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A carburetor is a device witch mixes air and fuel in a combustion engine. Carburetors are still found in older cars. Today the carburetor is outdated and most cars made after 1990 uses an electronically controlled fuel injection device instead, it is however easy to know if your car has a carburetor, if you have a choke on your car it almost certainly is carbureted and not injection. What the choke does is change the proportions of which air and fuel are mixed, thus allowing the car to start more easily when it is cold. It is also important to notice that motorcycles usually uses carburetors. Carburettors are slightly lighter, but this is changing as the technology grows.

Hungarian scientists Don*t B*nki and J*nos Csonka invented the carburettor in 1893. At this time engines used 'updraft carburetors', where the air would enter from below the carburetor and through the top and out, thus making it possible to press the gas as much as you want without flooding the engine as the fuel would fall out of the carburetor instead of into the intake manifold. Today, most carburetors in cars are either downdraft (flow of air is downwards) or side-draft (flow of air is sideways), usually when making a V-engine car you would want to use a downdraft carburetor. The main reason for using a side-drafted carburetor would be to save space under the hood.

How it works The carburetor is made after the principles first discovered by Daniel Bernoulli in the middle of the 18th century, although nobody had even though about the carburetor at this time. Bernoulli made a series of calculations that would prove that air in motion is less dense than air not moving. Also, the faster the movement of the air, the lower the pressure, and this part is by many misunderstood; the throttle in your car does not control the gas directly, it controls the airflow, or more precisely the amount of air that enters the carburetor. When more air passes per any amount of time the pressure will change, creating a vacuum in witch fuel is sucked into. Easy as this sounds, carburetors are fine crafted technology, it needs to measure the airflow of the engine at any time, then deliver the correct amount of fuel to keep the fuel - air mixture perfect and of course mix the fuel and air evenly. This job sounds simple, however it is not.