Does your vintage cafe racer need some carburetor adjustment? Ichiban Moto is back to help you out with a DIY tool designed for that purpose.
Of course, Ichiban Moto is just a YouTube joke account… but the subculture he’s making fun of is definitely for real. Hang out on motorcycle websites for a while and you’ll see plenty of their handiwork, usually in the form of hacked-up custom bikes missing their fenders, and with the airboxes removed in a misguided attempt at performance enhancement.
Carburetors… I don’t miss the damned things at all. It took 90 years of continuous development to get them to work as well as they did (almost as good as FI), and a bunch more futzing if the bike was retuned. Black art, and all that. The only good thing I can think of to say for them is that they, due to their long development or maybe their analog nature, I couldn’t say which, had smoother off-on throttle response than FI systems typically do.