Weight vs CCs again

[Tony Snyder]

I am bugged by what I see as most manufacturers building their 41 to 45 cc saws on their 50cc platforms.

Am I missing a manufacturer's model that is a strong 45cc saw and is sized and weight in perportion?

I used to hunt a lot, I would never buy a small gauge shotgun that had been built on a 12 gauge frame. It just goes back to power to weight. Any thing less than the optimized proportion is just poor design.

Whats your thoughts?

 

[tony marks]

i see u point . i was thinking of mabe takin my 54 cc and having it power tuned. this instead of getting the 70 cc saw. which sounds like what u are talkin. only on a bigger saw.what do u think the pluses and minuses of doing this would be. i still need the stronger power head than i presently have,and when i do this wood deal im looking at ,ill really need it at times.if i was sure the 54 would fill the need ,thats what i would do,but itll cost and i dont need to do it an find out i still need the big saw. didnt mean to get away from your original topic ,but it sounds like the same ideas apply. im rich in saws this size 48,49,an 54 cc saws all in good working condition .
ps if it was u fellas would u think id be better of power tuning the older 028[48cc] or the poulan pro 335 . 54cc
cant really see much difference as the are now, in what they will do.

 

[tony marks]

ps im rained out three days runnin now and goin stir crazy everything sharp greased ,heck i even cleaned the house.
if it dont rain tommorow ill be playin catch up all week

 

[dbabcock]

For what it's worth, I really subscribe to the old phrase, "there's no substitute for cubic inches". I don't know much about saw manufacturer's using bigger frames for smaller displacement saws, but I certainly would always go for the biggest displacement used in a given frame size. The weight difference is usually trivial.

As far as power tuned, smaller displacement saws cutting as well as stock, larger saws, I can only give one example and that's a comparison of my stock 266 at 66cc's and my Greffardized 2149 at 50cc's. In this comparison, the 266's extra 33% in displacement completely overwhelms the modified 2149. It's really not even close here. Now as I've said before, this isn't meant to say that Dennis's modifications to this excellent saw are less than acceptable; to the contrary, the 2149 easily outcuts stock 346's, 350's, 351's and 026's. I have done actual comparisons here and it really does do a number on stock saws of approximately the same displacement. What even the modifications can't do is compete with the torque of the 266. If the 2149 were a 2159 or a 357, then there would probably be a chance. Of course it would matter what saws one was comparing, but as a general off the wall guess, I would say that one might be able to get a saw that was "woods modified" to equal a stock saw with perhaps 15 to 20% more displacement. Remember, we're not talking peak horsepower here, we're talking torque and where it's available in the RPM range. Larger displacement saws have a much wider peak torque operating range than smaller ones.

 

[dbabcock]

Actually, I just thought of another comparison that we did a while ago. We ran my 266 against John's Greffardized 2171. Initially, John was running an 8 pin on the 2171 and I was using the stock 7 pin on the 266. We cut the same 14" pine log with both and used the same guide bar and chain. With this setup, the 266 was timed in the 4.75 second range and the 2171 cut only a little faster at about 4.35 seconds. When we switched the 2171 over to a 7 pin sprocket, it's times dropped down into the 3.5 second range.

I'll be sending the 266 to Ken next month for woods mods. Ken believes that because the 266 responds well to modifications in this regard, that it will then maybe stay with a stock 372. We''ll see what happens and hopefully we'll be able to compare it to the 2171 next year.

 

[eyolf]

One small saw that doesn't seem to be a small-bore sister of a bigger unit is the 940 EFCO. I haven't actually cut with one; just swingin' one around in the showroom, but it seems like a really nice light little back-handle saw.

I haven't always understood e-lux's philosophy on so many different saws on the same platform at the same time. Early on the old Husky 61 got expanded into about half-a-dozen different saws; more if you count variations like "rancher", XP and SE, and add in the Jonsey versions.

Why?

Why did the Jonsey 630 almost equal the 266 performance with the 61 bore? Why did Husky sell so many 268's at a significantly lower price than the 272 and say in the literature "all the power you'll ever need"? Why did E-lux not allow Jonsey to go all the way out to the 272 bore until the redesign to 2171/372 (even though the 670 performs within an easy spit of the 272)? Why is the 365/2165 torquey hardwood/firewood saw made on the smaller bore...why not two separate portings of the larger 372/2171?