Florida Teen Entrepreneur: Expert Carburetor Repair and Rebuilding Services

Carburetor Repair

Carburetor Repair while carburetors are often considered old-school tech in the automotive industry, one high school senior in Florida, Riley Schlick, has found a way to make money by rebuilding them. In other words, if your carburetor is feeling dirty, tired, gunked-up, or all three, you can send it to Schlick, who will fix it up and return it looking almost like new. It has been three years since Schlick has come up with her rebuilds , and there have been “quite a few carburetors” over the years.
Riley’s Rebuilds was initially a way for 17-year-old Schlick to buy her first car, itself a purchase that had to meet her parents’ specifications: it needed to have a manual transmission and a roll bar. She pulled in three grand over X months, enough to afford a Jeep. A few months have now passed and she’s brought four friends in to work with her. As far as Schlick is concerned, it’s a two birds with one stone situation. Her friends do better rebuilding carburetors than they would otherwise working minimum wage jobs, and they get to see each other in the process.
Carburetor Repair for cars, carburetors were previously an essential piece of equipment, which would regulate an engine’s fuel and air ratio for internal combustion engines. Just like how fires would need oxygen to burn, engines require air to be able to create the chemical reaction that can force the car forward. When it comes down to its simplest form, a carburetor , or a “carb,” is a piece of equipment or device that intakes air from one end while pushing it through a narrow section in another, creating the air to speed up while the pressure is lowered, as well. In turn, the drop in pressure will ultimately create a vacuum and suck in air and fuel through another hole in the side. .
Carburetor Repair :A carburetor is designed in such a way that its combination of pipes and crevices become filled with dirt and impurities. This results in a number of performance problems, including the ones listed above. While it is true that a chemical carburetor cleaner would sometimes eliminate these problems, it is not in the same area code as a full rebuild. Enter Riley’s Rebuilds .
Schlick and her staff—her school friends Dagny, Katie, Amelia, and Elaine—unbox carbs that arrive in the mail and first determine whether it’s a donation or a rebuild. These days, she explains, her business has “turned some heads and started to grow a little bit,” and “people from all over the country” are sending their carburetors to Riley’s Rebuilds as gifts. She rebuilds them, cleans them up, and sells them at nearby auto events .
Having figured out the carb’s origin, Schlick and his team document the model number and CFM rating of the device and prepare it for tearing down. Each carburetor has eight screws on top , Schlick says, which they remove, together with the hat and the floats . The latter operate in a manner not unlike that of a tank-type toilet flap, regulating the fuel level. The choke, which manages the air intake, is the next part to come out, along with all the springs, screws, bolts etc. inside the carb.
What do they do with the carburetors? They take the screws and bolts and toss them into a tumbler. They do that for twenty minutes. Then they soda blast the body, which means tiny fibers of baking soda are able to remove any dirt or slime. After that ther parts of the carburetors are transferred into the ultrasonic tank. Then the ports are blown out by the air compressor. “We use soda blasting instead of sand or glass because it’s not super aggressive,” Schlick said. “The soda doesn’t get stuck in the carburetor like other materials would.” . When the gunk is all gone, the carburetor is dry and is put back together. . On average, Schlick said, the team works on 20 or more carburetors a week.
Carburetor Repair :As a business, Riley’s Rebuilds charges $145 and up to rebuild a carburetor and send it back to its owner, depending on the model, year, and how clean they can get it. They’ll even clean up a marine carburetor, which costs more in the $300 range . “Carbs look complicated and difficult, but they’re not,” said Trask. “From a business standpoint, it’s a forever growing market for her and for younger kids.”