Installing The Choke In The Cushman

Well that didn't go as planned. Yesterday when I made the choke screws, I figured I'd have the choke butterfly installed in a half an hour, tops. What I failed to remember was that not only the choke butterfly and screws were missing, but also a choke rod spring was missing. Ok, so no big deal. I'll just rummage through my small assortment of springs and find one that works. Not so fast, cupcake. I did find a spring that looked like it would work, but upon further inspection, it didn't fit over the choke rod casting. No big deal, I'll just heat up the spring, anneal it, bend it around some, then re-harden it. After two failed attempts, I finally realized it would be faster and easier to just re-shape the spring without all the annealing/hardening business. Fortunately, the spring I'd found was long enough that I could sacrifice two failed attempts and still have enough spring material to make a third one. This first photo shows the finished product and the two failures.

This next photo shows the choke rod installed. The spring had to fit over a raised boss that supported the choke rod, so that's why I had to enlarge the inner diameter of the spring.

Here's the next issue I had to deal with. The tab that actuates the choke rod lever is severely worn and mushroomed out.

I took a ball-pein hammer and beat the raised parts into submission. Worked fairly well, too.

I now have a functional choke. And yes, I did use thread locker on the screws. We don't want them to mysteriously disappear down the throat of the carburetor.

The next photo shows the accelerator pump linkage. The linkage has two raised areas that are intended to lock the rod into a mating tab but the hole in the tab is worn, so the rod slips out. I drilled a 1/16-inch hole in the rod to accept a cotter pin. That is an itty-bitty hole to drill through that itty-bitty rod.

The next step was to check out the carburetor innards. The previous owner said he'd cleaned the carb but it didn't really look it in some areas.

It's all back together and working just fine and dandy.