New Products: Snarls in Suburbia

Among the more familiar sounds of summer in the suburbs, the throaty roar of the power lawn mower has long had no rival. But now there is a new and equally assertive voice racketing across the backyard fence. It is the ear-assaulting snarl of the gasoline-powered chain saw.

Until recently, portable chain saws were mainly a logger's or tree surgeon's tool, too heavy (as much as 50 lbs.) and expensive (up to $400) for casual, do-it-yourself yard work. Less than ten years ago, the industry estimates, virtually all 2,250,000 chain saws then in use in the U.S. were in the hands of professional tree men. Today, there are close to 5,000,000 saws in use, and half of them are owned by amateurs working at home.

The breakthrough came in 1960, when McCulloch Corp. turned out a 16-lb. saw, easily handled by any adult. By 1963, the Homelite division of Textron Inc. was able to produce a 12-lb. saw with a simplified magnesium casing that sold for $180. Both saws found a ready market in suburbia, where there is always brush to be cleared, storm debris to be removed and firewood to be cut—and where yardmen to do the work are a vanishing breed. McCulloch, Homelite and others have followed with a whole line of lightweights.

This week, McCulloch Corp. will start selling its Power-Mac 6. It weighs just 6½ lbs., will cut through an 8-in. log in six seconds and costs only $169.95. Even a woman can wield it; witness Maureen Reagan, 27, daughter of the California Governor, who took time out from her budding singing career to try out the Power-Mac 6 at her family's Malibu Hills ranch. If she can do it, so can women everywhere, thus freeing dad to concentrate on cutting down his handicap, not his underbrush.