It’s one thing to know roughly what’s happening inside of a carburetor but it’s another thing entirely to see in enormous detail how every stroke of the engine affects it. Fortunately, we live in a world with super slow-mo cameras and 3D printing.
Due to the requirements of physics, engines are mostly obscured from the prying eyes of those interested in their functioning. YouTube’s Smarter Every Day decided to reveal what was happening in a carburetor by engineering and making one out of clear plexiglass and shooting it in super slow motion.
The channel has previously filmed what’s going on inside an engine when it’s running but somehow the functioning of a carb was a little more theoretically obscure to me. I understood something about fuel and floats, as well as the word “venturi,” but I couldn’t have gone any deeper than that.
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For instance, I had no idea that the gas is just suspended out in mid-air, hanging there the way a brick shouldn’t (to borrow a phrase) before it’s drawn into the engine by the power of the vacuum generated by the intake stroke.
The benefit of that is also giving a more holistic picture of what’s happening inside the engine. Of course, I knew that the intake stroke was related to the carb, but actually seeing the engine’s effects on the carb sort of rounds out the picture of just what’s going on under a classic car’s hood.
Seeing the inside of a carburetor also helps drive home why you might want fuel injection, as the complex engineering and impressive mechanics of the carburetor are matched only by its imprecision.