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You may or may not have been reading in another forum about a bike I've been fixing up recently. Anyway, I'm new to all this and would appreciate any help with this quick question.

I took the petcock off this bike (1986 Trac DH100 Superhawk, yeah I know you've never heard of it ) so I could clean it up a bit. There are two holes on the top part that screws on to the bottom of the gas tank. One of those holes had a piece of metal tubing (copper or brass maybe?) about 2 inches long that went up into the tank. While I was taking it apart, I accidentally broke that tubing off. So now there are just two holes. Will this affect the performance of the petcock? Is it something that needs immediate attention?

Hey there. I've done the same thing on an old petcock except in my case the tubing you speak of was already failing and had a top to bottom crack so I took it off on purpose.

The good news is you can probably still use it. The downside is that you probably won't have a 'reserve' anymore. No biggie, just figure out what kind of mileage you are getting and use the odometer to tell you when to fill up until you can get another petcock or replace that tube. The way those things work (I think) is that the longer tube sticks up into the gas tank a few inches and that's usually the 'fuel' or 'on' setting. By flipping to 'reserve' you access the fuel below that tube. So all you've really done is make yourself be on 'reserve' all the time, but you might just be able to leave the petcock set on fuel - I could. I rode my bike like this for months and just recently found a new petcock for my 31 year old bike. Having a reserve is handy, but the bike will run fine without it (if the reserve tube flows freely) as long as you can get fuel to the carbs - they don't care which hole the gas comes out of! My experience is entirely with Hondas so someone please correct me if I got something wrong.

well, it depends on your definition of "ruin" you just have two reserve settings now. The long tube is just there to stick up farther into the tank so that it starves before the fuel is actually gone, that's how you can tell that you're low on fuel before you're totally out, normally you would switch over to the reserve at that point but now yours will both run out at the same time... and it will be too late to get to a gas station.