Wild Thing
By Ryan Gossen
Product Review
Poulan Wild Thing 2375 Chainsaw, 40cc, 18”
5 / 5 stars
I need to give some context here first, so bear with me. I run a tree business and I bought this saw off a guy used to work for me, Geoffry. Well, he just left it really, I don’t think I gave him any money.
I met Jef outside Home Depot. He didn't have much going for him but he had this saw, and there’s a big difference between a man standing on the curb with’s hands in his pockets and a man who's got a saw. The saw means he’s ready to work. It’s evidence he’s done it before. Even if he stole that saw, that shows gumption in my book. Hell, it's a plan! Anyways, Jeph worked good enough and when I came back to check on the crew, I gave him a ride home and he says, can I keep my saw in your truck? Then he’d drink all night and I’d come drag his ass out of the motel or wherever if I could find him the next day.
Geoph wasn't possessive. When he wasn't there, everybody used it and it was just like a community saw. That was three, five years ago? Maybe it's still his saw. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he shows up and says I want my saw back. And that’d be fine but then he probably also wants to work and he’ll want to leave his saw in my truck again. Hey, I’m an easygoing guy. So I don’t know how old the saw is or how hard it was used before it landed in my truck. It looked beat to shit when Ghef first showed up, both him and the saw.
Style
It’s lime green, looks like a jet ski. If you're at a campout and some dude with a lifted, beat-up F250 with truck balls is out there cutting up firewood, making all kinds of noise all day and carrying on around the bonfire all night, this might be his saw. The original bar used to say “Wild Thing.” Big crazy purple and yellow letters, like graffiti-style letters, like this saw belonged to Prince or something. I love that. Wild Thing!
Power
Kind of underpowered, but enough to do the job. All you need for a good ground saw most times is an an18-inch bar and 40ccs.
Reliability
It's all plastic and it shakes around on the frame but you can’t kill it. I've tried. Most tree trimmers go through a bunch of saws, but bubba, this saw goes through tree trimmers. Most times, the climbers take the little ECHOs, just sort of hang on to them and take’m home.
Sometimes there’s a climber who really gets into the job, loves being up there above everybody. He gets addicted to the fear, and he starts looking after the equipment, loving on his saw, won’t let anyone else touch it. I got my old Stihl Farm Boss that’s just never gonna die but it’s heavy as hell. When I've got a new guy, or someone who can’t lug the Stihl around, I give him the Wild Thing. Or if I had to suddenly sell all my other saws for some reason.
I’ll be honest with you… I enjoy smoking crack from time to time, and sometimes it gets out of hand and I find myself needing cash in a hurry. No pawn store wants the Wild Thing, offered me five bucks. I almost took it but I decided if I was going to die, I wanted to die with one thing, one tool in my truck, and that was more important than getting a mocha or whatever five bucks would have got me.
Also, it’s the difference between me going and picking up a worker outside Home Depot and standing outside the Home Depot waiting to get picked up by a guy with a saw. So when I was ready to climb out of the hole, the Wild Thing was there, like a friend who never gave up on me. When times are good and I've got a bunch of crews running lots of saws, I keep it in my truck like an old dog that don’t work anymore but earned its retirement years. Probably though, it's more like a rest than a retirement.
Now when I say you can’t kill it I mean it breaks down all the damn time, just if you know the saw you can always get it running again. Then again, you know I don’t think I’ve ever tried as hard to get a saw running as I have with the Wild Thing. People talk about how animals are animals because they can gnaw off their own legs in a trap. Well, there’s nothing special about that. I believe every one of us has vast, hidden depths of resourcefulness. Being down to one broke saw and needing to make some money is like trying to light a fire rubbing sticks together. You ever try that?
Maintenance
The Wild Thing has to be broken down every day, every other day. Carburetor gets clogged or something. Oso seems to have good luck taking the filter off and cleaning it by spraying carb cleaner through it. Uses that to blow out the throttle, then he puts it back together and sharpens the chain by hand with a rat tail file with no guide on it.
I tried to get these guys a good file guide, but he likes to go by feel, moves it back and forth like a cello. Goes quick, I've watched him do it in my rearview mirror in the back of my truck. Francisco can’t sharpen for shit yet, but he’ll get there. By the end of the day, the chain is always dull and the Wild Thing is running hot and it might start to crap out, but take it apart, clean it out, sharpen it up and you're back in business.
I can’t find the funky little filter at the small engine shop, sometimes they have something at Lowe’s that will work. I think Osso used to cut a piece out of his bandana with a knife and he’d make it stick in there somehow. For a while, this saw didn’t run at all and it was just junk in the back of my truck till one day all the other saws broke down and we had to finish a job, so Carlos took it apart and turned out it had been run with no filter for a while and there was just a lot of sawdust and crap all burned up in there. He cleaned it out enough to get her running and used something for an air filter, sharpened ‘er up and we were out of there just a little after nightfall. Clients don't like it when we’re still around after five, it's noisy and disruptive to the peaceful enjoyment of their big, beautiful homes. But I find it's easiest to get paid when me and everyone is standing on the front lawn.
My Experience With The Product:
Right now it’s Francisco’s saw. No one ever told him that but you can see that’s how he sees it. It’s a good sign of how far he’s come since just a month back.
When he first came on, he was soft and sad. But not the “I miss my family and I’m gonna work real hard” kind of sad, more of a “I miss my friends and this is dumb” sad. Bored. That might be the normal resting face for a white kid, but it is not OK for a Mexican, not up here. In a Mexican, it looks like not wanting to work, or worse, looking for trouble. Oso was doing him a favor, or maybe I think Oso was doing a relative a favor by bringing him on.
So Osco tore into him. Didn't hit him or even yell at him, just walked up kind of close when he was sitting on his ass one time and said some things in a quiet voice. Things were very tense for a minute, but then Cisco busted his ass hauling brush that afternoon and every day since. For a few days, he looked like hell, but now he moves well. He’s the one who climbs into the trailer and jumps around on the branches and shoves that saw down and across so the branches lie flat and you can fit more in there. It’s tricky because you're standing on these moving things and sometimes you cut one and it snaps up into your crotch or your face. Someone’s done it a long time, it don't look hard but believe me. He gets that Wild Thing and runs through it a couple times, I get a good ton of wood out on that rental trailer. Two tons.
I got another guy, Allejandro, when he shows up… he’s an artist packing that trailer. Never once heard him say it’s full, always makes me make him stop, and I don’t stop him till the leaf springs are resting on the frame. Hook that up to my old flat-six dodge and I’m gone. Fifty bucks at the city dump or free off the side of Hwy 183.
Most guys that use it are Mexicans and by Mexicans, I mean Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Columbians, Ecuadorians. Sometimes Nicaraguans. Depends on what’s going on.
A lot of my guys all come from the same town in Jalisco. I don’t know how I wound up with guys from this particular town, but they come back to me year after year like butterflies. I guess one guy got my number and they just brought each other along. It must help a lot to have friends like that. I bet a lot of job sites here in Austin have a bunch of guys from the same town in Mexico.
These guys are not chainsaw snobs. Some guys get weird about chainsaws. I think it's something like guns and knives, some fellas are just born with the bug for those things, like a fetish. A totem?
I don’t have it, I’m more of a business guy. I like to keep my guys happy but I don’t like to spend money, so I look for saws that cut good and don’t die. I get the little ECHO 300 top handle for my climbers. It’s under three hundred bucks and easy to fix. Nobody wants any better than that except for that certain kind of white guy. He wants the Stihl MS200T princess saw. I’m not buying that.
Usually when I hire a white guy it’s some sort of cowboy, but sometimes I get a rock climber. Had a guy, first day comes to work in a rock harness and a long, stretchy rope with pink and blue stripes. He free climbs up the damn tree, hangs the rope at the top, and trims the whole thing on a rappel device. Took him all day. Carlos did four or five trees while he was up there, but I really needed a white guy on the crew. These suburban housewives want to talk to a white man, first just to know she’s understood, but to be just completely honest, brutally honest, they don’t feel safe around Mexicans. I don’t think that’s a secret. So if you got a bunch of Mexican guys, having one white guy on the crew will make just enough difference for some folks. And here’s another thing: they want to flirt with a tradesman, but they don’t want to flirt with Mexicans and I can’t be everywhere, I got to move around and run different sites and you know, get lunch and whatnot. So I like a white guy, ideally, on-site to communicate between the crew and the client. Ideally, it’s a civilized white guy and not some cedar chopper. You know what a cedar chopper is?
So this guy hung around, eventually started using the appropriate tools. Learned a little Spanish. We had steady work for a while and it mellowed him out. He’d eat half a chicken and a grilled onion with hot, green sauce from the lunch truck, put his hat over his face, and fall asleep flat on his back on someone’s lawn. Man does that, I think it means he’s come to terms with himself. Work will do that.
He never liked the Wild Thing though. He’d use it if he was all done climbing and we were bucking up brush so we could leave. You have to hit the fuel pump a certain way to prime it and then leave the choke out for two pulls if it’s cold, and then try starting it without the choke and he couldn't seem to do it without getting pissed and getting a look like he was thinking about his life choices. Most guys curse their saws in their native tongue, whatever it is. Some guys do it soft, like foreplay, whispering to it whilst tweaking the choke and the pump. Some guys make threats, some beg. Some start with shouting, others build up to shouting later.
Some guys, climbers especially, get upset if they have to waste their strength ripping on a chainsaw cord when it's going to be exhausting getting up in the damn tree. The more upset they get, the less likely they will crack the code on the saw, the harder they pull, the angrier they get and now their arm is shot. Some men will go down that road for a surprising distance. Not me, anger is not my drug of choice.
That dude was very patient with the little ECHO he had bonded with. If it was having a hard time, his first response was tender understanding. Was the filter dirty? The fuel bad? It wasn't the saw’s fault. But the Wild Thing would already be under his skin when he started pulling and he’d yank like he wanted to frighten it.
Maybe even hurt it.
Other Thoughts & Impressions:
The way I feel about the Wild Thing is… I’m not the kind of guy that loves a chainsaw, but I guess I love it, because it loved me first, as they say. It takes care of me. The guys who use it think they understand it best. Oso knows the corners where sawdust collects and burns in the engine and how to bring it back to life. Francisco knows the gyroscope feeling when it revs that pulls it a little off center. David knows what a piece of shit it is compared to the pro-level Stihls and he thinks that means something.
My connection is deeper than any of that. I just see it there in my truck and I know it sees me. I consider us common law married.
The Wild Thing is not as fun as it looks. If you want to have fun, I recommend cocaine. And it’s not the best work saw. It’s just that… I feel like if I didn't have this saw I might not be alive right now. Could be it’s inhabited by a ghost or a demon, and yours might get a different ghost. Or no ghost. Maybe that’s where I'll go when I die. Maybe it's my own ghost that’s in this one. Dang, that’s a lonely thought.
I guess you can read more reviews and see how they match up.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
