I went in to my local dealer (carries ECHO and Stihl) a few days ago to look at the CS-590. He had just sold his last one earlier that day but will have more in about a week. But I did have a very interesting conversation with him and the service manager about the question of fuel and how ECHO saws are tuned by the dealer. It seems that ECHO specifies that the H & L needle valves are to be adjusted using a tach with the saw under no load using high grade fuel (preferably their PowerFuel, I suppose). It seems that fuel quality is becoming more and more of an issue, and I was told that ECHO recently sent a memo to their dealers and service stations that any saw that came in with fuel in it with octane rating below 89 or phase separation was not covered under warranty. The ethanol (and perhaps other additives) in standard automotive fuel is really affecting the stability of the 2-cycle oil added into the fuel. Even stabilizer doesn't help for long. Since a 2-cycle engine relies on that oil for all of its lubrication, it only takes a little gas (or worse yet, water) with no oil in it to ruin the engine. There are many reports of people who have bought good chainsaws, like the CS-400 and CS-590/600 that have burned up from lack of lubrication after only a few hours of use. They all claim to have used good 2-cycle oil with "new" gas from the local automotive service station. And, of course, they were all upset to find out that the warranty doesn't consider such damage to be a manufacturer's defect. Since I want my new saw to run for a long time, and always when I need it, I am willing to pay extra for quality fuel, although I too wish it were less expensive. And perhaps it will be as the demand grows and larger containers become more available.
There is some interesting information about this on the VP Racing Fuels website
http://www.vp-sef.com/index.php/products/pro-max
wherein they point out that the 2-cycle engine of a chainsaw like the CS-590/600 runs under conditions (HP/pound, RPM, cylinder temperatures) often more severe than the highest performance race car engines, especially since such 2-cycle engines are air-cooled. VP now has a premixed fuel especially formulated for high performance chainsaw engines called VP Pro Max with 97 octane, no ethanol, and Motul synthetic oil (710 2T?). I have a dealer not too far away and I will find out what it costs. The regular VP Small Engine Fuel with 94 octane, no ethanol, and Motul oil costs about $6.00/qt in the standard 8-pack. All of their fuels are also available in 1-gallon, 5-gallon, and 54-gallon containers for larger users.
Starting last year, I now use TruFuel 50:1 premix with 92 octane, no ethanol, and synthetic oil certified to JASO FD, etc., which I get for about $5.00/qt in standard 6-packs at Lowes. (Supposedly it is made by the same company that makes the Stihl MotoMix in the USA.) My smaller CS-330 tree saw starts and runs noticeably better on it. And, of course, in the tree is where I care the most that it starts easily all of the time.
I'll post what I find out about the VP Pro Max once I visit the dealer. I'll also post my test results with the CS-590 once I get it.
Happy cutting to all!
I've bought quite a few burnt up CS400 saws off Ebay, at least 95% were burnt up from lean tuning not bad gas. Those that were to lean most likely were HD saws or from a dealer that didn't do his job. There's way too many crooked dealers out there in every business that want to get paid from both the consumer and the warranty so they blame it on bad gas which works for them. Steve