Chainsaws....

When I was a kid some 40 years ago my Dad had a Poulan (Sp?). What a pile-o-crap it was. Chain tossing nightmare. Would not hold the settings on the karbanator. Rope recoil would jam. He had a buddy around the corner that ran a small engine shop. Dave got tired of working on it. Dad was one of those people that no matter how crappy something was he would not just get rid of it. One day he "forgot" to put premix in it.....problem solved.
Went ice fishing on Splitrock Lake once years ago. Buddy handed me a hand powered auger. Pain in the ***. He asked if I wanted to go the next day to some where different. I borrowed a neighbors Stihl. Had a 36" or so bar on it. Joe seen me getting it out of the trunk at the lake, baffled what I was going to do with that saw. Sure glad I bought a fuel can with me. I charged $2 a hole, came home with $150....
Back to the issue. I was on the side of the road a while back trimming. Mike, our UPS guy stopped to thank me for widening the road. We got to talking about saws, he lives on 32 acres up in Colville, his folks live a few parcels away on 32 as well, so do his in laws. He had a Stihl and had a ton of problems with it. Mike ran a Carquest and a NAPA machine shop for a while and has built a few hot rods so he is like most of us, a tinkerer. He told me that he could not get Stihl parts anywhere but from a Stihl dealer, which obviously meant paying retail on parts. I have had zero troubles with our saw, other than the leak and a bonehead mistake on my part. I have only had it 3 years or so, I have ran about 7 gallons of fuel thru it though. But i would hate to buy something that I needed to go to a dealer to get stuff for it, I buy damn near everything on line if I can. Mike told me that when he had his Stihl they had a no internet sale policy....Sorry for rambling around a bit, one of "those" days...