pleasant

Hiring chainsaws from hire companies pretty much ceased 10 or so years ago. Hse put paid to it....by stipulating on top of providing all the safety kit with the saw. Bar length couldnt exceed 14" and all saws had to be hired with a brand new chain fitted. They used to simply re-sharpen a chain that had been used for a bit of weekend warrior work. Cost to hire the saw, with a new chain, and all the safety kit with insurance waiver started to cost near to £100 for that sort of money you can buy an electric or nearly buy a cheap petrol one new

Will probably sell for more than F R Jones were charging........and í'm not joking! 🙄

...everybody is somebodies customer

Only one we had do similar was a little msa140 and that was a tight motor bearing. You could hear a momentary high pitched faint electrical whine and the sprocket would jump forward by a mm if not less.

...and untrained occasional users. That is why most if not all chaps in the UK are all round protection as it's the hobbyist they are mainly designed for. Even I use type C on the ground when I an testing customers chainsaws. You can't have enough protection with those things IMO.

Most of my weekend warriors budget chainsaw clothing is jeans, an old t-shirt and flip-flops

Should be flipped every two or three chains. Never understood why Stihl and such like don't invert their logo on one side of the bar. Can display it with the logo the correct way up in the showroom with the inverted side behind so it doesn't look odd, but once purchased in will invoke a reaction from the customer as to why one side is a different way up...an explanation would then encourage the bar to be flipped to even wear.

Don't make kids like they used to eh? 😉

Unusual for us to get really big saws in, as we tend to focus on the well heeled weekend warrior. However, we had a very low hours husqvarna 395xp plonked on the counter...domestic user with big logs apparently. Wanted it serviced...on off switch hasnt been working, so has been pulling the choke out to stop it. Has now broken the choke lever so has been trying to stop it with a damp rag over the muffler outlet! We thought, thats a saw we havent seen the size of for sometime....then half an hour later an old boy comes in.....said he used to work for lewisham council in charge of buying maintenance kit and selling it off when council deemed it end of life...which was 3 years. Told me he was 76 and had trouble walking and would i help him out the car with it. Open boot and he's got this huge stihl 076av with a four foot bar on it. I have two of these he said...oh and an 038 and an 020 topper. Got them off the council pre auction. I said i take it you dont use them anymore...what do you want a price or something. Oh no...im halfway through a job and its sprung a fuel leak! Would use my other 076 but couldnt get that one to start. This guy was frail and half my size....and i struggled to lift it out the boot. Side by side made the 395 look minute. Pic is of my 13 year old daughter and she's tall for her age....made her look small!

You will be surprised actually how untight that sheared off thread is in that housing. I sheared a head off one of those torx bolts in exactly the same place but on the earlier all unpainted alloy version of those and I simply just wound the broken part out the other side it was littke more than finger tight once the head had sheared

£10 an hour for a grafter??? Minimum wage is £10.42 an hour...and that's for the lowest of the low...not a grafter who knows how to use machinery.

Jeez....did they want you to season it as well then?? Some people really want their cake and eat it

A quick advert on your local housing estate or village neighbourhood fakebook page stating free logs buyer collects will shift them in an afternoon. Did that with a load of old ragstone I dug out my garden, and some slabs under an old shed I took down. Mention free and they are like flies round poo

As above........cut anything but dry, planed clean wood and chains need regular sharpening. Just sharp isn't good enough. Razor sharp is the only option. I usually print this off and give a copy to my 'weekend warriors' Looking after the chain on your chainsaw - Saw Chains WWW.SAWCHAIN.CO.UK Looking after your chainsaw chain The reason they state you cannot flip the bar over, is because of the attached chain adjuster bracketry arrangement they have fitted. This may well be removable from the bar, so someone with reasonable knowledge should be able to flip the bar and re-attach it...assuming it's not riveted or spot welded in place. If you have a power washer or even a decent jet head on a garden hose it would help if you washed as much crud off those logs as you can before cutting. Remember a chain is a 'blade' and running a blade through grit (all moss contains wind blown grit) and other detritus will dull very quickly. You could buy a nice expensive Stihl saw for a grand....the chains will still dull as quick.....even if you are buying Chinese ones made from cheese.

When you state it is 'flawed' isn't that just your opinion? Or does it fail to meet legal standards? Big difference.

Yup...it will just take a bit longer to get down to the bone wearing that class. 😁

Neither was I 😐

True. When you see fr jones selling stihl stuff with 30+% off rrp, it give the impression that every dealer is buying from stihl with a 50 or 60% discount to allow them to sell at those prices and still sell at a profit and pay for good after sales service. The fact is, they admittedly were buying in bulk from stihl to get the best price, but even so they would have been working on a profit margin of around 10% which has proved to be unsustainable. Unfortunately price seems to be the over riding buying decision for most customers, and they forget all the other parts of purchasing from a dealership needs to be paid for out of that margin such as aftersales support etc. We made a decision several years ago to focus mainly on the private consumer who appreciate a quality product, who want good service and have a realistic budget. This has worked well for us as although if asked we may well offer a small discount, but we can actually make more profit out of selling two machines to a private customer than selling a pallet to the trade at stupid prices. And a lot less hassle.

Yes, that's what I stated

No they are not the same.......although they are jointly owned and distributed now by the Yamabiko corporation. Shindaiwa pre date Echo by some years and both highly regarded Japanese manufacturers.

Really? My understanding is they only 'expect' that kind of discount, simply because of the prices FR Jones have been selling at....not every dealer is an FR Jones who give the impression dealers are making a big margin by offering such huge discounts. This has become obvious, as they are now bankrupt through selling a prices that were unsustainable.....even if that's what 'most tradespeople expect' I would be interested to hear from you exactly what percentage margin you think us dealers get from Stihl.......if unlike Jones we aren't buying machines by the pallet load to get better terms??

My advice is avoid the 'amazon' 'Alibaba' chinese tat. These things are really dangerous, and the last thing you want is hitting something solid and a chunk of it flying off and taking bits of you with it. I am biased towards Stihl, but other reputable manufacturers product the same at similar quality.........don't buy simply on price for these things. Quality can be a life saver in this instance, and they are not overly dear anyway. I have used not only Stihl, but Husky as well as SAWTEC and Oregon and all are well made

Quite obviously you can't. But my reply was in response to the comment before suggesting you should.....if you read ahead you will see.

Echo isn't the same company. There are a plethora of metal brush cutting blades available. All you need is the centre diameter (normally 25.4mm- or 1" but on early stuff particularly Huskys it can be 20mm) Then diameter, then number of teeth/blades on the edge. Then any manufacturers blade that matches that spec will fit.

Last set of accounts for them made up to and including 31st December 2021 show a LOSS of £711,214.00 for the year. Previous year was another loss of £56,039.00. You sell stuff (particularly Stihl) for little more than just above cost to under cut other long standing reputable businesses to put them out of business, then you need to sell a LOT of kit.......otherwise you will go out of business yourself. Jones were selling Stihl stuff cheaper than I could buy it from Stihl.....simply because they would buy a pallet at a time and stack them high and sell them cheap. Even though Stihl said discounts were frowned upon and to only collect in person.....assembled and demonstrated. Yet they turned a blind eye in return for volume sales. (I'm not bitter..much. However, I'm still trading.)