Floater (Too Much To Ask)

For your consideration, we present the passenger-side carburetor from a 1974 VW bus, formal name Solex 34-PDSIT-3, minus its top. We are concerned here with the gasket, manufactured (or, at least, sold) by Royze as part of their rebuild kit for these carbs.

Like I said, the top isn't on in these pictures. It's fastened to the bottom with five screws which go into the holes labelled 1-5 here. The gasket is there as a seal between the top and bottom of the carb.
Notice how poorly the holes in the gasket line up with the holes in the carb, particularly numbers 1, 2, and 5. The mismatches the ? points to are also suspect; it's like someone designed the gasket from memory, without actually looking at an example of where it'd be spending its life (let alone actually putting one on a carb). These are all clues that care has not been taken.

The float acts just like the float in your toilet; when the bowl where it sits gets full enough with the gasoline it floats in, its brass part pushes up against a needle valve (living in the carb's top and so not shown here) above it, shutting off the flow of gas. When gas gets used from the bowl, the float doesn't float as high and the valve opens, letting more gas in until it's full enough again and the float shuts the valve off once more and so on. 
Question: what might happen if, say, a piece of a poorly-designed gasket interferes with the float's ability to float?

This happens...

...because this.
As you probably determined because you're smart, the float gets hung up on the stupid gasket and can't float as high as it should, so the valve doesn't get closed, so gas keeps coming into the carburetor, filling it and everything downstream--including your crankcase, if it was unlucky enough to have stopped in a position where an intake valve is open--with gas, gas, gas.

The crappy solution is to carve out the offending material with a nice sharp utility knife at your campsite 300 miles from home (or at your mom's house 1,100 miles from home, which you didn't do because at that point you were still implicating the needle valve itself, also provided in the kit; tip: get a NOS Solex one if you can find it). Or, worse, resort to a crappier, non-charming, hippie-type "solution": putting a clamp on the fuel hose any time the damn car is gonna be off for more than a couple hours.

The better solution is that the gasket maker is told that they might want to take a closer look at what they're doing, and they actually care enough to do something about it.

cc: Royze