A review of electric chainsaws

I’d say if you’re getting an all new setup, go for the 80v. I did buy both a new Gen 60v and an older Gen 80v. I gave the 80v 18" to my dad and he really likes it.

I kept the 60v because my mother owns a lot of other 60v tools so I have beaucoup batteries. My other reason for keeping the 60v was it had a longer bar and I wasn’t interested in trying to find out which aftermarket bar fit the 80v.

I should note that 90% of what my 60v saw does is buck down logs and branches.

8 Likes

Did a cleaning on my 60v saw, here’s what I really like about the Greenworks. I’m sure a lot of other battery saws do this, I hope they do at least.

  • Side cover uses captive nuts, so that’s a big bonus for me. - You can tension the chain through the cover with a Flathead.
  • The bar oiler Port stays clean
  • Internals are easy to clean

Here’s a pic before cleaning.

9 Likes

Here is a video to take a look at:

I did not realize the counterfeit’s were being marketed so closely labeled confusing.
Watch the whole video to see a bit which tools usages you’d really want to keep corded powered.
Watch to 19:00 minutes to see the burn down shorted not-safe cell batteries.
S.U.

10 Likes

There used to be more mistakes, in packaging and grammar. The counterfeits actually performed pretty well tbh.
Fake USB flash drives and sd cards got so bad, I won’t order those online.

I actually wonder what happens if you put the right batteries in them, if they perform as well, and dont have the automatic disable after self-discharge like you ran into with the genuine ones.

More surprising was the short test and the fake ones had a blowable fuse, and the genuine didn’t, and relied on the batteries themselves to short. Samsung batteries have a blowable fuse built in to protect against internal shorts that cause fires similar to the one at 19:00.

3 Likes

Brian and i have a lot of Makita tools chainsaws , grease guns , drills and impacts ect , over here we are lot lucky to have the great prices that guy mentioned for genuine batteries , here a 6amp Makita is around $180 AU do a conversion and works out at around $120 for a single battery , we have been buying the rip off 9ah batteries now for 5 years with pretty good results as long as you don’t take them down to where they cut out , they seem to last a good long time , we have had 3 that once run down over and over have gone into fault mode , so now we only use down too 1 bar at $99 for two 9ah were ok with that .
Dave

9 Likes

Google around. There MIGHT be a way to bring them out of fault mode. IIRC you charge the batteries with a pwm charging supply -slowly- without the control board until they are above what the minimum voltage is supposed to be.

When I was looking at the teardown of the greenworks knockoffs besides the battery quality, the biggest difference was they didn’t solder all the temperature and fault detection wires to the board, which is like 2x as much work, but the boards looked close to identical and the spots were on the board for the extra wiring.

Missing ground wires and such were the difference in the soldering iron I got as well.

3 Likes

I had an cheap Skil (19€) that hold up 14 years before the magic smoke leaked out, now they don’t make that model.

hi Göran

old Skil angle grinders had Bosch internals, they were good tools.
i had both Bosch and Skil, scavenged parts from one to fix other.

but not anymore.
newer Skils both 230mm and 125mm were typical chinesium crap.

now i have migrated to Makita, they are pretty cheap, considering their quality.
one thing i love in Makita 125mm grinder is the size of the reductor - it is really small.
that’s good for reaching difficult places.

first thing to fail in Makita is the rotor(armature), but replacement costs around 25 euros - not so bad.

9 Likes