Monday, March 9, 2009

Chainsaw Woes

When we moved into our wilderness hide-away, hubby's mom bought us a
chainsaw from Sears. It's a craftsman of course. And hubby used it to
cut 2 small logs to use as a table when he changes the oil in the
generator and then cut down another smallish tree (see that epic in our
picasa pictures under the album titled "chainsaw massacre".). He then
went out a few days later and tried to cut down another smallish tree.
About 6 - 8 inches across so yeah, it was small. anyway, he got it cut
down and was getting ready to slice it up (a friend had commissioned us
to make small disks from a tree so she could use them in her resteraunt
as table decorations) and the chainsaw seized up! so for a total use of
less than 10 minutes total time, the chainsaw couldn't handle it.

So we went to sears, and because it was longer than 90 days from when we
bought it (30 days was up February 8, 2009 and we took it in on March 5,
2009) they had to put it in for repair and couldn't just exchange it.
We left it in their hands and they were going to send it out to their
small engine repair shop.

I get a call a little while later, and they can't find the phone number
in their system that we gave them that we bought the chain saw under.
So I gave them both my old cell # and hubby's old cell #. These were
the #'s we had when we first moved down here. I got a call later that
night that they still couldn't find it. So I went looking for the
receipt. lol. So much for the store keeping records right? Anyway, I
found the receipt and called them back. They then found the records and
it was under my old cell #. Leaving me to question if they really had
looked at these numbers I gave them on the phone or if they were just
lazy and decided to not do anything about it.

A week later, on the 13th, I called since I hadn't heard anything from
them. The deal is, if it's fixable, then they fix it. If it's not
fixable then they replace it. Since we have work that is waiting on the
chainsaw, we kind of need it back.

The person I spoke with at Sears, couldn't give me any information other
than the name of the place that is doing the work. miller's Appliance.
Apparently, Sears outsources it's small engine repair. They were also
able to give me their phone number. YAY! I may get someplace with that.

I proceeded to call miller's Appliance, and see what they knew. I
didn't find out what was broken on the chainsaw, but they had to order
parts from sears. They had been shpped on 3/12/09. And she said that
it could take up to a week and a half (we are in Oregon, they are in
Alabama) for the parts to get here and then another week after that for
us to even get our chainsaw back. Crud.

Ok. I just wanted to say, if you buy a chainsaw, then buy it local and
don't go with sears or any of these other big stores. Sitting around,
on your butt while you wait for someone to pull their head out of their
own rump to get your chainsaw fixed is a real pain. A whole MONTH will
have been taken out of our working on the property while we wait for
this thing to come back to us. If we had bought locally, from some
small mom and pop store, then we probably wouldn't have had to wait this
long to get it back.

I am off today to see if any of our neighbors would be willing to cut
down some trees for us this next week, in exchange for some of the wood.
Blah. We need these trees down so we can use them for building
materials for the garden beds and a few storage sheds / animal barns.