Stihl MS251
Husky 445
Dolmar 421
Mods here are shit
Some other saw
This video may have already been referenced in this thread, but it is a good one and worth repeating I suppose.Originally Posted by Welder
http://youtu.be/7_tsY2abJes
IIRC, Stihl came out as the best chain, albeit by a margin small enough that makes it hard to justify the extra cost. I think it was Oregon that came in a pretty close second at about half the price as Stihl. (I suspect Carlton is pretty good too.)
Very good post, by the way.
Conversion complete; part numbers in my recent post are installed and they fit and function. I used up a 12.0Ah battery sawing up a 50' section of forest-grown oak trunk (14" at the thickest, slowly tapering to 8" at the thinnest, growth rings really tightly spaced as it put all it's energy into getting height) into 17" firewood pieces.
You can see that this bar nose is a lot more rounded / less pointy which means a little more chance of kickback, but I prefer this profile for boring / plunge-cutting as I think it's easier on the chain.
The new non-safety chain does allow boring cuts and works fine for the purpose. You don't get the chain speed out of this saw that you do from something like an MS200T which is what I normally use for small work like this, but it's acceptable and most importantly it's not waking up the entire neighborhood. The Carlton chain seems good so far; it's still plenty sharp and I haven't touched dirt with it yet. One thing I did notice is that I had to extend the adjuster way out to accomodate this chain. I didn't pull the cover back off to see how much adjustment I have left at this point.
One design flaw in this saw is the shape of the chaincase cover. It forces the sawdust to angle all the way back around and actually shoot forward away from the user, creating a choke point in the process. The Carlton chain cuts fast enough that it'll try to clog this cover as it's currently designed. Pretty much any other chainsaw doesn't redirect like this. There was plenty of room to design a proper cover....why, Milwaukee, did you do this? I'm tempted to notch the rear of my cover out about halfway up and just let the chips fly where they want.
I guess this isn't a problem with that crappy safety chain the saw ships with; but with a real chain....
One other thing I think I'd address if I were designing version 2.0 of this saw is to give it some real felling dogs. The teeth on these aren't deep enough to grab anything with much diameter to it, or with flaky bark like White Oak for example. Pretty sure they're bolted on, so since I know someone who can work with metal, I might have "him" make some real ones.
The new TsuMura 14" bar is super stiff and probably twice as heavy as the thin, whippy 16" bar the saw ships with. Whether it was the whippy original bar or the thin .043 gauge original chain, I no longer have any chain-flying-off issues with the new setup using 3/8LP .050 chain.
I'll cross-post this to the Cordless Tools thread as well so this is here for whoever's looking.
Echo CS-501p; purchased in the Spring is a great saw when it starts. Third trip back to authorized dealer for corrective action. Just ordered a Makita XCUO4PT, deal with the extra batteries expires end of the month
Like what Welder just did and may consider an after market 14" bar/chain set up.
It's been a worthwhile change. I've now felled and bucked 3 trees in the evenings after work, all about the same 50' log height, 14" base / 6-8" top of the log, all using the M18 with the TsuMura bar and Carlton chain. Chain is still sharp, bar is working good, saw is oiling and running fine. I use the MS200T to mark the log for the cuts since it's a top-handle saw; I can one-hand it and work the tape measure with the other hand. (17" is the absolute max I can get in my stove and that's what I want, so I take the extra time to make it so.)
After more use, I've decided that when Milwaukee updates this saw, they need to go with the 14" bar / 3/8"LP chain combo, they need to redesign the clutch cover to direct sawdust rearward and down like all other saws (and fire whoever 'engineered' this abortion of a clutch cover), they need to at least offer an optional larger set of felling dogs, and they need to up the chain speed probably in combination with the next new high-output M18 batteries which will hopefully now be backwards-compatible.
The M18 saw is a great piece to have around if you don't want the noise or the hassle of a 2-stroke and if you already have M18 batteries; it's a no-brainer, really. But if you're a saw snob like I can sometimes be, you can't help but notice that the MS200T is considerably lighter with the same length bar, the MS200T is considerably more powerful, the MS200T will run longer on a tank of fuel than the M18 will on a big battery, and the MS200T's chain speed absolutely rips compared to the M18. All of which means that at the end of the day, if you don't care about the noise, you've gotten more done with a 2-stroke than the M18 *and* you're less tired.
The MS200T is now old tech; it was basically perfected as the 020T of, what? A couple or three decades ago? One day we'll look back on these first battery saws as boat anchors much like the first 2-strokes were. There's room for improvement. Get the speed up, the weight down, and put some pro-grade features on them. Maybe the 'real' chainsaw manufacturers have some stuff that's more on the ball than this M18. But I'm not buying into another proprietary battery system. I'll just modify and hack on this one until something better comes out with the Milwaukee name on it.
Added a full wrap and WCS 3 pointers on the 462.
I haven't done a whole lot of cutting with this setup yet. Although the WCS are "felling" dogs, they do make it easier for me to make straighter bucking cuts on larger wood.
If you don’t want conventional chainsaw engine issues, start and run your chainsaw once a month. That applies to all small engines.
#RESIST
Maybe not the best plan, but I put a splash of SeaFoam in, run it for a couple of minutes, then drain it and run it until dry. Then put them up for the heart of winter.
But...I started using Motomix this year. Probably not going to dump seafoam in it.
Somebody and their home plasma table beat me to it! They already made $300 on about $8 total worth of steel LOL. I think I'd want a more 'spiky' profile, as in, slim down the fat between the spikes so they're sharper.
My handy-dandy new vertical bandsaw which I just got running 2 days ago would turn those out pretty quick, too. Except for the hole-drilling part. I don't think I can get punches that small for my ironworker. Dang plasma table owners, always showing off
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