Homelite 3514c

Before opening up the chainsaw entirely, I thought it would be a good idea to look into the internals to see the general conditions of the components. I utilized the sparkplug hole and the exhaust port in order to have a look at the interior of this chainsaw. After removing the sparkplug and the exhaust muffler, I had a closer look at the interior of the motor to see what condition it is in. 

Pictures were taken with my iPhone X that I zoomed in to get these borescope like pictures. (I am working with a limited set of tools so I don't really have a borescope yet or any fancy tools, but I make do with what I have)

As you can see, the cylinder walls and combustion look in decent shape; However, the piston skirt looks scorched and damaged. Now would be a good time to note that a two-stroke engine like this can still function like this as long as the piston rings are sealing good.

I also had a look at the carburetor which I ended up taking apart to make sure none of the passaged are blocked. I removed the Low and High adjusting screws, sprayed WD-40, and checked in the venturi area of the carburetor to make sure that the pressurized fluid is able to spray out of the main jets and the idle jets. Carb cleaner would have probably been better but I didn't have that laying around. I forgot to take pictures of the interior of the carburetor but I find this Video to be quite helpful in understanding the internal mechanics of these carbs.

After testing the passages and jets with some WD-40, I emptied the gas tank and decided that now would be a good time to open up the engine.

This was quite a tricky endeavor as I had to remove items in a certain order. The order of removal I went through was sparkplug, carburetor, exhaust muffler, recoil starter cover, flywheel, spark distributor, centrifugal clutch, engine mounts, fuel tank, and then the engine block. 

Taking apart the 4 screws on the bottom of the engine block I was able to remove the crankshaft bearing along with the piston and rods. I laid everything out on the tarp in order to look at each individual part, its condition, and to clean them.

After that, I cleaned everything out, reseated the piston rings properly (Before they were seating over the gap pin which is why I think some gas was able to pass though and may have aided in some loss in compression), and I applied a layer of RTV on the bottom cover as the old gasket was very thin. Next, I washed the inside of the engine block to remove the gunk near the sparkplug hole and took a clean rag to dry the cylinder walls and ports out. 

Removing the piston rings was pretty easy, all I had to do was take a small flathead screwdriver and gently push out both edges. To clean out the piston ring area, I took some WD-40 and used a small pin to scratch out the gunk jammed inside preventing the piston rings to move. The last step was to reinstall the piston rings which involved pushing the two flat edges and sliding it onto its correct position between the pin.

Before reinstalling all of the components, I made sure to lightly oil the cylinder walls, piston rings and crankshaft bearings with some 10W40 I had laying around. The next step was to mount everything back to the way it was. I made note of the sparkplug wire polarity and after everything was assembled, I tuned the carburetor using the High and Low adjustments screws as well as the idle adjustment screw. Below is a video of the Chainsaw running. (Note it does smoke a bit due to the chainsaw burning off the oil I used to initially lubricate the cylinder walls and piston rings).