<div class="bbWrapper">This is a "religious debate" topic... You will get a lot of loud and voiciferous opinionating, with not a lot of hard evidence to back it up, though you will get a lot of antecdotes on either side... Essentially it is a question of whether the person is a member of the "Church of Mosquito Foggers" or the "Church of Follow Manufacturer Instructions" %-P There are other churches as well, but most are offshoot sects of these two.<br />
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My personal religious doctrine statement...<br />
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Article of Faith #1. Modern oils are good enough that 50:1 is quite sufficient to provide adequate lubrication, even on older engines that call for higher ratios, IF one uses the proper alphabet soup grade of oil - (I forget the exact spec offhand) <br />
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Article of Faith #2. Oils that are sold under the various reputable saw maker labels (i.e. Stihl, Husky, Dolmar, Echo, but not Pull-on or Homelite) meet the above specs and are acceptable - possibly ditto for some of the dino-drippings refiners, but check the label. Synthetics are preferable, but Dino is OK. Of the brands I've got available to me at the local hardware store, I like Echo oil, but I'm not fanatical about it, however I won't purchase the Store brand oil.<br />
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Article of Faith #3. Some saw makers (Dolmar told me, and we had a previous post saying Stihl also does so) will tell you to use their house brand oil at 50:1 and all other oils at 25:1 - There are two reasons for this - #1 is to try and get you to buy their oil... #2 is that if you aren't burning their stuff, they don't know what you are using, and want to make sure that if you are using some sort of cheap crap that you will still have enough lube not to burn up the saw... If one sticks with the oils suggested by Article of Faith #2, then you are using good quality of oil, and can ignore the 25:1 suggestion, and run 50:1 per the dictates of Article of Faith #1...<br />
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Being as how I believe in freedom of religion, you are perfectly free to practice whatever beliefs you wish, but these are mine for whatever that is worth...<br />
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Gooserider</div>