Your saws are improperly tuned and you don't know how to start them correctly, or how to clear a flooded saw. I have 22 saws and all of them stare in one pull when hot, and a half dozen after sitting dry for months.
I started the thread just because I wanted to find out if anyone knew of a cheap Chinese carb I could buy, and you decided to change the whole discussion. Now you're complaining about it. I appreciate the info you have provided, but you can't blame me if I'm not excited about letting you take over the thread.
I have started at least one other thread to get information on saw storage and so on, and you can go read up if you want. I'm grateful to people who responded, but the advice I got was not all that great. I'm still working on it. I can't wave a magic wand and make solid advice appear out of thin air.
Chinese carbs are great resources, but you seem to have something against them. To get any part for a saw locally, I have to get in a car and drive for miles, and getting repairs appears to be nearly impossible. I got a Chinese carb for my other Echo, and all I had to do was sit on the couch and use a mouse. It was nearly as cheap as a rebuild kit, it went in the saw in a few minutes (faster and easier than rebuilding or cleaning), and it worked like a dream. I know it sounds funny to throw out a carb instead of working on it, but in a world where you can get a great carb for $11, it's stupid to suffer to make an old carb, which is no better, work. When Chinese carbs are available cheap, OEM carbs are disposable, plain and simple. It's a fact of life.
Eleven dollars is not a meaningful sum of money to waste. A rebuild kit can cost more. Sticking a new carb in a saw that may have varnish problems is a fine idea, even if there's a good chance you're wrong. You can spend eleven dollars on breakfast at McDonald's. It beats leaving my saw with a numbskull for weeks and then paying a third of the cost of a new saw for a bad repair.
I wish there was an HDA268 knockoff. I would have installed and tuned one when my Echo started having problems.
Obviously, I do know how to clear a flooded saw, as I pointed out above. Sometimes it doesn't work, because flooding isn't the only thing that will keep a saw from starting. As to whether I know how to start a saw correctly, all I can say is that I follow the directions in the manuals. If the directions are wrong, it doesn't surprise me at all, because a lot of the information I've gotten from authoritative sources has turned out to be ridiculous garbage. It seems like the industry is very interested in sales and making money from repairs, but they don't knock themselves out providing useful information to consumers.
Yes, my saws are improperly tuned. I think we all knew that. One has a brand-new carb, so of course it has to be tuned. The other was repaired by...I won't say "jackass," but by someone whose efforts have fallen short in a number of distressing ways. It was really disturbing to find out that the screws holding the fan cover had fallen off in my pasture, after I paid over $130 for repairs. The screws are only available by mail order, and some of the thieves on the Internet wanted several dollars for each one.
Tomorrow or the next day, I will resume trying to tune the saws. It was about 98 here today, so tomorrow's forecast of 91 looked pretty good to me.
I wish I could just drop the saws off somewhere when they have problems, but long drives and month-long waits are the norm here, so I am stuck with my own limited skills.
After being in saw fourms for 15 or more years the operator is at fault as much or more then the tool itself[emoji111]
I am definitely at fault. When I got these things, there was nothing in the manuals about the horrors of ethanol, the amazing uselessness of popular fuel stabilizers, the worthlessness of the manuals, or the fine points of tuning a carb. I looked around for information, and the information I got was total crap, so now I have problems. I am working on getting better information, however.
Hopefully the Ultrasonic Cleaner won't kill the carburetor permanently, sometimes the cleaners will save a carburetor sometimes they will kill them, do to the internals.
I don't care if the ultrasonic cleaner kills my old carb, since I have a new one. If it's true that they kill carbs, then this is one more example of me getting crap information in spite of making my best effort. I didn't come up with the ultrasonic cleaner myself. The idea came from hours of searching the web like a responsible person. I made a good effort, so I'm not going to let it bother me.
