Honda style carburetors on 4-stroke or 4-cycle engines, such as your lawn mower, snow blower and etc..., have a float bowl on the bottom. Once you fill your fuel tank up and all of a sudden you see gasoline pouring out the carb, usually it pours out on the air filter side. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to fix a leaking Honda style carb.

Reason

Because it is flooding through into your engine and your engine oil, it also raises the level of your engine oil up and your engine oil smells like gasoline.
No matter what side that carburetor is flooding through, one problem in here is going to be the same. If that sounds like a symptom you are having, you are definitely reading the right blog unless your carb is built in other style.

How 4-stroke or 4-cycle Carburetors Work

It works as how your bake tank of your toilet works. In a second, when you flush your toilet, the water starts coming back into that tank and there is a float connected to a shutoff valve. As the water level keeps coming up higher and higher so as the float is also coming higher and higher and floating on that water. When it gets to a certain height, it shuts the valve off, so more water does not keep pouring into your toilet. That is the exact same concept of how 4-stroke or 4-cycle carburetors work with that float bowl on the bottom.

How To Fix

Step 1: Take the bowl off your carburetor then you can see the float. It floats as the bowl is filling up with the fuel from your fuel tank and pushes the a needle and seat closed so no more fuel is coming into it and it is not draining out. And the reason why it is draining out is because the needle in seat that float valve is not seating and sealing properly.
Step 2: Have a look at that needle and see the holes on the bottom. You have to pull the little pin out and put it aside, then take off the float and there is another needle in the float with a rubber tip.
Step 3: You can use a little magnifying glass and you look at that needle and that rubber tip. Sometimes you will see there is a little piece of crud stuck on there. You just need to take your fingernail and just pick it off. Sometimes it is just stuck on there and that is why it is not going up into the seat and sealing properly.
Step 4: Now you have to look down into the seat where that needle goes down in the bottom where that rubber tip of that needle is going to seal. Sometimes you will actually see a little piece of crud stuck on the bottom, it is like a half the size of a grain of sand. Sometimes you can barely see it but that is all it takes to make that rubber tip of your needle not seal into that seat because these seats on Honda style carburetors are not replaceable.
Step 5: Clean out the bottom of your carburetor. Sometimes it is brass, sometimes it is plastic. If there is something stuck on there, that is why it is not sealing properly. You can take a Q-tip to clean it with little carburetor spray.
Step 6: Now you can actually test the float before you put it all back together. All you have to do is to leave the bowl off hook, put your fuel line back and open your fuel line up, you will see fuel pouring out of there and lifting the float up till it’s level, if it stops pouring fuel out of there when that float is about level, that means you just fix the problem. If it keeps pouring out even when you lift out up like way high and fuel is still coming out, it is still a problem that needle or the groove around the tip of the needle maybe too big or there is still something wrong on your carb. So you just need to replace it with a new one.

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