From the life of a journeyman mechanic - when a candle keeps getting wet
A customer came to our workshop with a small car with a two-cylinder engine and complained about poor engine performance. He also said that one of the plugs was constantly getting wet. It was therefore obvious that something was wrong with the ignition, so we looked for a fault here, but unfortunately in vain.
The ignition was OK, but the plug became wet again after the engine had been running for a while. So the only thing that could be clogged was the exhaust. This was removed, but again there was no significant blockage that could have caused the loss of power.
Aha, said a very clever person, the cylinder in question has no compression! This was also checked and, to our utter amazement, there was nothing wrong with the compression. Now we looked for the fault in the carburetor.
Our vehicle had a carburetor with a pipe that branches off and leads to both cylinders. The carburetor itself was also in order. But we took a closer look at the pipe. At the branching point, one of the outgoing pipes showed a crack at the weld. We carefully welded the crack shut and reassembled everything.
And lo and behold, the engine ran perfectly without any faults. Now everything was clear: one cylinder was sucking in the wrong air through the crack, while the main flow was going into the other cylinder. The ratio of the gasoline-air mixture was not guaranteed in both cylinders, and the mixture could not burn properly.
This text was taken from issue 4 of the 1960 edition of the magazine "Krafthand".
