Wednesday, April 6, 2022

2022, a year for finishing old projects

I've got a lot of old projects hanging around, mostly it's just laziness, stuff got started and I lost interest.

Meanwhile we're trying to clean up around the house, it's easy to let your stuff take over and when you've got a small house it gets to be a problem quickly.

A good example is my old Echo chainsaw. We got that saw back in the 1980s, it literally fell off a truck in front of my parents house. We took it to camp and at some point I think I ran some bad gas in it. It'd run but it needed choke to be able to do anything.


I brought it back to our house, took it apart and ordered a carb kit. Then I got distracted and you know how it is. Its been here so long I don't remember how long ago I brought it here, before 2016 certainly.

The other day I was cleaning up in the garage and noticed it. I was just about to put it into the trash but for some reason decided I'd take one try at getting it back together. If you've never worked on a chainsaw it's much harder than a lawnmower because everything is small and fits together just so. I figured this would be an extra hard job because it'd been so long since I took it apart.

Imagine my surprise when the reassembly only took around 3 hours. About half that time was spent digging around to find bits and wondering what some other bits I had went to. I *think* I'd disassembled a few other things in that period because I've got some random bits that I can't identify.

Anyhow after a little carb tweaking it runs great. This is an Echo 510EVL which is about the same size as my Husqvarna but since the body is all metal it's heavier. I think its got a little more torque too, it seems to power through stuff a little better.



The entire time we've had it this hand guard has been broken. I used my Harbor Freight plastic welder to stitch the parts back together. The black is actually plastic from the welder kit that I added it, I also embedded some metal window screen into the repair which should make it pretty strong.

It does need one more bolt to attach the handle to the body, that's been missing the whole time we've had it and will make it much more comfortable to use.

Did I really need another saw? No, my Husky does everything I need but once in awhile it's handy to have a backup and I do hate throwing away something that still has life in it.

Onward to the next old project!

No comments: