When he finally, sheepishly, after more than a year(!!) and many reminders on my part, brought it back and told me what he did, I put in fresh mix and removed the spark plug, and squirted some oil in the cylinder. It took some might to turn it over at first, but it loosened up some and I actually got it running. It smoked terribly, even long after the oil I squirted in the cylinder would have dissipated.
It never ran right at all, though. It remained very hard to pull & start. Then the rope broke and I shelved it out of disgust.
Recently, I ordered a gasket kit, discovered I could not order a piston until I found out which size wrist pin it required, and tore it down. I have been doing top ends on dirt bikes for many years. This isn't much different from the little 50cc racebikes my kids started out on. Actually easier; there are no reed valves or power valves. There is nothing in the way of obvious wear or scratches in that cylinder that you can feel or see at all. I would not hesitate to just put a fresh piston and rings in it if was a racebike.
The crank and rod, like you said, also exhibit no excessive slop or binding or signs of damage. I'm beginning to think my friend was wrong about his using the wrong gas. I think he just left it sit with gas in it for over a year and that the "hard pull" and rope breaking was just from a rotten old oil soaked rope. It is the carbs on these motors that are the most delicate and finicky parts. They absolutely cannot take having old gas and/or impurities in them for over a year. The rope and the carb
may have been the only real problem.
But as long as I have it apart, and IF I can separate the cases (it takes special pullers), I figured I may as well put the brand-new heavier duty (genuine Stihl) crank in it. If I can do that, there are numerous high quality (but non-Stihl) aftermarket big-bore cylinder & piston kits available for these legendary 044's that turn them into real monsters. Those cylinder & piston kits are only about $100. I would have a bigger & better-than-new saw for all my trouble.
I'm definitely ordering a complete carb rebuild kit for it along with a new starter rope, of course.
I know what you mean by these Stihls being hyper-sensitive to any loss of compression through cylinder wear or scoring, though. I also own the biggest piece of crap Stihl FS-85 weedeater ever made. I bought it brand new and from day-1 it has never run right or started easily. I took it back repeatedly to the dealer. he would dink with it for a couple days, then pronounce it "fixed", but it would still be a bear to start and would soon stop starting at all.
Finally, after much research online, I read where mine was not the only model 85 that year that was pure junk. Other people are having the same problem. They were getting their carb replaced under warranty and solving the problem, though. My dealer, the utter moron, when I asked him about this as the problems continued the following year, told me he had known about the recall on the new "smog carb" but he had "just drilled the main jet instead". That IDIOT!! He had been charging me for much of the work on that POS and KNEW the carb was recalled. Now, he claimed "it is too late to get you a new carb, the warranty is up".
Well that orange piece of junk has laid around being utterly useless ever since (won't even start). There is good fuel. There is a new (identical) carb; which floods the motor as badly as old one; until gas is running out the muffler after "just" 10 or 20 pulls. There is plenty of spark. There is what feels like decent compression. But not one pop. Ever. Looking into the cylinder, it appears terribly scored, so I'm sure the compression is too low. i am anal about using nothing but fresh gas and Stihl oil in my Stihls; no ethanol; and I keep the air filter clean and oiled, just like on the racebikes. I have no idea how that cylinder could look so bad.
Nothing that says "Stihl" on it and costs that much should be hard to start at all, much less refuse to. And it has been that way from the very day I took it home brand new. I have owned Stihls that you could not killl no matter what you did, but this one is pure junk. I have two friends with separate tree service businesses who have spent many thousands of dollars at that dealer over the decades. About the same time I bought that weedeater, the place was sold to the guy's son or employee or something when the owner retired. Since the management change, that idiot has ticked off, ripped off, and lost more customers than you could believe, including professional businesses like my friends' who were his biggest customers.
Regardless of it being one bad dealer, I won't buy another Stihl. Certainly nothing with any emissions crap carbs. And if I can't get this Stihl chainsaw going, I have a line on a huge old-school (no plastic) Jonserud that should have been in the chainsaw massacre movie. It makes an 044 look puny and the guy only wants $200 for it. But I like this old 044 and i know how well it always ran, so, unlike the FS-85, I believe it is worth fixing.
The FS-85 is going to get parted out on ebay. I have no idea what brand weedeater to buy now; if you can't trust a Stihl, who can you trust? My friend has the same exact model, and it runs like a striped ape, but his is older. My brother and I literally cut our way across all of Minnesota and Iowa doing every road crossing for a pipeline the summers we were in college. We trashed every weedeater they bought until they bought a couple Stihl FS-85's. Nothing we could do to them would hurt them. But years later when I spent hundreds of my own dollars for one "just like it but much newer", I got junk. Stihl must have hired daimler engineers just before I bought mine.
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