Chainsaws are loud, smelly, violent, and dangerous little monsters. Pretty much the perfect backyard toy! Now, if you've picked up anything about old Jon here yet you may have noticed that I like to collect up discarded things and make them functional for little or no money. Chainsaws are no different.
I've been watching the "weekly treasures" (aka, garbage and recycling) for a while and have managed to pick up a couple old Homelite saws. I have NOT heard favorable things about this brand but I really don't know anything about chainsaws at all. That doesn't usually stop me.
Allow me to cut to the chase here: The grey/blue saw was found full of the most brutally stale fuel I've ever seen but was completely intact. I emptied the skanky fuel and cleaned out the carburetor a bit and to my surprise the saw started great and ran beautifully. I only had to spend a couple minutes adjusting the high/low needles on it. Now that it ran I discovered that the chain bar was pretty bargain-basement and the chain itself was about as sharp as a bag of wet mice. That brings me to the second saw.
The Red saw was of similar vintage and size to the blue/grey one but appears to have been dropped off of something very tall because the handle is broken mostly off at the two points where it connects to the main body of the saw. In fact if you check out the video you will see how someone even MORE crude than me whacked the thing back together with some wire and tin. It's pretty wobbly and nasty because of this so I didn't even bother running it. I did, however, notice that it had a more aggressive and actually sharp chain which was on a nicer bar that has the little pulley thing at the tip. Told you I don't know anything about chainsaws. :)
A quick swap of the chain and bar resulted in a good working saw for no money and probably about two hours of my time... which we all know is virtually worthless anyway. The only remaining bad part is that the muffler (which is actually just a spark arrestor and not a sound deadener) is pretty rusty and there's a hole in the side of it. I might have to invent some sort of replacement for that.
So... I guess the moral of the story again is that more people should reuse things instead of throwing them out. That said, whoever chucked out this old saw probably has some nice new one now that is half the weight and cuts with twice the power. Oh Well, I don't have a lot of trees to butcher, just the occasional storm-blown arboreal wreckage so I'm fine with a primitive old saw.
Here's the YouTube video evidence:
