2109 pages long and three years old! Quite a thread.
My experience with McCullough saws was the summer of 1962 when I got my first full time job right out of high school as a member of a TSI crew for the Forest Service. We lived in tent cabins out in the woods and used Macs with bow bars and straight bars. All Mac 10s with one BP-1 saw. That's the one with two cylinders one being to balance the other but not have any fuel mixture or spark plug. It was supposed to turn 13,000 rpm when saws at the time ran at 6-7,000. We tried to remove the governor to get it to max rpm (we were mostly 18 to 20 year olds with indulgent supervision) but the only thing that looked like a governor was a plastic funnel affair that fit in the throat of the carb to restrict air flow. I don't recall if it made a difference but since they developed a reputation for blowing up and injuring the operator that was bad enough McCullough bought all the BP-1s they could find back from the owners and crushed them, I'd say it didn't. Ours never exploded but it wasn't for lack of trying on our part.
They say that the most destructive thing on the face of the earth is an 18 year old American soldier with an M-60 machine gun and unlimited ammo but I think an 18 year old with a bunch of chainsaws to choose from and unlimited fuel and maintenance is a close second. We were working in a big old growth crown fire burn and had many huge trees to cut down. We weren't supposed to but what the heck? They wre big enough that the big bars on the saws had to be turned pointing straight into the tree to make the front wedge cut.
At that time the fallers for the mills in the area all used Homelites for their work. Macs were like a second class saw to them and ours were in the shop a lot but then we treated them poorly. I can still remember their sharp bark exhaust note. Before Osha and I'm sure they played a part in my hearing loss.