I just got a weber carb with manual choke. I'm new to carburetors and chokes. I've noticed that I cannot get the choke to close unless the throttle is opened slightly first. Is this part of the intended design, or do I need to adjust something?

It is part of the design. That's called the fast-idle cam and it increases the idle speed when the choke is engaged. As the choke warms the idle speed will drop in stages.

 

When setting the choke it is always wise to pump the pedal 3 or 4 times and on the last pump leave the pedal pushed to the floor, pull out your choke to the desired setting, and then release the pedal.

 

GD

Much obliged, thanks!

So I got a universal choke cable from pep boys. It looked to be of a little higher quality than the one at autozone. Or beefier anyway. Well, the cable itself pushes and pulls on its own smoothly, and the chocke opens and closes on its own, but when I marry them up, not all goes according to plan. I can get it to pull closed fairly easily, but it just doesn't want to push open. I can push the choke handle all the way in, lock it in place, but then I have to go to the engine and manually jiggle the cable to get it to actually push all the way open. Is there a higher quality cable I should be looking for, or is there a trick to getting them to work well together?

Try holding the throttle pedal down a little while you push it in, this should relieve any drag from the cam. If you can get a helper and have them work the cable in the cab while you watch the choke you should be able to pinpoint exactly whats going wrong.

If not youll need to work the mechanism on the carb by hand a few times to see what is going on. Something is too tight/binding somewhere, maybe the cable is not making a reasonably straight shot from where the sheething ends and where it ties in to the mechanism etc...

Good luck.

Thanks for the advice. I think I figured out where the problem is...

 

I hope this helps future manual choke folks. I found that this little brass pice was introducing too many degrees of freedom:

 

So I removed it and just hooked the wire to the next part of the linkage:

 

And like magic, it's operating smoothly!