Back in the first years AS existed, things could get pretty wild on the chainsaw forum. Much of what went on that people saw on their computers was well choreographed behind the scenes via phone calls and emails at all hours of the day and night. We all had multiple aliases and traded them back and forth at will. Although I myself had no less than 10 alter egos at one time, one's enough today. Those days are over.
I joined AS initially to find out about my dad's old David Bradley chainsaw and quickly got sucked in to the fun and games of who were then the top posters on the site. Unlike me, they were all pretty much involved professionally with chainsaws; they worked hard and they played hard. In the few years that I was posting regularly on AS, however, I ended up buying no less than half a dozen chainsaws just because I liked fooling around with them. I also traveled across the country and Canada to meet AS members at chainsaw get-togethers. On a few occasions, some of the guys would come out and stay with me for a while. Rotax Robert, Ken Dunn and Gypo have all been out here to visit and we all got to be pretty good friends.
When I was out at Dennis Greffard's place at his first so-called Clearwater Revival in 2002, I met Dennis, Rotax, Gypo, Sawracr, Rupedoggy and RBTree for the first time. We had a great time out there. A while later, Dennis, Rotax, Gypo and I all met out at Rupedoggy's place out in Placerville, CA. While we were there, we stopped in at Ken Dunn's in Oroville and Art Martin's in Sacramento and dragged them along too. There are pictures on this site that we took at all these parties.
Even though most legitimate threads were somehow taken far off-topic by one or another of us, obtaining a broad spectrum of knowlege always seemed to prevail. Of course, along the way there were always disagreements and some of them would get ugly on the forum. Darin was very patient, but ultimately he'd have to step in and baby sit. In the beginning, this was probably just a niusance to him, but as time went on, the posts and pictures got more outrageous and I'm sure this didn't look good to his sponsors. To us, this was just a sandbox, but to Darin it was a business.
I haven't stopped by here very much in many years, but as I said above, this site has really grown. If it weren't administered to as Darin was pretty much forced to, it probably wouldn't be what it is today, if anything at all. Make no mistake about it; the AS of 2002 was completey different from the AS of today.
We were all banned at least once along the way for posting foolish and sometimes vulgar things, but we'd appeal to Darin via private email to let us back in, when we promised to behave. After a while, we'd start to get bored and things would escalate again, then Darin would step in. With many, he just got sick of it and enough was enough.
Love to hear some stories of the good ol days! haha
