Here’s How Disgusting My Classic Car’s Carburetor Looks After Being Abandoned For 7 Years

Back in July 2024, I pulled a nearly 80-year-old car out from under a tree in rural North Carolina, where it sat untouched for at least five years. I’m finally working toward getting my 1948 Plymouth Special DeLuxe started and I just achieved one of the biggest steps. I just cleaned out one of the dirtiest carburetors I’ve ever seen. Now, it’s almost time to hear my classic ride sing.

Admittedly, I was a little nervous about working on my Plymouth’s carburetor. While I have plenty of experience cleaning and tuning motorcycle carburetors, I’ve never touched a carburetor on a car before. Further, the motorcycle carburetors I’ve cleaned and rebuilt had relatively modern and cheap replacements. This carburetor is a thoroughly vintage part and I’d hate to accidentally screw up such a lovely piece.

I was also a bit concerned about what the heck was the organic matter inside of the carb. Was I looking at dead bugs? Was it rat poop? Was it a pile of dead bugs? I’m not sure, but I also don’t let fear stop me from making progress, so let’s dig into what happened to my poor carburetor!

If this is your first time checking in on this series, I’ll bring you up to speed.

Back in July, resident wrencher extraordinaire Stephen Walter Gossin, a couple of readers, and I descended onto a property in rural North Carolina. This was the residence of a wonderful 95-year-old man named Willie (click here to read his story) and in a secluded backyard sat around two dozen Chrysler P15 platform cars, a BMW motorcycle, and a couple cheerful Citroen 2CVs.

How does a man end up with such a car collection? For decades, Willie was the foremost expert in post-World War II Chryslers and he had an affinity for the beloved French people’s car. Willie knew so much about every car in his yard that I bet he could have repaired them with his eyes closed and his hands tied behind his back. I’m also not exaggerating when I say he was considered an expert. His knowledge was so well-known that decades ago, newspapers and magazines featured his collection and his expertise.

As some of our readers know, I think cars are more than just piles of metal, glass, and rubber. The people who own those cars have stories that are just as, if not more important, than the cars themselves. Willie was no exception. He spent the 1970s as a trailblazing Black motorcycle cop in New York City with a style that could only best be described as dapper. Willie was easily one of the coolest people I’ve ever met entirely by chance.

Unfortunately, father time is unrelenting and Willie was no longer able to reach his backyard secret car compound. The cars back there all sat for years, merely feet away from the house. Eventually, he decided that the best path forward was to send his collection out into the world for other enthusiasts to enjoy. A gentleman from Mexico cleared out most of the cars, but somehow left the car that Willie told me was his favorite.

That’s the 1948 Plymouth Special DeLuxe that’s in my possession now. I made a promise to Willie that I would put his black beauty on the road again and I intend on making it happen.

It Was Better Than I Thought

When I last wrote an update, I talked about bringing the car home, evicting the horde of giant spiders I found inside, and then giving the car its first wash since it was parked six to eight years before. Then, I freed up the seized engine and then the car got battery power for the first time in several years. The car passed its systems check with flying colors. Everything works, even the nifty AM radio that has to warm up before it actually works! Even better is how the engine made nearly 40 pounds of oil pressure just turning over on the starter.

Thus far I’ve been shocked with how well the car has presented. The service brakes work, as does the parking brake, clutch, and transmission. The car also rolls straight and true with tighter steering than some more modern vehicles I’ve driven.

When I picked up the car in 2024, Willie said it had been between 5 to 7 years since the car last ran. He told me that the car ran and drove great when he parked it. Willie just ended up getting distracted by his other two dozen cars and by the time he came back to the Plymouth it was too late.

It would appear that Willie was not fibbing. This car feels every bit like it was parked only 7 or so years ago and that it was operating when it was parked. Heck, the tires, which were brand-new when the car was parked, still had air in them back in July. The date code on the old battery under the hood had a manufacture date of early 2018, which supports what Willie told me about putting in a new battery and trying to start the car.

Now I have even more supporting evidence.

What Is This Horror?

I decided to tackle the carburetor next. Honestly, the carburetor was pure nightmare fuel. I was shocked when I removed the air filter and saw this:

Just what in the world is this? It wasn’t moving and it didn’t appear to be alive. I never really got close enough to sniff it either, but it didn’t have a stench or anything. But I’ve never seen anything like this before, so it was sort of freaky to me.

Luckily, I found a carburetor rebuild kit for this, so I decided to give cleaning the carb a try. Ultimately, I’m going to buy a spare carburetor, but I want to see what I can do with this one, too.

Disassembly was almost frighteningly easy. I discovered the magic of working on an old car. There’s an incredible level of honesty to everything. See all of the bolts in this picture? Those are the bolts you have to get off. Some of the bolts zipped off with a basic Harbor Freight wrench while the other bolts came right out with whatever slotted screwdriver I found on the floor of my garage.

My first observation about working on this car is that nothing is putting up a fight. Each bolt came out without any real struggle on my part. I didn’t even need to use a power tool. Working on this Plymouth was about as easy as can be. I’ve spent my entire life thus far in America’s rustbelt, so the ease in which these bolts practically flew off was mind-blowing.

I also want to get back to that “honesty” part for a moment here. Getting the carburetor itself off wasn’t difficult. I loosened the fuel line and the clamps for the choke, and all of it was right there in my vision.

Then came the throttle body. This part didn’t seem to be in that bad of shape, but hey, I was already monkeying around under the hood, so I took it out, too. Once again, one nut practically came off just by me looking at it with a stern face. The other nut? Well, I thought I hit my first roadblock. There was no clearance above the nut, so I couldn’t see how it was possible to remove the part.

I then looked at the throttle body and noticed it was one solid piece. There was no way to create clearance. As it turns out, I was thinking like I was working on a modern German car. See, if this were a Volkswagen or a BMW, I’d have to remove the fuel tank, ignition, and my neighbor’s gold tooth before the thing would even budge. Then I’d have to sacrifice a lesser car to Ferdinand Piech or Chris Bangle to finally get the part off.

In this case? As I loosened the nut, it lifted the throttle body right off. That’s genius! I’m not talking about “genius” like our headline structures, but actual genius. Why can’t all low-clearance parts be like that?

With both parts off, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. While the carb was entirely full of whatever nightmare fuel was inside of it, the junk actually did not make it all the way into the engine. Instead, it caked up around the carb’s bowl and didn’t progress further. Whew!

It was here I also confirmed that the car’s mechanical fuel pump was still alive. Remember how I said I just laid on the starter motor for two minutes or whatever? Well, the fuel pump definitely did some work. Both the carb and the engine got flooded. However, I was surprised that the fuel was as much of a liquid as it was. Yes, it had some of that varnish smell, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.

I didn’t want to take a chance with whatever crap was inside of the carb, so my next stop was to my air compressor, where I attached the blow tip and used the compressed air to blow out the horrors. Pretty much all of it came out in a congealed chunk. Honestly, it was disgusting enough that I did not bother taking a picture.

Building It Back Up

Once I got the carb inside, I followed the advice given to me by Stephen Walter Gossin and David Tracy and took the carb apart. Amazingly, the carb wasn’t that dirty. The gas inside smelled a little like varnish, but it was still thin liquid. I saw no rust or dirt deposits and nothing slimy to clean out. Nothing inside of the carb was seized or slow, either. I’ve restored motorcycle carbs that were in worse condition.

My plan involved first dropping the carb into the bucket of Chem-Dip that Gossin recommended I buy.

Admittedly, I thought that Chem-Dip was just a bucket of normal carb cleaner, but this is actually way more than that. Berryman Chem-Dip is some real corrosive stuff. How corrosive? If you mistakenly leave a carb in the bucket overnight, you might find your carb to be porous in the morning. If you don’t remove the rubber parts from your carb first, they probably won’t exist by the time the Chem-Dip is done cooking.

The benefit is that if you’re careful, you can drop your parts into the bucket, come back in a few hours, and your part will be squeaky clean.

My carb is a vintage Ball & Ball unit from the Carter Carburetor Corporation, which worked as a supplier of fuel systems for Buick, Chrysler, and sometimes its own rival over at Rochester Products. It also hasn’t been around since 1985, so I wanted to do my best to keep this piece of auto history working. Because of this, I decided to let the carb cook in the juice for no more than a few hours.

Amazingly, that turned out to be too long. Chem-Dip works so well that not only did the carb come out of the cleaner significantly better than it went in, but Chem-Dip was so aggressive it nearly dissolved all of the black paint on the carb’s accessory parts. Oops!

Sadly, I learned that my carb rebuild kit didn’t come with all of the parts pictured in the listing. It was supposed to come with new jets and a float! But I decided to make the best with what I had. I disassembled every part of the carb that I was able to reach. Then I used a can of carb cleaner to blast out every single orifice. Nothing gave me a single bit of resistance.

From there, I took my wife’s old toothbrush and got scrubbing. Honestly, it was cathartic doing this. I never thought it would feel so good to have some carb clean therapy. Or, maybe that was the chemical fumes getting to me. Oh well.

Once I reached a point where the toothbrush no longer made any progress, I decided to replace what I could. Since my carb rebuild kit sucked, I was only able to replace all of the rubber seals, all of the gaskets, a plunger, and the fuel line inlet with the needle that seals the fuel flow with the float. While I had everything out, I confirmed that the float also still, you know, floated.

Once I confirmed that everything was moving smoothly and was free of debris, I packaged the carb back up. Here’s what it looks like right now. I still want to do some final cleaning, but I’m satisfied enough with what I have here. At the very least, it should get the car running. Again, I’ll be buying another carb, but I had great fun doing this cleaning.

I Need Some Help

Here’s where I turn things to you. I want to install a fuel filter. I’m going to drain the tank, but I know it’ll be impossible to completely clean the fuel system. Here’s the twist, all of the fuel lines that I’ve seen under the hood are hard lines. I’m going to get under the car to find some rubber lines, but I’d prefer to have the fuel filter in the engine bay where I can quickly swap it out. But I’ve never had to slide a fuel filter into a hard line before.

Do you have any recommendations? I’m considering this glass filter, which would mount onto the end of the carb:

Also, I think this car needs an official project name. How about Project Plymouth Rock? This thing is going to rock so hard when it’s running!

At any rate, with the carb clean and all of the other work already done for me, I can almost taste the engine running. I still have a long way to go with cleaning the fuel system. I’ll also need to replace the radiator once the engine is running. But I’m making real progress here! At this point, I’m pretty sure hearing that straight-six fire for the first time in seven years or so might be the highlight of my year.