I assume that you have an Amal Carb ? If so, you need to be raising the throttle stop screw, not tweaking the pilot mixture. Slacken off the throttle stop lock-nut, and then with your finger feeling the airslide, screw the throttle stop screw in until you feel the slide being lifted up. Raise it about a sixteenth of an inch, and then start the engine, adjusting the screw until you get a tickover.
As regards not starting on the kickstart, I wonder if you are using the correct technique…. Again assuming that you have an Amal carb, the technique for starting from cold is to first turn on the oil tap, then the petrol tap, and depress the tickler button until petrol dribbles out of the vent hole on top of the float chamber. Close the air lever, and then give one kick with the throttle closed in order to draw some mixture into the crankcase. Then open the throttle around a quarter to a third open, and operate the kickstart with the proverbial “long swinging kick”. There should be no need to retard the ignition.
Try this and let us know how you get on….
Brian
PS There remains the possibility of a blocked primary airway in the carburettor. Some of the drillings are very fine, easy to miss when checking the carb, and equally easy to get blocked. You can poke them through with the bristle cut from a wire brush, or even better, go to a BOC depot and buy one of their excellent sets of jet cleaning wires sold to clean out gas welding nozzles. Roger Cooper was recently having endless problems getting his vintage Flyer to run properly, tried endless things, and finally discovered a blocked primary airway in his carb..
