MCW
Somebody's talking crap here & it ain't the tree!
Nah Wes is a good bloke mate and not a troll. I just wish he'd posted a more convincing full chisel video
I think your original claim was that full chisel isn't significantly faster than semi chisel which it isn't. Of course you can do a lot of things to chain, particularly full chisel to make it faster but then of course you are approaching a race chain mentality and many of those chain mods aren't practical.
That's why I'd rather see out of the box, new chain compared but realise not everybody can do that. I was a shocker for just going down the shed and cracking out a few new loops just to run some comparo videos for AS. I realised after a while that I had dozens of semi worn full chisel in 3/8" .050" 84DL that I simply wasn't using. I even gave some of these away to people I knew or cracked them into smaller loops for people and for my own use on other bar lengths and saws.
It's not just an Aussie hardwood thing either. I quite happily and successfully used full chisel in Tasmania on our green, clean hardwoods and it worked very well. Use the same chains in my area, even on the same species, and they are quite often a waste of time (although fun for a short while as mentioned in some situations).
I know when I joined AS a few years ago I had a number of north american members arguing with me that the dust they were seeing in my videos was from a blunt chain and that to truly cut I needed to learn how to square file. Other comments were that I needed to lower my rakers etc etc. They completely forgot to read the video description that stated they were brand new, out of the box chains. These were the same peanuts saying that grinders kill chains etc and that Stihls are the only reliable saws on the planet (OK, I made that last one up
). Us Aussies have also had our fair share of arguments in regard to dust getting through filters. Many NA members here have stated it can't happen. I'd like to think that myself and the other Aussie members here have semi educated some of our northern hemisphere friends with our different cutting conditions.When you start running saws in certain conditions for hours on end it pays to try a number of chains to find out what suits your conditions. Too many people here listen to a lot of hype without trying a few different chain types themselves. I've even sent a fair few loops of semi chisel (and even chipper) to fellow US AS members for free just so they can try it. Unfortunately the swag of chain I sent to Wes via Sea Mail went bloody walkies and hasn't been seen since (you get what you pay for I suppose
) I mean if you are cutting nothing but clean softwoods then it goes without saying that full chisel will be the chain of choice. My most commonly used bar length has been 24" and 32". The 32" chains are all semi chisel now and I have offloaded the full chisel and full chisel skip loops I had. My 24" box of chains are about a 60% semi chisel and 40% full chisel mix. I like using full chisel as that extra 10% odd in speed is fun, but by the end of the day the extra sharpening isn't and counter productive in my situation.
As far as our harder timbers damaging chains it pays to remember the forces involved. You can tap a razor sharp chisel into wood all day but start hammering it and it loses it's edge quick smart. The mentality of "razor sharp full chisel" is BS. It stays "razor sharp" for about 2 seconds in the cut and then returns to just "sharp". The super hard box I mentioned above wasn't so much "cut" through as "worn" through. 90% of that tree is still laying there on the Murray River floodplains near Dareton, NSW. It will still be there in 20,000 years I reckon...
The fact is that full chisel in the felling situation that I undertook with the Casuarinas was slower by the end of the day. It's not as simple as a 2 minute touch up, but a 5 minute round trip walk back to the vehicle.
