Thread: Cheap cordless chainsaw at masters

Originally Posted by rtyuiop

Only issue might be warranty coverage once masters shuts down (assuming they do), but at the price hopefully it's worth the gamble!

Danny

Not really a problem as from the same page:

Public Announcement from Woolworths

Woolworths Limited has announced that it intends to exit its home improvement businesses, including our 63 Masters Home Improvement stores, and our Home Timber & Hardware business.

This process will take several months and the business will continue to trade normally through this period. Woolworths will honour all gift cards, product warranties, returns, and lay-bys and the completion of any contracted home improvement projects such as kitchens, bathrooms and floor coverings.

Peter.

Well, that makes me a fair bit less nervous about it! Thanks, Peter.

Now the main risk is just that it might turn out to be a really bad saw!

I would not call $224 cheap. Looks like a good saw. Kobalt 80-Volt 18-inch Cordless Chainsaw - Review | Tool Snob - ToolSnob.com

I bought a Ryobi 10 inch 18 volt saw to have in the car when I saw something along the road that was too long. It was around $100 US. I have two 18 volt Ryobi drills so the batteries will interchange.

I found that it would use one battery to cut an 8 inch log. There was a two for one price on big batteries, so I bought.

You may want to take your new saw home, charge the battery, and if you are happy with it buy one or two of the biggest amp hour batteries they have.

Got mine this morning, plus with ABN, another 5% off

With the 80V 2Ah it battery lasts more than one cut like the little 18V other stuff. It has oregon 18" bar and 3/8" chain plus charger is a 30min fast charge. Has 5 year warrantee on saw and 3 year warrantee on battery/charger although for another ~$40 you can increase those to 7/5 years which is amazing if stood by.

All works a treat so far, oiler works well and runs nice and quietly . In the car ready to do that odd little trim as I'm driving along

Ripper Neil, glad to hear it doesn't have anything obviously wrong with it so far. Did it come with chain oil in the box? Headed off to Masters today to pick mine up.

Paul, I should clarify and say it's cheap by Australian standards... We get ripped off a bit in comparison to the US - for comparison, the normal price on the battery by itself is more than the saw + battery + charger on this deal!

The Lowe's US Website has the retail price for that saw at US$299, so AUS$224 or US$161 is almost half the US price

see Shop Kobalt 80-Volt Lithium Ion (Li-ion) 18-in Cordless Electric Chainsaw at Lowes.com

A few comaprisons
80v x 2 Ahr = 160 Whr
The Stihl AR 300 36V power tool battery is 227 Whr , albeit the price of the Stihl battery and charger costs more than twice the total cost of Kobalt CS and battery.
The Stihl AR 300 claims a run time of 35 minutes, whereas my experience with it is about half that.

The 18" bar is somewhat optimistic.
An 18" cut usually requires about 2kW of power.
( 80V x 2Ahr)/2kW = 4.8 minutes of cutting at that size.
A more reasonable bar size would be 12", might get 10 minutes of cutting with it?

My experience with these is the chain needs to be kept razor sharp. I would recommend a touch up with every battery charge in hardwoods and every second charge in softwoods.

Just unpacked mine... To answer my own question - no, no chain oil included, so grab some if, like me, you don't own another chainsaw.

The charger has a fan that is pretty noisy (needed to charge as fast as it does I guess) - I'm hoping it's smart enough to quiet down once the battery is near capacity.

Yeh I am interested in how it will perform. I'm certainly not expecting miracles and it performs like my 211 but I was hoping it could handle the 150mm burled Acacias and the 300mm Pennyleaf I have GPS marked for later collection .

Saw a burled Acacia today near Bowen that would have been a good test, but could only GPS it as I don't want any more timber heading up to Darwin, more for on the way back. I'm heading up to Jim's and Cliff's places near Cairns next week and will try it then.

Let me know how yours goes rtyuiop

I arrived at Powderpost's place (Jim) today and both of us were interested in the performance of the saw. So Jim suggested we trim some low branches on some of his mango trees. Well we started with one ~2-4" chopping it off and breaking it down into smaller pieces. Went well but battery still on 3 bars (full charge). Started on another branch, same thing, went but well still on 3 bars. Kept going and ended up doing the whole orchard's low branches, on ~25 branches, battery down to 2 bars .

mango orchard.jpg


So we picked on a dead Lychee tree, good and reasonably hard timber with 2-6" branches and trunk of up to 300mm. Dropped all the branches and finally down to 1 bar .

lychee1.jpg lychee2.jpg lychee3.jpg

I then kept cutting the branches on the ground down smaller until the battery ran out (actually on the last cut).

finished lychee.jpg


Overall ~0.5 hours of run time, chain starting to show signs of wear but not completely blunt, and used 2/3 x the oil in chainsaw .

Verdict - very happy. Worked well on the smaller branches and certainly worked harder on the 300mm trunk but quite acceptable considering the chain was worn. Not as good as my Stihl 211 but I didn't expect it too either . My gut feel was that I would have used a full tank of fuel in the 211 to do the same job.

Wasn't as quiet as I was hoping, it could easily be heard and recognised as a chainsaw from inside the house, so not sure about those silent prunings in the middle of the night . But as a general purpose convenient saw with no after 2 stroke stink for the odd trim or three it was very successful and I give it a big thumbs up .

Thanks for the review of the saw.

What made it noisy? The work of the chain?

Thanks Neil! Mine is still in the box, I was too lazy on the weekend to try it out.

Originally Posted by wodjie

What made it noisy? The work of the chain?

The chain on the sprocket and the gears in the drive. The gears in a hand drill also make a noise that will travel some distance.

But, a hand bow saw is as quiet as your puffing and grunting... : ~]

Keep in mind that electric (cord or cordless) chainsaws are potentially more dangerous than fuel models. Protective chaps will (usually) stall a fuel saw, but are not as effective against the momentum of an armature driven saw.