Found this in my carb when doing some tuning. Noone else has touched it, and I know I didn't do it. I have never seen this before. I did have a big backfire, but it is hard to believe it caused this. Any ideas?

 

Collapsed float?

 

More like crushed float. How in the world did that happen?

 

Several times. Usually in boats.

Water in the carb; freezes; crushes the float.

A backfire that pressurizes the fuel bowl can also do that; but that's pretty rare. It'll blow the air cleaner off and stuff like that too, you'd know it if you'd had enough of a bcakfire to do that.

 

I truly doubt that it was a water freezing issue in August!!

I figure that with the area of the passages that lead to the float bowls being miniscule, any backfire that would cause this kind of damage would also destroy my trusty Edelbrock air cleaner that everyone hates so much (maybe they don't know how to properly tune an engine????).

I will most likely dwell on this issue until an answer comes to me, kind of the way I am. Just wondered if anyone else had ever seen this.

Since I am a retired military explosives expert, I do have a feel of how shock waves and the associated pressure patterns work, so I still have yet to come to a conclusion as to how this could have happened.