@drf256 Like the good discussion about the piston Dr. Al. Yes all those few thousandths of an inch can add up. Lots of little lessons in here for other folks as well. The "out of spec" piston deal was one of my ways to decrease squish band clearance before I had a lathe. Besides the lesson of use the piston you are going to build the saw with when you are mocking things up. I've just waited a week for a new piston to show for my own saw that I plan to do a revisit on as it was one of the first I messed with, and I've learned so much since then hanging out with all of you guys here. Gaskets are much the same way some as much as .010" different from original, most around .003" difference. So I liked to order as many different base gaskets as I can get my hands on to help fine tune things. Now with the lathe I pick one and stay with it. Then there's the solder trick, several different sizes of solder are necessary to have on hand as just like you said one is needed to be close to the actual squish target number. I like to roll back and forth ten or more times until the resistance is felt to go away. Also it would be hard to say one would be a hack, had it been chosen to face the piston .010" in a lathe. Two ways of looking at that, a tad lighter piston will spool up faster. A tad thicker piston will run cooler. So usage comes into play here for us to make good decisions, as every action taken has an opposite and equal reaction.
Just chuckling to myself thinking how much nicer it is around here being able to talk about ideas back and forth freely again without JMS dominating the convo with he's right and you're not line of BS. Also for the readership don't think for even one second any of what i said here is to take one inkling away from the mighty damn fine job Dr. Al has done here on this power saw. I can't see one detail missed, the attention to detail is quite refreshing. Kudos all around for giving us all good examples to go by.
