'm talking about the enrichment hole or whatever yall called it.

 

The enrichment well jets I think is what your trying to say snowwy. Those are always the first things to plug up.

I think the other thread about putting in the #42 pilot jets is a good idea. Next time I have my carbs apart I'm going to switch and see how that works.

Drfate Good Luck on getting those carbs cleaned up. Take your tiime and do a good job you'll be glad you did. Nothing worse than pulling carbs several times to get them right.

MN