The New Hotness

We acquired a McCulloch chainsaw from a friend in “Used to worked fine” condition. I hate small internal combustion engines, two-strokers in particular, but sometimes ya can’t look a gift horse in the orifice.

Anyhow, the only real repair needed was a new bolt for the anti-kickback clutch handle. For unknown reasons, McCulloch uses a non-standard head that, fortunately, can be carved out of a stock bolt.

I got the two parallel sides a bit closer together than was required; if I were to do it again I would squish some modeling clay into the recess, make some measurements, and get it right the first time. I’m certain the original was much fancier, but this will suffice.

Trim the bolt to fit and a nylock nut on the outside should hold it in place forever more.

The repair was prompted by a late winter storm that dropped a huge branch from our neighbor’s tree next to the house. We’d splurged on underground utilities when we upgraded the service entry to 200 A and this is exactly why…

[Update: A great and completely off-topic discussion about schematic & PCB programs showed up in the comments. I’ve extracted those into a separate post so folks can actually find the discussion with a sane set of search keywords…]