Actually, that is the one thing that I have always been facinated about with Homelite... All of the technology they were using in their saws at the time was fairly advanced... I mean look at the planetary gear drive for instance... You may know better than I, but I have honestly never known of any other saw to use this setup... It's so simple, but yet so complicated... It allows the user to switch from direct to gear drive in the matter of minutes, where as any other saw out there, if you had a gear drive, well you just had a gear drive... There was no easy switching of bar covers, you would litterally have had to switch out the whole right side of the engine housing... AND the overrunning clutch setup on the rewinds, lets face it, this is pretty advanced for the time as well even if it may not always have held up to time...
This applys to their power specs too... I have gone through just about every homelite saw with the same bore and stroke in relation to the C-Series saws that I could find and here's what I found to be about the rough guess of power specs of the saws through comparison of other homelite saws with the same specs...
C5 is roughly 5 hp
C7 is roughly 6.8 - 7 hp
C9 don't know couldn't find a saw with the same specs to compare to...
These are all comparison specs granted, from other homelite's that had their hp levels actually written down or actually calculated... You look at other saw company's about the same time era and you will see that you actually did have to have the higher cc's to make any power and some of the saws with 70 or 80 cc's were barely putting down 3 - 4 hp...
Saw comparison to modern day saws --- I don't know with todays tech advances in the small engine industry plus there's the fact that saws today turn at 9,000 or 10,000 + rpms, but I do know that when I completely burry my 36" bar on my C9, that it will keep right on pulling until the tree binds it or the chain hangs on something and these saws originally were only available with a 30" bar at most... AND this is with an old wore out engine, not rebuilt or yet restored...
In reply to your jug boring, you should be able to take it to a fabrication shop, not necessarily an automotive shop... The fab shops will usually have the proper tools to bore out a cylinder... However there still lies the fact that the aluminum cylinder will have to be coated to function properly...
Here's a site you might find interesting... This guy restores chainsaws of all kinds and collects them as well... I'v been in contact with him on and off and as you will be able to see, he does extremely good work... In fact he's the only person, honestly, I would trust to restore my saws, of course he's not what your looking for persay because he is pricy, but I thought you might like his site... ---
www.bigdmc.com/Chainsaw.html --- He's got a restored Homelite C9 "first saw he restored" plus many more including a C9 that will include the extremely rare automatic oiler that was available for the C-Series saws at the time, that he is currently finishing up and should be on display in the next month... (For those who know you couldn't get the oiler on the original 3 C-Series saws "C5, C7 and C9, he has put a C91 side engine housing on the saw to make it work) He also will not sale the oiler, I allready asked