Carburetor clean-out

The F100 will not start. I took the carburetor off to see if there was a fuel problem. I pulled the carb apart enough to find this little gem, a 1/4" lock washer, jammed in the air door assembly of the secondaries:This was no doubt accidentally dropped in when someone was working near there. The secondaries would never work right with that in there, but it could have been worse; it could have dropped into the venturi, and gone down inside the engine. That would leave a mark. Besides, this is not the reason it will not start.
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I found a lot of dirt inside the carb. A surprising lot. I was going to take a photo of it, but I figured you know what basic dirt looks like. I cleaned out all the little orifices I could, generally cleaned everything else, and checked for broken parts. When it came time to reassemble it, I found that the center gasket was unsalvageable; a careful disassembly had nonetheless torn it apart. This is a problem with taking a carb apart, the body gaskets tear very easily and are rarely reuseable. Since I did not have spares for this carb on hand, I mail ordered a pack of 5.

Here's a new gasket on the left, with the top of the carb upside-down beside it, and a tube of white grease at the bottom. The black paper gasket has a light glare on it in this photo, but it is indeed black.

Here's what I do; I smear a light coat of the white grease on both sides of the gasket before assembly. Sometimes, this will keep the gasket from sticking to the parts the next time they are taken apart, so the gasket can be reused. It's not just a cheapness thing; if you dug into the carb as part of a roadside repair, you'd likely tear the gasket, and not have a new one to replace it.
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Anyway the white grease doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot. Errant grease will dissolve in the gas, so don't worry about it. Might help your mileage or something, I don't know.

Here is the carb all back together. You can see the thin white line going around the carb body where the new gasket is. I am still getting familiar with this style of carb, it's similar to the Rochester Quadra-jets that came on many GM cars. One nice thing about these is part of the design: the main carb top comes off, as shown in the 2nd and 3rd photos, and most everything is accessible right there. The carb top gasket that we've been talking about is horizontal, not vertical like the 4 separate gaskets on Holley carbs, and it's above the fuel level, so it should never leak under normal conditions.

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I did not have time to try starting the truck, so cross your fingers for later in the week.

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I'll leave you with an additional bodge I found while troubleshooting. The silver-colored end of this coil wire is supposed to look like the brass-colored end. Instead, it's all folded and crimped up to fit (jammed) into the coil end terminal. Sloppy fit, and I'm surprised if this ever worked better than intermittently as it was was doing for me. I mean, who does this?