Dealers beware

[Brmorgan]

My favorite thing here was a few years ago when they tried to crack down on people driving snowmobiles across lakes. They tried to say that the exhaust was getting into the snow and then melting into the lake water in the spring. It was then pointed out that outboard engines pump their exhaust DIRECTLY into the water and that any effect of a snowmobile passing overtop would be negligible at most, so that movement sorta died out. It'll be back though, I'm sure.

FWIW my dealer already will not do any sort of modifications to saws, though they state WCB restrictions for their reasons. Said they don't want to mod a saw and then have some logger get hurt/killed because of it. I can understand that, though I don't see how a muffler mod could make a saw more dangerous except possibly more of a fire hazard.

 

[olyeller]

you dont think you know who in washington dc is behind this do you ?

his name starts with O ?

i think someone is backing them up but who ?

Sorry to bust your conspiracy theory, but this emission crackdown has been a long time coming. And now it's hitting home here. When I was a motorcycle magazine editor back in the early 1980s we attended some California Air Resources Board (CARB) meetings where these petty bureaucrats proudly announced they were going to clamp down on everybody: Autos, trucks, motorcycles, lawnmowers, chainsaws, etc. They got to motorcycles shortly thereafter, and the manufacturers had to lean out the carburation so severely you HAD to wait until the bike was fully warm or it would stumble, cough and die--not good in traffic! Now we have bikes with cats and EFI to run clean--for more $$$ of course.

The real pi$$er came when we asked in those meetings, "What is the cost-effectiveness of creating all these restrictions?" They said, "We don't care. We're going to get everybody."

These guys are on a holy mission to save the earth. And our government empowers these little eco-weenies to make laws that impact thousands and thousands of people, and they have never worked in private enterprise in their lives, don't know what it's like having to make a payroll work, going from starry-eyed college idealist straight into life-long government work. And they're not elected officials, so we can't throw them out of office; they're appointed to be faceless cogs in the machine.

So bottom line for us, buy the saws you really want now, before 2010 restrictions come. In time, saws might evolve to become better than ever--sportbikes of today are unbelievably superior to machines of 20 years ago. But we'll likely have to pass through a stage of chainsaws that are like 180-hp corvettes once again before the technology matures. Myself, I'm selling my MS 390 and getting a MS 460 while I still can.