Hi all- I’ve been following this thread and some of the main contributors for some time. I bought some 029 parts from hutzl to repair a few old saws and everything went well- so I decided to try out the 066 kit for milling and large felling. After assembling the kit and running it for about five hours, here are my thoughts.
1) I made myself a threaded puller using taps and drilled bolts similar to the kit one of the members rigged up and was selling. It works like a dream and makes case assembly super easy and fast. 100% recommend going that route vs heat (having done that on 029s).
2) The chain adjuster stripped almost immediately. I made a little brass buffer to tighten up the play- but it was too late. Went OEM after two tanks of fuel.
3) I bought tons of spare parts for many items on the saw. After 5+ tanks of fuel one of the caps kind of failed/cracked and I swapped it out with an extra...no leaks yet from the kit caps.
4) Two different decomp valves had the plastic top pop off, luckily I caught both before any damage. I bought an OEM - just do it like everyone suggests.
5) Most recently starting became hard and the saw wouldn’t idle. I discovered a loose head bolt which turned out to be sheared- probably from vibration. I thought I had extra, but now I’m waiting for a few to come in to reassemble the head. Definitely using a lot of locktight. I’m also going to use a metal head gasket (bought as an extra part) vs the paper is used for the first build.
6) Another note - one of the only machining flaws I could find was the exhaust port being slightly skewed. Seating the exhaust gasket and muffler firmly took some bending of the muffler metal and torquing if the exhaust bolts.
All in all, milling has been a lot of fun. I’ve milled 500 bd/ft of red oak so far. It’s a powerful machine. As others have indicated, be prepared to tinker as you go. Thanks to all for the knowledge base.