Tank pressure

monkeylove

monkeylove

Been here much more than a while
Location
Roslyn, Pa.
So I never heard this or read about it but it my local Stihl / Husquvarna told me to give this a try. I have a couple saws that seem to leak bar oil when they just sit around. Not all the time but enough to be annoying. What he suggested not matter what brand or year was this...before you put them away for the day, crack open the cap for the bar oil and the gas and of course then reseal them. This will relieve any pressure (wanted or unwanted) in the tanks. Apparently some saws pressurize the bar oil tank and they will keep pushing oil until the pressure is released. I don't know thst my ramblings make any sense but it does seem to work.
 
I had a Stihl repair guy here tell me the same thing, and it does indeed work. I have one saw that was still giving me issues, so I replaced the cap and that fixed it. Couldn't see anything wrong with it from a visual inspection, but it would drip a little. I kept it for a backup, figuring a slightly leaky one was better than none in a pinch.
 
See now I assumed it was coming from the bar feed holes but maybe it is coming from the cap. It's hard to tell, all I know is I open the case the next day or or 2 later and the saw is laying in bar oil. The really cool part of the whole story is that I am an Echo saw guy and was just there to get a Porty. I asked about pee pads for oil leaks and that my Echo was leaking, he didn't even blink an eye. Just said that some saws do it more than others and passed on some great advice to me. Nice folks.

For you guys in my area they are OMB warehouse in Levittown Pa.
 
Another thing I discovered with the Stihl saws, anyway, is that when they're brand new the caps will sometimes leak a little. I just take the cap off, put it back on, run the saw until it's pretty hot... repeat a couple times and they stop leaking. I suspect that this is just a matter of heating the metal up enough to expand a little, and that Stihl used tolerances that allow for this. Both the bar oil and gas caps seem to be prone to this when they're brand new, but this tactic worked on all three of the Stihl saws I've bought in the last two years. The one it didn't work on was the older 200T.

I have an Echo TS-590 with a 20" bar that I bought last fall that is dripping a little bit of bar oil, but not fuel. I'm thinking, I've only run that saw for a couple of hours, because I've been using the Stihl MS-261C-MQ lately. I wonder if that's all it really needs, is for me to give it a good workout and try the trick of letting the pressure off. Hmmm. Glad you got me thinking about this.
 
I always thought of that movie with that old guy..."leaks fuel like a pig all over the ground; but get 'er up to 50,000 and she's bone dry"! (More or less; can't remember that old guys name...a free atta boy who names that old guy and said movie).
 
I don't know the movie you're speaking of; it might have been in "The Right Stuff", as that dealt with test pilots doing their thing, but I don't remember the scene you're speaking of.

The aircraft you describe is how I think the famous SR-71 reconnaisance aircraft behaved. I think the fuel was stored in the wings, if I'm recalling correctly, and the fuel used had a really high temperature required to ignite it. The leaking of fuel was a byproduct of the planes' design, I believe. As the plane warmed up, the gaps would close up and no more fuel would leak. So far ahead of its time as to make it almost unbelievable.

Tim
 
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