For the longest time, I've been having difficulty keeping my engine alive after running it around the loop in my neighborhood. Each time I'd open it up (probably not the best thing to do in the neighborhood), the engine would rev up just fine, but once it got back to idle, it'd stumble really bad, miss, and then finally sputter out. I assumed that one of the two SU carbs was tuned way off or something, maybe running too rich and fouling out the plugs on one side.

A while back, I learned that the SU carbs came with a set of banjo bolts designed to let the carb floats vent out. My carbs came had the banjo bolts, but it didn't come with the banjo connectors shown in the picture below (connector shown in the middle).



I just loosened the banjo bolt up a bit, hoping that it would provide enough venting as I drove around. As it turns out, the bolts turned themselves in from the vibration of the engine, and sealed up the floats, causing the floats to drain out and starve the engine of any fuel... hence the missing and stumbling.

I looked online for banjo fittings, and they're stupidly expensive, so instead of going that route, I simply replaced the banjo bolts with a similarly sized threaded nipple, like the one seen below, and ran some fuel hose to the side of the engine to catch any runoff gasoline, in the event of carb needle blockage.



Sure enough, that fixed the problem. Vroom vroom.