courtesy Riley's RebuildsCarburetors may represent old-school tech in the automotive world, but don’t tell Riley Schlick, a high school senior in Florida who rebuilds them for a tidy profit. Send your tired, dirty, mucked-up carburetor to Schlick and she’ll return it to you clean, shiny, and ready for duty once again. She has operated her Bradenton-based business, Riley’s Rebuilds, for three years now, and a steady stream of carburetors has crossed her path.
She learned how to do the work from her dad. “I said to her, ‘You can get a job at Publix or I can show you how to do some restoration stuff in the garage,” says Schlick’s father, Dane Trask, who rebuilds classic cars as a hobby. He showed her how to do it, and also made use of some YouTube tutorials. “She picked it up quick,” he says.Once a vital piece of equipment for cars, carburetors regulate the fuel and air ratio for internal combustion engines.
Schlick and her staff—her school friends Dagny, Katie, Amelia, and Elaine—unbox carbs that arrive in the mail and first determine if it’s a donation or a rebuild. She says that now that her business has attracted some attention and started to grow, people from all over the country are sending their carburetors to Riley’s Rebuilds as gifts. She cleans them up and resells them at local auto events.
“We use soda blasting instead of sand or glass because it’s not super aggressive,” Schlick said. “The soda doesn’t get stuck in the carburetor like other materials would.”
This is pretty cool that she can do these things and I bet she eventually learns fuel injection. But then someday she will have to learn something else when gas vehicles go away. But good for her...!!!
Well that’s a pretty cool idea! 👍
Huge business! NOBODY knows how to do this anymore! I used to pay $75 (and supply the kit) 20 years ago and that was cheap.