Gremlins

[Rick G]

I've been fighting an intermittent problem for several months . The idle would wander around and require constant adjustment. I removed the YIKS box and synced the carbs , checked for air leaks, drained the carbs and readjusted them , until I was blue in the face.
I had problems with it seeming to need to go on reserve.
Finally I , today as it went on to one cylinder, 65 miles from home, I put it on prime and the problem went away , so now I need to rebuild a petcock.

[supervision]

 So Rick, are you saying it was a vacuum leak, in the petcock?

[Rick G]

Could be , but where ever the leak is  , the petcock wasn't being held open , so it starved the carbs ,to the point that one carb wasn't getting any gas and the other not much . The first thing I did was to pull on the choke , which helped not at all. I tried  operating the throttle rapidly to activate the accelerator pump , no go . Last thing was to switch to prime and all of a sudden it took off!!  I need to get busy in the shed at night to find out if I have one as nice as I sent to lucky.