Float Bowl Drain Screws

[DaveG]

winterized and "screwed" up a couple of the drain screws.   chewed up the heads bad.   moved the bad ones to the outside carbs so a little easier to get to.   using needle nose vice grips to loosen.


Question: does anyone make and sell allen head or some other type of replacement screw?

[mademiriam]

not sure if anyone 'makes' them, but there are some small allen head screws available in metric sized. Try to find a good fastener place, they should have some. I get most of our hardware not from the suzuki dealer, or any other aftermaket place, but a good local store, where I've asked for some crazy stuff and even if they don't have it they're usually able to order it in.

[smooth operator]

  I've also used a local hardware store over the years. I can get most metric in stainless,and usally go to a allen head.

[Dave 02 1200]

Be very careful if you install allen head screws.  It is really easy to get then too tight and strip the threads in the carb body.

That is why Mikuni specifically cautions against their use.  Mikuni float bowl screws and other fasteners are made of soft metal - on purpose - so that if they are over-tightened, it strips the screw rather than the carb body.

It is definitely better to ruin a cheap screw than an expensive carb body.

A better solution is to buy a set of JIS (Japanese Indusrty Standard) screwdrivers.  They fit the cross-head screws used on Japanese equipment very well. 

Most people are unaware of the difference and do not know that Phillips is not the same thing as JIS.

I venture to say that most North Americans who experience problems with cross-head screws are using poorly-fitting Phillips screwdrivers on soft JIS screw heads.

Good luck.

[mosquito]

Just wanna agree with Dave 02 1200.  Get a replacement screw that is softer then the bowls.  If you damage the screw somewhere sometime and you still need to get back home by the next day it's going to be easier and cheaper to find and replace the screw than the bowl.

If you (or someone) needs to go cheap and the screw is good except for the screwdriver 'slot' you can use a vice and take a file to your screw head to make it a hex head...

Normally for stuff like this I pay the OEM premium and consider there's a lesson I need to learn.  I've done it many times, myself ... And here's something I never knew:  I assumed screwdrivers were standard world-wide.  I might have to look into some JIS tools.  Thanks!

[gbw]

A couple of the drain screws on my old GS750B are getting chewed up.  They have a big slot across them, not a philips.  These days I always give them a couple of taps with the impact hammer before I put the screw driver on them.  That seems to get them loose enough to keep the screw driver from chewing up the slot.  I think they are made of brass, so they are pretty soft.

This is the kind of stuff that makes fuel injection so appealing to me :)