Thanks for the feedback all... Even if I did put the ring in correctly (which I still believe) I'm certainly guilty of buying a cheap lightweight piston that I took even more meat off of looking for more performance. I'm still a rookie at this and learning from the generous folks on the blogs about saws. I sometimes have to learn things the hard way too... Like I said above though, I'll still probably hit many parts with the spinny thing...
I did work on a saw a couple years ago that had been running just fine. The owner wanted a muffler mod and I took the jug off to do a quick exhaust port clean up and widen. The ring fell out in two pieces when I pulled the cylinder. The crack was luckily not near a port. I would have thought it would have been not running, but I even made a couple test cuts with it myself before taking it apart. That was a lucky one!
I'm OK... I'm just trying to be honest and open as I can be about both the good and the bad while adding a little of my brand of humor to it. I figure if I'm learning something I might as well share the info. The good side of this was that this saw has run great and gave me 2 years of fun firewood cutting. The downside is that maybe the cheapest, lightest piston might be OK in the short term. But if you don't like to open up saws and work on them, stick to higher quality stuff. I had less than 300 bucks in this saw and had fun building it, learned a lot building it, and had fun using it. If the bottom end flushes out OK, I think I can get by with a meteor / caber combo for under $45. Yes, I'm still a tightwad...
