A buddy of mine has a 2001 LT80 that he said the cylinder is filling with gas when it sits in storage. I recommended he change out the petcock since they are known to go bad but the more we talked about it shouldn't the float in the carb stop any fuel flow at that point if it is working correctly?

 

That's right the float along with the float valve should stop the flow of fuel once the fuel bowl is full if it's working correct. If it's flooding the cylinder then the carb needs cleaning. I'm not sure how long the storage is but I would turn the petcock to the off position.

 

"float valve should stop the flow of fuel"
But that's in a perfect LT80 world..LOL
To sum this up (we've argued this subject for hundreds of pages), the owner needs to put a inline shut-off valve (about 4 bucks at the autozone).
Cleaning the carb and paying attention to the float needle and seat don't hurt tho.

 

In my experience, these lt80 carbs leak in every case where the engine is not running and fuel is supplied. Stock petcock only flows fuel with engine vacuum applied to it's diaphram. If this feature is defective, which is common in aging lt80's, then fuel will be constantly supplied to the carb. This will cause flooding of the engine especially in storage for months. Usually in just an hour or so it will be hard to start if petcock is not completely off. A cheap fix is to add a simple on/off valve to it for storage or extended off time. I would just replace the petcock with an oem suzuki on/pri/res petcock for appx $80 and call it a day. You should get years of service out of one of these and it's great to know that the fuel is off as soon as the engine is off. Have fun!!!