rxe

The site suggests some sort of catalytic burn in the cowl. I don't see how you'd have the temperature to do this, and you wouldn't want it anyway. The last thing I'd want on my roof is some sort of uncontrolled secondary burn device. The reduction in smoke? Easy - it is a diffuser. It takes cold air in at the bottom, mixes it with the hot smoky air and, ta-dah, less (apparent) smoke. If they've genuinely found a way of oxidising pollutants at low temperature with a device that can sit on the roof for a decade, they'd be better off selling it to the car industry.

I have a similar gripe. Don't have time to waste a Saturday morning going and getting parts - I'd rather be doing something with the children (though they'd probably be happy enough with a trip to a saw shop). Will be dropping a PM in a Northerly direction... I'm OK for sweets as well!

Doesn't start when you pull it, but starts when you pour petrol into it - so compression is good, sparks are good. If it has been sitting for a while, check the fuel pump membrane, it is probably stiff as a board and not pumping. Have you put a new carb kit on? (And if you did, did you get everything in the right order - I have screwed this up several times and ended up with a saw that did not pump.). Very much points to a fuel problem. I had one that would never start on the cord, needed a bit of fuel in the carb. Once it was warm it ran and started perfectly. The problem was the choke flap which had distorted and was not sealing.

Shortest I've used on an 880 was a 25" bar, which is still short enough for speed cutting comedy value. I was using to saw up the gnarly stuff that wouldn't split with an axe. Most fun I've had with a saw in, er, OK, a few months.

Picked them up for! Sorry! : - ) My best one was a runner for £67! Keep watching eBay - sometimes they go for silly money, other times there is no interest. I got a top notch 090 for £200 last year. Needed nothing doing to it, just cuts wood. If you have it on a carriage, then yes, the fillers are a problem. I was assuming you'd be on a Granberg like I am!

070, 075, 076, 090 would be my choices. The "caps on the wrong side" thing is not an issue. When working with a big bit of wood you quickly get into the habit of checking the saw after each cut - when doing oak, I tend to touch up the chain after every two cuts, so re-filling the saw is not a big deal. 070 are cheap - I've got a runner for less than £100 and a very good one for less than £200, and pattern parts are plentiful and cheap. They're simple to work on, have masses of torque and work well. 075/076 - similar, but more expensive to buy, and they are ridiculously complex to work on. So many fiddly bits to strip off, and the area around the piston is a magnet for milling dust. 090 - I don't notice much difference to the 070 in wood less than 3 feet wide. Clutch is expensive, and they aren't cheap to buy. They use more fuel. One nice thing about the 1106 series (contra, 070, 090) is that the overspeed is the choke. You over rev it, it chokes up - which is very safe indeed. You've got to be really brutal to kill one of these. 084 / 880 - big bucks to buy, 084 parts issues. Less vibration, better fuel economy.

009, 010, 011 are pretty much equivalent in capability to MS170s, 180s and the like. I have one that must be 40 years old, it was given to my father by its original owner, he used it for 20 years, now I have it. It still runs fine, I still cut firewood with it. They're not too fiddly to fix, the carb is a bit picky, and the flap that seals up the choke seems to bend - so it is very hard to start from cold (you think the choke is on, but it isn't), and runs fine when hot. The plug hangs out the back, so is vulnerable to having the lead knocked off.

I only have an old electric saw that was given to us (a Stihl E10), it cuts well enough, but it is still pretty noisy - I wear ear defenders if I am using it. It certainly has less chuff than a petrol one, but the "on off" nature of the beast is quite handy. I'd get him a decent saw buck and a petrol saw. 2 hours a month = about 2 tonnes of firewood for me, but I load a big buck and cut 10 at a time. You could get him down to 15 minutes with petrol which is OK from a neighbour perspective.

I keep it sharp, keep the bar oil topped off...and that is about it for routine maintenance. If something doesn't feel right, or it doesn't work, I put the dead saw on the bench and pick up another. Once a saw has made it to the bench, it is cleaned out and checked over more thoroughly: bar flipped and checked, clutch bearing greased, general blow over with compressed air. Only exception is milling: then they get the full bench check at the end of every day.

Yup, take out the summer bricks and throw them away. We struggled with ours for a while (it came with the house) until we discovered this. We find that the harder we run the heating, the hotter the oven gets. On a really cold evening when it is going pretty much flat out, the oven is over 300. The trick to getting the oven to high temperature is to load it, have a good burn for 30 minutes, then shut the flue damper down by about 50%. Don't really know how much wood it uses, but about a barrow a day in winter, and a barrow every 2 days at the moment.

I use a Stihl 07S on mine because I am mad, but the saw cost £30, so it seemed like a good idea. I would have thought any old "non-chainbrake" iron would be a good choice as it is pretty cheap.

I do all my firewood cutting with an 090, so I am familiar with the problem. To be honest, if you are using it for normal cross cutting, a 660 is a better saw than any of the 070, 090, 076 generation. They are heavy, noisy, vibrate like brutes and use a lot of petrol. On the +side they are pretty bomb proof and seem to last forever if reasonably cared for. Where they excel is long bars and milling. They aren't particularly fast, but they have stacks of torque. With a 25" bar, a 660 will wipe the floor with any of them. At 36" it is more even, and if you ever need a 40" bar, then the old ones are best. For milling, the robustness counts for a lot. The 070 rev limiter is the choke - set to a very conservative 8500 rpm or so. So unless you're really stupid with the H setting, it is very hard to kill it. For one use a month, I'd keep the 070. If you don't have the AV handles for it, then you could look for the parts on eBay - you occasionally get an AV wrecker on there. I got a very busted 070 2 years ago for £70 - but all the AV was intact, and went onto one of my non-AV saws.

Two thoughts: 1) As Big Bolt says, water can get down the back of the fuse box and corrode everything. Quite often I have to "wiggle" the fuses to get a good contact, though this is usually for stuff that is rarely used (fog lights etc). 2) The earth for the headlight is up inside the wing. Should be an easy job, but it is a brute because all the parts are totally corroded. Simplest course of action is to get the earth wire and bolt it firmly to something accessible and out of the muck. Dunno about the switch, mine is pretty new as my children broke the original one climbing on the steering wheel when they were small(er).

Keeping it in isn't a problem for us - we have a 355, and even on crappy poplar it still has a fire in the morning. That said, keeping it going overnight and belting the heat out would be a different problem. You are pretty much on the limit for a wood burning rayburn at 9 rads, so expecting it to heat up an accumulator as well might be pushing it. Try playing around with the thermostatically controlled vent. If you set it at (say) 3, and don't put the flue slider all the way in, you could set the CH to go off at 11:00 PM when you bank it - then kick in again at 06:00 before you get up. This would open up the inlet and set off a fierce burn, you would need to refuel at 07:00. Remember that these things were originally designed for farmers - get up at 5 to milk the cows, reload the rayburn on the way out to the cow shed, by the time you got back at in at 08:00, it was toasty hot for cooking breakfast.

The biggest problem on these will be the body work. Somehow Series and Defender Land-Rovers look better a bit beaten up. My Series 3 has "cow dents", from being left in a field where cows scratched themselves against it. Looks fine. My Defender has mostly matt paint (was gloss many years ago), loads of scratches, and again looks fine. Put a dent in a modern Range Rover, and it just looks like a dented car that needs a few grand to fix. There is a market for Defender style vehicles, but the things that make them practical (ladder chassis that can be welded by a beginner, meccano panels) are pretty much banned in new cars now, so they have to move to something less practical. My Defender will probably see me out though.