Tank Cleaning and an Old Rant from my Youth

had some really inconsistent runs on the Saturday morning. Not bad, but the engines were hunting a lot and not as constant smooth as I would like. Had my 89 year old dad out watching and he said to me, "when did you last clean your tanks?" Well, I dont I told him! Lol. He just shook his head and laughed and said some things never change.

When I was young and racing two stroke Yamaha TZ Grand Prix bikes, my dad tuned, built, and looked after my engines. To the extent that I was sitting on the front row of a 50 bike grid waiting for the warmup lap flag, and looked at my pit board and it was saying "STAY ON GRID. DONT DO WARMUP. So when the warmup flag dropped I sat there with an arm in the air on the front row whilst TZ GP bikes went past me inches away at full throttle with their front wheels up by my head as is the want of 1970s/1980s two stroke GP bikes. The next thing my dad is out on the track telling me to get off my bike and hold it, and is changing the main jets and power jets on my carbys, and I said to him, "What the (goodness Lol) is bloody going on!" Anyway he got all the jets changed just as the grid was forming again and helped me restart my engine. A very strong cold front was unexpectedly sweeping in rapidly across the mountain and he had been watching the barometer and thermometer and knew my engine would definitely blow up with the jetting in it. Once changed and the 15 second flag came up the last thing he said to me was "go like hell, but remember your slicks are cold" - came 3d. couldnt quite close the gap from starting on cold slicks, but if not for dad being such an awesome performance engine tuner and builder it would have been a DNF from a blown engine and a possible very high speed crash if it seized going around the top.

I got home from flying and cleaned all of my tanks, soaked in metho, used a syringe with a filter to force metho through all of the 3 tubes, in and out of all the different combinations, poked lead out wire in them and scratched around and forced clean metho through them all again. The garbage that came out of them!!! I guess running exhaust pressure into them probably cant help and they should be cleaned regularly. Went flying Sunday, the engines ran fantastic and no more hunting, clean solid revs and same needle setting flight after flight. My old man has still got it!!! what an awesome tuning and build engineer

Keep your tanks clean. At least wedges, with exhaust pressure. It makes a big difference over time. Lol.

Yabby