Didn't know the needles had been changed, had no reason to believe so and never looked.
I bought this sled from Don Amber's son Bob, in the Summer of 2009. As I recall, Bob had purchased it from the original owner in the late Spring or early Summer of 2008, where Bob had been doing some resto work on it at that time shortly after he bought it. Since I do sled service work for DA and Bob quite often on their own sleds, Bob had brought me the carbs in the Summer of 2008 to clean them for him- which I did and gave them back to him afterward for him to re-install during his resto.
Fast-forward to the Summer of 2009, where I purchased the sled from Bob and those super-clean carbs that I had cleaned a year ago were still on the engine, but the sled had not been ran much since it was Summer-time, other than starting it. They were still as fresh and new as the day I had cleaned them for him a year earlier, so I simply installed them, set the correct slide height, air screw and idle adjustment and the engine ran nicely. Had no reason to think that anyone had changed anything, especially since the sled ran so nice for me during my test ride.
After I purchased the sled, I went through it as I told you and your father, to make sure it was trail-worthy and I rode it for the first 42 miles as a "shakedown" ride to make sure everything was fine with it before you took delivery of the sled. It ran quite well for me and it was a really nice riding sled that I'd wished I would have kept, but I didn't run it as hard as you did, since the engine was fresh.
You might try to PM DA or his son Bob to see if they changed the needles for some reason.
