In this post I wanted to share how I fabricated a way to effectively seal the carb to the hood on a really tight budget using some really basic materials.
First off, I had this bucket laying around. You can buy it from WalMart for about $6.00. Mine was well used and had a crack near the top so instead of trashing it I went green and recycled it.
There are several designs of these buckets, so make sure to get one that is fairly rigid and has a large enough base to allow the air cleaner to breathe well.
Step one is to cut a large hole in the bottom, about 12" in dia. Then cut the bottom away from the top, in my case it was about 5" tall from the bottom.
I then grabbed an old "flat" base 14" air cleaner bottom I had laying around which came on an old parts car. I've seen several of these in junkyards over the years. I used a metal blade on my jig saw and trimmed the center out, creating a large flat washer that had a 1/4" turned up lip on it making it plenty rigid.
I then placed the ring upside down under the plastic tub bottom, then placed the base for my Summit 14" dropped base air cleaner on top of the tub and used 4 fairly flat self tapping trim screws to hold the sandwich together. Rivets can be used too, but I like to keep things easy to change later on if need be.
Here it is at this point mounted on the carb....
For the seal I got some 1/2" thick foam with scrim backing to the length of the dia of the tub from the local upholstery shop. The ends were sewn together to make a round doughnut of foam. I then carefully cut the foam in half length wise so I could fold it in half. You have to be careful to not cut the scrim backing as this keeps it as one unit rather than two foam rings stuck together.
Here it is slipped over the base. The second photo shows it after some black interior paint. The hood holds it in place and it works great. Yeah, it's sort of rednecky, but for the most part the foam covers the ugly base and gives it a nice clean professional look for cheap cheap.
