AlextheUKOD
New Member
Hey all, just figured I'd share a little bit of recently acquired knowledge. I currently have 2 stihl 026's, both with gasket delete, muffler mods. One is a black lever with shaved cylinder and a hyway piston (44mm), no porting other than a little bit of lower transfer smoothing. Other is a red lever with some mild porting and a meteor piston (also 44mm). had previously done porting and gasket delete on red lever, was running good but oem piston/rings were getting heavily worn (both saws had a lot of hard hours before i aquired) so i recently put in the meteor piston and didnt check squish for 1st couple days of running. Ran fine but when i did check clearance was at 0.009". piston was just kissing the top of cylinder- actually cut a half moon into top of piston and boogered squish band in cylinder a little. Made a .004" gasket out of pop can. With motoseal came out to 0.0143" and now have no issues saw runs great. Lucky didnt bomb the saw. Black handle is at ~0.016" and runs good too, btw.
Takeaway: Minimum squish is somewhere just north of 0.009", so don't do like I did.
This site has given me a lot of knowledge, figured I'd share some of mine.
Takeaway: Minimum squish is somewhere just north of 0.009", so don't do like I did.
This site has given me a lot of knowledge, figured I'd share some of mine.