Mystery Solved (I hope) Old Blue ran great today; 5000 rpm shifts, went up McKinley streets steep road in 3rd without a hiccup.
What was the cause of all the problems?
In spite of pouring through the Delordo manual, (The Weber book also) to such an extent I can recite whole passages by heart. Not a a clue in the written word. I even called CB Performance in California-(they still sell rebuilding kits and parts for Delordo's.) They recited all the same steps I had already tried.
Now, I have to go back to last week. I was blowing out the jets, for the umpteenth time and,
for some unexplained reason, perhaps divine intervention, I rapped the air cleaner element on the fender of the Beetle- like I expected rocks to fall out? There it was. a sprinkling of fine black pumice all over the baby blue fender. I tapped it again, more fine pumice. My heart leaped- That's it!!! It explains everything. But of course I couldn't be sure.
Now ordinary carburetors would not be bothered by this, but not Delordo's.
The air correction/Main jets and idle jets stick up through the top of the carburetor between the velocity stacks. Which is great, because you don't have to take the carburetor apart to clean all the jet passages. YOU CAN'T RUN THEM WITHOUT AIR CLEANERS- NO VELOCITY STACKS ONLY. To clean the entire jetting system- remove the jets and blow compressed air through he jets and the passages.
I found a new air cleaner element in my box of carburetor parts. So while I was waiting for the new one to come in, via Appletree ( only EMPI still makes them) I removed the top half of the carburetor (easy 5 screws) and cleaned the float bowls and reset the floats to factory specs. The new air cleaner came in today, I blew the passages out one more time and in less than 5 minutes, EUREKA!, it was running like its' old self- Except the test drive revealed another problem, the ... brakes.