Husky brush cutters

[newforest]

Thanks!

I will try to look around for the 4201. I will be at the shop that stocked the Carlton blade soon too.

Good idea on keeping that little guard for the rocks. A sawyer new to clearing saws will have the 560 when I get it fixed up right and the main amount of work left for the fall does have rocks - covered with moss. I've hit them a few times already.

I use clearing saws mostly for post-harvest maintenance work, so the quality of the cut stump comes into play for the future of the regen. I really prefer thinning, much more "mental", but such work is fairly rare in the USA and when I can get it the work is in diameter classes where a chainsaw is better. See my signature. Anyway in thinning the stump height wouldn't be important - the cut stems will never catch back up to the crop tree.

[SwampDonkey]

I thinned some nice yellow birch stands in the past on private land. I have gone bye those sites some years later and not much for suckering underneath, almost like walking an older stand of wood.  The sites that do sucker on hardwood ground have been thinned too early and twice as thick in a few years from suckers that are almost as tall. A stump with a good root system can put a lot of water and minerals into suckers. The edges will always sucker, but step inside the woods a few feet and it's different.  ;D

I just marked out some ground this week with lots of backbones and steep rocky side hills. We of course go around the edges but there are lots of those pyramid like rocks that jut up through the ground. Hard walking on and hard on saw blades.  ;D :D

Any of those Swede blades will work fine, I just have better luck will the Stihl blades as I don't have to sharpen them as often because of wood dullness. Just avoid the rocks. Yeah, right! :D

[SwampDonkey]

Did you get the bugs ironed out yet?

[newforest]

Sadly, no. My new 550 is back in the shop at only about 60 hours of use.

Removing the muffler screen was a bit of curing a symptom, not the disease.

The saw did what I needed in a very short sense - it worked to hand to a young guy, new to power equipment and cutting wood. But like most young people, he drifted off all too quickly.

I was quite looking forward to running it myself, just that saw all day long, without picking up a chainsaw for the occasional 5" Ironwood my tired-out old Husqy 345 can still cut, if you have the patience.

But on my first day with the 1400 in my hand, it started running raggedy for 10 minutes and then just quit. I pulled the plug and sure enough, the plug was fouled. OK, they don't last forever. I swapped it out but the new plug was fouled on just it's third tank of gas. The "Module" is running the saw too rich and there is nothing I can do about it. I really doubt Stihl's engineers designed it to plug the screen on a third tank or foul a plug on the third tank.

My hunch is a manufacturing defect in the solenoid that somehow sends some input signals to the M-Tron, or perhaps the carb jets are actually a little bigger diameter than the M-Tronic system presumes them to be. Either that or the incredible levels of vibration when the saw was new created a feedback effect, damaging something just enough to make it not run correctly.

The only way to figure it out is to hook it up to the diagnostic port and use the proprietary Stihl software. Naturally, the distributor's rep is away, when I need a little help, once again. So it will be a while till my $1400 is back in any kind of action. I finished out the job I was on with my trusty-est 345 and a chainsaw and came home to let the deer hunters have the woods while I chase Steelhead for a while.



I stopped by to note that I did find a 'Maxi' blade to run, on a clearance shelf. It was fun enough for a while but ultimately I think I will stick to the regular 4204 blades from Stihl.

I have been wondering why both Stihl and Husqy removed those designs from their offerings, first in the USA and now it appears globally. Though the 3rd party Oregon/Carlton suppliers still offer them.

It appeared to me that the 'Maxi' design triggers kickback a fair bit easier than the blades with a big gullet in front of the tooth. This didn't bother me that much from a safety point-of view (brush/clearing saws are very, very safe generally), but working in heavy slash (post-harvest situation) with kickback wasn't so desirable, as kickback could bury it in un-cuttable wood or kick it into a rock. I still cut very very low for the sake of the regen as I'm not just cutting stems that will never catch back up to the adjacent Crop Tree stem.

So I will use the Maxi blade through it's regular service life but probably not order any for myself, and I definitely wouldn't give a Maxi blade to someone learning clearing saw operation. The blade was wicked good when it was new though.

[SwampDonkey]

I don't know what blade your referring to that is off the market, but it's not a Maxi blade. It's all we use up here on thinning crews, have for 30 years. A testament to their worthiness. Funny they sell them at any saw shop here. Time to find a new shop/dealer. I run a single blade for weeks if we aren't in rocks and blow downs, which is like a rock only hidden with root and mud. :D

Something isn't right with that saw and obviously the dealer isn't providing solutions. But if you ran clearing saws weeks on end, you'd find out, no matter brand, that the saw starves for air very quick from a filled spark screen the first week. If the plug if buggered up in 3 tanks on a new saw then something is up. What is this 1400? You mean 560?