May I be the first to welcome you to the Poulan thread my Pioneer loving friend!
You come bringing deep questions that I'm not sure we can confirm, but our brand preference's should be put aside in the effort to answer that question.
I have said before that I have no Pioneer experience as they were pretty rare in the area that I have lived in all my life.
The heartland of the middle US was never really big timber land so the really big saws were never really common either.
You having experience with the original Pioneers and having both in your possession will give you the advantage as to if the saws and there parts are indeed identical, but that is only one part of the question.
I am looking forward to tomorrow, as I got a call today from Cbfarmall/Chris and we plan to get together tomorrow and I should get my first chance to actually see and run a Poulan Pro 655BP saw. (as well as the Dolmar rebadged Poulan 6000!)
At this point I have always considered the Poulan Pro 655, 525 and 455 as Pioneer saws. After some study though I do believe they could be considered Poulan saws.
The reason that I say that is that it is common knowledge that
Elux bought out Pioneer in 1979, we also know that the Peterborough Pioneer plant was essentially closed in 1984. It seems that something with a few employees continued on in Peterborough untill 1989. Was that some the Pioneer/Partner bussiness going on there?
We also know that in 1979 that Pioneer was heavy in debt and probably would have closed without the Elux buyout. Why did Elux buy out the Pioneer factory and take on all that debt?
We know that none of the Elux saw companies had the patents and equipment to make there own saw chains and saw bars, which would have made Pioneer attractive but I have another question. Was the bigger P series saws and all the tooling and machinery pretty new at that time in 1979?
Maybe if all that was new, it would have been appealling to Elux as well.
Also what I would like to know is actually how much of a exact copy was the Poulan Pro to the Pioneers of that design. Was there improvements over the original designs?
Did the 655 have boost ports that the Pioneer didn't have? These are legitment questions to me.
No matter how you look at it, the Poulan Pro line was introduced in 1988. As far as I'm concerned and as far as I know, there was no Pioneer at that time. Where were the Pioneer based saws manufactured at that time in 1988-1989? We know there was no Pioneer factory in Peterborough then.
Were they manufactered in the Poulan US plant? I would guess so but I don't know for sure.
So with what I know (or think I know) I would say that they are a Poulan saw without a doubt.
Yes you could say its not a pure Poulan saw and I would agree, but if there was no Pioneer at that time, you cannot say they were rebadged Pioneers even if they were mostly a Pioneer design and manufactured on the Pioneer machinery.
If we find out the Poulan Pro saws were exact copies of the Pioneers then I would say they were way less pure but if they were not exact clones and had improvements to the original designs it would only reinforce my opinion that they were Poulan saws.
Feel free to disagree with anything above and reply with your opinon and facts. Also feel free to copy and paste this to the Pioneer thead for the other Pioneers guys opinons.
