I bought my MS271 brand new about 10 years ago and have put many MANY hours on it. It has been my "go-to" saw for every day use. A few days ago I was cutting some trees for firewood and had been running the saw for about 30-45 mins. It was running normally and then just quit. No indications of anything weird before the failure. It had plenty of gas and bar oil. It just QUIT! When I went to restart it, I could not pull the cord. I removed the spark plug and still could not pull the cord. I knew it was something internal and took it back to my garage. I have attached pics of the piston and the cylinder walls. It looks like something got into the cylinder and gouged the piston and cylinder wall. The gouge was way too deep to even think about re-surfacing/honing the cylinder. It was toast. My question to all of the knowledgeable folks on here is: What could possibly cause this to happen?? My fuel filter was relatively new, I think I replaced it last summer. It looked perfectly clean when I disassembled the saw and the fuel tank was really clean. I really can't figure out what could have caused this. Have any of you had this happen?
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