Local dealer by me has about a 4 year old brand new never sold 12" unit. Only thing going for it is it has a awesome engine but that's it. Turbo charged Kubota diesel. Everything else is shit. The feed bar is ridiculously touchey and they tried to add a safety feature where if you pull to far back it reverses the feed wheels. It had four positions with about a two inch throw total. You couldn't work the bar with one hand, had to use both hands and stabilize with your thumbs to get the wheels to feed forward. Feed wheels were slow as hell too, it had a cheap shitty valve to slow them even more. Then there wasn't a clutch either. Just some super cheap spring tensioner on the belt.
I was considering purchasing it when they told me it would come with a three year warranty. Plus it was cheap. I asked for the warranty info so I could read over the fine print. It covered basically the frame and that was it. It said bearings were a wear item and no bearing failures would be covered by warranty. I brought it up to the dealer and he had the factory rep call me. When I asked what if undersized bearings were speced and failure was an engineering fault he told me, "oh well not covered." Then he mentioned there was no engine warranty because it was out of the manufactures warranty. Then also said it was only a one year warranty. I mentioned how it didn't really matter how long it was since they weren't covering anything, his response was "we cover manufacturing defects but nothing else."
I really like my little 355T but the whole ordeal really rubbed me the wrong way on Echo products. Prob won't be buying any for a lil while.
