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Don"t know who makes the chainsaws now but I believe it was Olympic just a few years ago. As far as Homelite goes... Homelite was a part of John Deere Consumer Products until just after the Y2K fiasco. The Consumer Products division HQ was in Charlotte,NC and had plants in Gastonia North Carolina , Greer,Clover and Columbia South Carolina. Gastonia made leaf blowers ( anyone remember the Yardvark ? ). Clover was an assembly plant for Generators and string trimmers.Greer made String Trimmers and Demolition Saws ( MP38 and MP88 ) as well as Generator parts. The machine shop I work for made parts for the generators and demolition saws.I quoted the machining to Deere and took care of ordering the castings and components as well as handling any problems.Deere was my little baby. We made demolition saws in at least 4 colors that I can remember. Homelite Red, Atlas Copco Yellow , John Deere Yellow and White. Someone at Deere got greedy in 1999 and ordered lots of generator parts from us and from engine suppliers.We made enough parts for over 250,000 generators that year.They did not use nearly that many.They even wound up with over 5 million dollars worth of Robin engines they did not need. That was the death of JD Consumer Products. They sold the division to the parent company of Ryobi and shut down the plants I mentioned except for Columbia I think. I would guess that around 1500-2000 people lost their jobs at these plants. I knew some of them very well and really hate that they have to suffer for some fat cats greed. Incidentally, there was a difference between Homelite and John Deere products even though they may have looked the same exept for collor.One of the engineers told me that the Deere products were designed to run a lot longer than the Homelite and had better bearings and so on. I can tell you that the machining was the same though. Sorry for the rant. Ford Man
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