Scrounging Firewood (and other stuff)

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Did some crude port work (actually improved upon my previous work) by widening and flattening the intake and exhaust and enlarging my bridge ports. I also slightly elongated my upper transfers after noting that the factory jug has wider ones.

My work is crude and not as pretty as some of the masters that post to this site, but so far I have improved performance each time I've dabbled, so finger crossed it continues!

This is a New West 440 Big Bore cylinder. I love that they have tight D combustion chambers, and their transfers also look better than most aftermarket. That said the intake and exhaust ports generally need lots of work.

Hopefully, when I pair this jug up with an OEM piston, it will impress!

Sorry the pics are just the best I can do with a cell phone. Also tough to get the light right and not block the light when you take the pics.
 

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Did some crude port work (actually improved upon my previous work) by widening and flattening the intake and exhaust and enlarging my bridge ports. I also slightly elongated my upper transfers after noting that the factory jug has wider ones.

My work is crude and not as pretty as some of the masters that post to this site, but so far I have improved performance each time I've dabbled, so finger crossed it continues!

This is a New West 440 Big Bore cylinder. I love that they have tight D combustion chambers, and their transfers also look better than most aftermarket. That said the intake and exhaust ports generally need lots of work.

Hopefully, when I pair this jug up with an OEM piston, it will impress!

Sorry the pics are just the best I can do with a cell phone. Also tough to get the light right and not block the light when you take the pics.

You have more guts than me. Im well short of ready to do that. Keep us posted on the results

So are you doing a timing advance, muffler mod, base gasket delete/or a thinner one?

I can tell ya. Starting a COLD saw that is ported can be rough. and even when warm some times. My 2166/72 is what i grab when i dont want to be beat up that day[emoji23][emoji23]

That 2166/72 was Best saw purchase ever.


Sent while firmly grasping my redline lubed RAM [emoji231]
 
Hey Neil. There's a bit of a question mark over whether we're stihl allowed to scrounge here, depending on whether it falls under the category of 'essential travel'. Sure, we'd all regard scrounge as essential for warming our families and posting pics on the internet and particularly when there won't be another person in miles (there might be goats, though :crazy2: ). However, being miles away from any other person is no excuse now.

Two stories in the news yesterday. A 17 year old learner driver getting a lesson in driving in the wet from her mother copped a $1650 fine for 'non-essential travel'. So the fact that they were not going to come into contact with anyone else was irrelevant. They were also too far from home to pretend they were going down to the shops for essential items. That's a nice little earner for the State.

You're allowed to exercise outside like riding your bike. However, you're apparently not allowed to drive your car with the bike on the back to a nicer spot and then ride your bike. A bloke got pinged yesterday down in Melbourne for that too. Cha-Ching!

Gotta find the money to pay those public service salaries somehow, I suppose. Having shut down most of the private sector, I guess I missed the announcement that Premier Dan the Man from Victoriastan voluntarily took a pay cut in solidarity with the private citizens whose livelihood he destroys and from whom he now extorts more money from for stupid reasons that have nothing to do with infection control. :mad:
Two things to never believe, the Media and the Government ( yes number two was hard as heck to believe, seeing as its ingrained in out society and institutions within the Commonwealth). The haves will always look after the haves. Some of us of will just do what whatever we can for the rest. Essential .....not in the least, the world will still wake up to another day without all the slags. On a brighter note.........24 days later..........I havent been fired for drinking on the job at Daddy Day Care 24/7!!!!
 
Reminds me of a city council member pulled over for going the wrong way on a one way street, he kept telling the officer a very entitled “Do you know who I am?”. Like the rules don’t apply to him, and the officers shouldn’t be bothering such an important person. Ha ha.
 
Works alright on fairly level ground when you're in the yard. Gets to be A LOT of work wrestling them into place in the woods where there's brush and stumps and uneven ground.

Yep, a lot easier to just flop on its side and noodle than trying o get it in position to split vertically. I can have one noodled in half by the time it would take just to get it ready to split vertically.
 
Okay, I'm certifieable. MIdnight, standing over the vice wearing a hoody jacket, sharpening and rebaring the MS362 to a 20" bar ready to lay into the pile of locust limbs in the morning.

I somehow have 4 16" chains to be sharpened and ready to attack the standing small locust scounge later in the week.

Good news is I have the appointment on Wednesday to pull all the junk hanging off my jugulaar vein. Be able to take a decent shower again
 
Joe, I think I have the same gears as you, but you may be right on the towing, but I see #s all over the place (2 WD, 4 WD, Cab Selection, bed size, etc).

With 3.73 gears they are rated to tow 9,000 lbs!
My dealer offers a life time warranty on the engine if I get all of my oil changes there, and they only charge $75 to do it. Last time I was in I asked what the max towing was. She got out a chart and went item for item on my build sheet. I think different tires changed it a little. A bit of VooDoo in their calculations.
 
I haven't split ash, there’s very little ash here. It was planted in the front yards of homes built in the 50s and 60s, otherwise I don’t see it.

The toughest wood I’ve split is live oak. You have to split it all the way down a lot of times, it screeches the whole way, then makes a very loud pow when it finally lets go. It’ll shoot off left and right both, you don’t want anyone standing there.
I split two cords of Hickory this winter, and had to put a 2x6 at the foot so the bade could go all the way through. The last half inch is too stringy to pull apart.
 
With all of this spare time, I've been watching my Blue Birds nesting more than usual. I just saw the hen hanging on the outside of the hole feeding chicks. I might try making my next box with a plexi glass window in it so I can watch the chicks grow?
Maybe put a cover over the plexiglass that you can lift up and peer through the plexiglass.
 
So talking about ash brings up a question I've been pondering.

Years back when all my wood butchering was hand operated (NY state near Canada, if it makes a difference), ash was one of my favorites for splitting because I usually found it in tall, dead columns deep in the woods with straight grain that split easier than most other stuff.

In recent years--now in Colorado, where the only ash available comes from harvesting planted trees in the towns downhill from me--I get ash that is sometimes straight-grained and easy-splitting, or I get ash that looks like it was knitted together in cross-grained patterns that split only because I have hydraulic power that slices through despite the grain.

What gives? Anyone have thoughts on this?
Forest trees are typically long and straight with little branching till high up and thus the grain is straight and split easy.
The trees I get, lol, are usually field edge or fencerow or yard trees. Lots of branching and the wind weaves them in a spiral and splitting them will test a man.

Sent from my CLT-L04 using Tapatalk
This! We only have black ash that normally grows in the swamp or near water. The swamp trees have dense straight grained wood that is loaded with water. The lake edge trees are less dense but often have the yellows in the core and often twisted grain.
 
You have more guts than me. Im well short of ready to do that. Keep us posted on the results

So are you doing a timing advance, muffler mod, base gasket delete/or a thinner one?

I can tell ya. Starting a COLD saw that is ported can be rough. and even when warm some times. My 2166/72 is what i grab when i dont want to be beat up that day[emoji23][emoji23]

That 2166/72 was Best saw purchase ever.


Sent while firmly grasping my redline lubed RAM [emoji231]

This is an Asian Clone, and I've done several of them so far, and have always been able to improve performance. They had a group buy on another site a year or so ago so I picked up several of them at bargain basement prices so I could learn how to port a saw. I'm just using the low cost HF grinders that were on sale for $6.99 (with some grinding heads from E Bay).

The mufflers have no baffle and come with a large hole, no screen and DP cover, so I don't further mod them (I've found increase mods just burn more fuel).

Deleting the base gasket results in near perfect squish almost every time (I shoot for .020).

I advance the timing by shaving .020 - .030 off the key.

The plating on the New West jugs looks to be VG, but the port work was terrible.

In the beginning, I was just lowering the intake and straitening out the exhaust port to get better performance. I print my timing wheels off the computer and glue them to Oak Tag.

Then I started widening and flattening the intake and exhaust and adding bridge ports. I also noticed OEM jugs have wider upper transfers, so I tried to widen the ones on this jug a bit. It is an interesting game to try to make them stronger each time. I usually can, unless the port timing #s are not with me. Since I don't machine my jugs, I can only move ports in one direction.

Most builders will tell you the OEM jugs run the best. I have collected 2 each OEM 044/440; 046/460; and 066/660 jugs to port when I feel confident enough to do them. I also want to make sure the bottom ends of these 440 clones will hold up before installing an OEM jug on them. They seem to do well with good oil, especially with the lighter OEM 460 pistons (all the AM pistons are heavier than OEM).

From my results, I understand why builders insist on certain oils and ratios. The increased RPMs of a ported saw, and additional piston weight of a Big Bore or Hybrid put a lot more stress on the bottom ends, resulting in 2 failures from ones run on conventional oil. Both failures were at the large rod bearing. I always replace the piston pin bearing with OEM, the cost is only about $10., it is cheap insurance.

I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn saw porting to play with and AM jug first. Learning to control the grinders takes some time.
 

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