Good Lord LostWater!
Please tell me that the butts of those cigarettes that you are killing yourself with do not end up on the forest floor when you are done.
I`m not a big fan of cigarettes either but it seems to me that if a guy threw as many as 20 thoroughly extinguished butts on the ground during a day in the woods, 99.99% of them would never again see the light of day. That statement is almost on par with the greenies demanding that bar oil be biodegradable. Your hyper-eco sensitivity wouldn`t have anything to do with Brian basically saying that you must not know how to file or keep your chain out of the dirt would it? Maybe his delivery wasn`t what you like, but I believe that his message was well intentioned. I`ve got grinders out the wazoo but I prefer a hand filed chain, which you can get much sharper than a ground chain with less total down time once you figure it out. I keep the grinders, all set up in different ways, for the "rock mechanics" or myself with the trail saw. If you really like the grinder that`s fine too, just say you like grinders. Rationalizing it by saying that "time is money" and "I guess I saw a whole hell of a lot of hard stuff" don`t make valid arguments for one way over another. It`s not the hard stuff that is giving you grief, it`s the abrasive stuff. Figure out ways to not cut through mud encrusted wood, bark mostly, and even a fraction of a second of chain contact with the ground is too much. I think Tony was alluding to the fact that many people never figure out proper sharpening but it isn`t brain surgery. It just takes a desire to understand what you need to accomplish with the tooth, and then patient practice. If time is money, then so is all the chain you burn off every time you grind, and all the down time removing and replacing chains. I don`t mean to offend you Mark, just want you to realize that there is possibly another good way of doing things.
django, 2-3 minutes for a 24" chain isn`t too unusual in my opinion. Of course it will take longer if you don`t or havent done the same volume of chains, but I think the trick to quickness is the same trick that helps you keep uniformity in the teeth. File often enough that you don`t need any more than 2 or 3 licks with the file. When you need to hog off a bunch of material is where I think you can get into trouble. I know that common convention states that you must find the shortest tooth and make all the others equal to it, but for practical purposes, I disagree. Of course I try to be as uniform as possible, by taking the same number of strokes with the same pressure, from each tooth, but if I have a short tooth, unless it has a big ole burr on it, I disregard it. Eventually all the others will be as short. Using the same # of strokes per tooth will give you reasonably close, actually very close, tooth lengths on a side. The biggest problem most people have is getting different angles on the right side vs the left, that`s just something you have to be aware of and continuously monitor and compensate for until it becomes second nature to do both sides the same. If you are determined to learn freehand filing, it doesn`t take more than a few hours of actual practice. Believe me, I`ve tried every gadget and technique under the sun looking for a better mousetrap and I finally settled on freehand. You will find in time that visibly unequal cutters from side to side can cut well if you have the depth gauges set right. Cutting wood fiber is not as much a science as machining metals and other materials can be, and of course the grain structure and alignment in wood is nowhere near as uniform or predictable as a chunk of metal, which I think negates the need for extreme precission in chainsaw chain unless you are racing. Just my take on things, Russ
