I would like to know what a "lackie" and "minion" are? Since you have directed those comments at me, I may have to take offense to it. Unless someone reading this thread is completely retarded, I don't have a fancy handle, my name is Cliff, not "lackie" or "minion", and I'd appreciated being called by my name, thank you. Since we are getting personal here, your comments toward others are noticeably condescending, to a point where you make very crafty comments to try to make others believe that you are possibly smarter, faster, stronger, taller, more educated and have greater depth of experience with these things than the rest of us. It appears that you may have a business of some sort, I and decided after your second condescending post that had my name in it that I would NEVER, EVER, for any reason spend one cent of my money with you.
Steve seems to have a good bit of DIRECT experience with USA delivered Echo power equipment as well. Our results with these saws have always been pretty close. A very good friend of mine worked for many years at an Echo Warranty facility, and he's the one who got me started on Echo power equipment. He told me that one of Echo's main objectives is to be well with EPA compliance, and in the same sentence told me that they run a fine line of being lean vs potential P/C failure. They simply expect a certain percentage to fail as they will not have full control of all the parameters that equipment will operate in once it reaches it's final destination. Yes, was told that by a factory trained technician who did it for a living for nearly 20 years. He since moved on and up in the World, but is still one of the best and most knowledgeable small equipment tech that I know.
I've seen a good number of Echo P/C's damaged by lean carb settings, and to date haven't seen any chainsaws that didn't benefit from richening them up some (yes, unless you don't do math well that's 100 percent). I tend to be a bit more critical than most, and when I lay down my hard earned money for something, I want it to work at it's peak potential, and provide many years of reliable service. I still don't go as far as many do on AS, porting, reducing squish, moving the timing around, etc. At most I'll do a minor muffler mod in conjunction with correct carb tuning.........Cliff
PS: just to make things really interesting, I dropped the hammer on a new CS-590 this morning, so stay tuned......