Introducing the New Chainmeister

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Many guys thought the plate should go outside the chain as a measure of safety when installing the device.

Also, when taken off, the device was two separate pieces that came apart.
We needed a redesign to make the tool a one-piece unit.

Also the TCIA feedback told me that instead of having two sizes, we needed one.
One size to fit both small and large bars and chains.

Three critical pieces of feedback from the Arborist community that spelled out one thing:
Back to the drawing board. Again.

 

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The engineer also posed the question, "Have you made arrangements with a firm who can fabricate and produce this for you?"

I went back to my welding shop with this prototype, but they could not commit to doing it as a number of the parts would need to be fabricated elsewhere.
They suggested to me a place across town that maybe could. They made a call on my behalf and I drove over immediately to present the prototype, along with the improvements needed.

The place they sent me did high-end precision work for NASA, made parts for the nuclear industry, and yada yada.
I felt so very small. I didn't think there was a chance, but I was really passionate in my presentation and by sheer luck, the president of the firm was himself a chainsaw user. He himself had a dozen dull chains hanging on his shed wall at home and could see the benefit to our industry.

He accepted the challenge and assigned me one of his production engineers.

I thought the process was expensive up til now. Ha ha ha ha. I am so green, so noobie. So clueless.
But I had this unstoppable inner drive, so I accepted.

Here is the device that I brought to them.

 

[Tree Machine]

The designs, from a pure engineering-production standpoint began coming in.
I learned what laser cutting technology looked like. Resistance welding. Robotic TIG welding. Details down to the n'th degree

 

[Tree Machine]

Here is the first prototype that came in.

This model represents over 30 engineering hours. The sprocket groove was too narrow for an .063 driver link and when the sprocket bolt was fully tightened it clamped down on the sprocket and prevented it from rotating. The threaded rod on the T-handle seemed too small a diameter.

Since we would be revising this model, I chose to alter the shape of the plate, as seen below.
At position 3, I wanted the rod to go deeper into the block to prevent the block from pivoting at that point. Basically, we were going for another complete revision.

Back to the drawing board, as they say. The drawing board was digital, and I found the process uniquely stimulating. PhotoShop became my new best friend.

I took the device back down to Florida, to my fishing guide who originally conceived the idea and we laid the device out on his table. We needed to confirm that the device would fit on all sizes of bar and chain, so we emptied his shop of all said parts and started fitting things together.

We learned this:

The wing nut interfered with the protruding stud.
And the slot was not long enough to accommodate a full adjustment extension.
Back to the drawing board. Here we were drawing on the device itself, and digitally with PhotoShop. This was sent back to the engineer for prototype revision.

 

[Tree Machine]

Then Captain Rich's 'design assistant' came in to help.

"Really?" I said.
Captain Rich was quick to suggest we don't mess with him.
"Bad Mojo if we make him mad."
Since Captain Rich had the ability to pull a Snook out of a minnow pond, I didn't question it.

A half our later the cat moved. I thought we could get back to work. Nope. Just a reposition.
The whole creation of this device had been a long string of stepwise setbacks, but this one really took the cake.
We went out back and trimmed trees.

Probably half of the engineering hours (at the new production facility) up to this point revolved around the unique wingnut.
I searched the world over for a suitable wingnut, something heavy enough to spin completely off the stud when struck with your finger. In this computer model, the 'wings' on the nut seem small, so we revised once again.

Image is shown without the sprocket.

Note here, as long as we have the sprocket off, the through-hole is D-shaped. We did this to assure the sprocket assembly would align and prevent it from possibly rotating. Laser cutting technology allows this level of precision and detail.

Seemingly a small detail, I felt it important enough to have this wingnut fabricated to spec. It took two days of design revisions to get to the point it is today, but I think you, the end user, will appreciate that the effort went into this as it truly adds to the overall performance, and it looks proportionate to the device.

The threads on the stud and wingnut are M8x1.25, the same as the side case nuts on our chainsaws.
If you were to somehow lose the wingnut, you could use a regular bar nut. But as it is deliberately designed, you need no tools to use it.

Here is the new, revised chain tensioning device, at least from a computer standpoint.

 

[Tree Machine]

Here is za shot of the former version, and the new version set next to one another

You can see a second hole to the left of the sprocket in the lower update.
This is so the sprocket assembly can be moved to accommodate 12" bars, like on power pruners.
It is unlikely anyone will ever use this feature, but I had to cover all bases if the claim was going to be made that this device can fit all sizes of bars and chains.

'All' does not necessarily include harvester bars. They are a bigger animal and I have not tried the ChainMeister on bar/chain setups larger than .063 gauge The width of the sprocket slot is .065 and it toothless, allowing any pitch to run in the sprocket groove.

I believe this device can be used on harvester bars if the sprocket were changed to allow the wider gauge driver teeth of these heftier chains.

The bar mount slot on the larger Stihl bars are easily accommodated by the stud size of the ChainMeister.
The picture below shows this well.

There is a little play, though not enough to require an adapter of any sort.
Once it is brought to tension, the performance is flawless.

 

[Tree Machine]

There seemed to be little further room for improvement at this point, making it a good time to do some thorough field-testing.

The ChainMeister was brought to the Indiana chapter ISA conference and set up at the TreeStuff booth. Let me introduce the video, what s the intended purpose and why.

We set up a trial involving 10 arborists. Random Arborists, passing by, were invited to participate in the trial and I explained it to them like this:

The objective is to remove the ChainMeister from the bar & chain, never having seen or experienced the device before.

The 'control' being, how long does it take to remove a powerhead from a bar & chain. We all kind of already know how much time that takes.

But removing a ChainMeister from a bar & chain? this is a first-time-ever for all of us, right?


For these participants, I demonstrated once how to do it. Then they got one practice try. Next try, you will start under video when I say, "Action!" Are you ready?


Of those ten trys, first time ever tries for all the participants involved, how much time did it take for them to remove a ChainMeister from a mounted bar and chain? Their result should be approximately what yours would be. I did not encourage anyone to try to be fast. I did not pitch this as any sort of speed competition. We simply wanted to come up with a baseline time for first-time users so that we could make certain statements, free of subjective opinion or guesswork.


Well, the video tells all. To track the time, I had Phil, my video guru, put a stopwatch into the right side of the frame. At their stop time, the motion stops for 1.0 second, so you can clearly see that individual's time. Then on to the next guy, and so on. At the end, the total time for all of them is displayed, then that cumulative time is divided by 10 and shown, to get an average time that we can, from here on out, refer to as fact.


The reason I am making a deal out of testing publicly and providing this baseline information is that it becomes our agreed-upon number. It is exceedingly important that this number be correct and agreed upon in the eye of both the general public, but especially amongst members of our professional community. We frown upon exaggeration or mistruth.

 

[Tree Machine]

As you can see, the design of the wingnut has quite a bit to do with the swiftness in removing the device from the bar and chain.

Avg time to remove the ChainMeister from the bar and chain, under 5 seconds. This is to be compared directly to how long it takes to remove a chainsaw powerhead from a bar and chain. You, individually can determine that.

Remember, this device is of greatest value for you guys who have multiple chains hanging on the shop wall. If you are having to remove the powerhead from the bar and chain to do a changeover, first you need a T-wrench or other tool, and then it take a certain amount of time. If you have multiple chains, the time in changeover is repetitive.

Any time we have repetitive tasks, it is best to find the swiftest route. If you subscribe to the belief that "time is money",
then time saved is money saved. I believe you should spend the time in the actual sharpening of the chain, not all the hoo-ha involved in mounting and unmounting a chainsaw powerhead just so you can make use of its chain tensioning mechanism.

We can all agree that the powerhead itself has no use in the sharpening of the chain. It simply contains the bar tensioning mechanism within it. The ChainMeister IS the tensioning mechanism, plain and simple.

Ask yourself these questions: Do you enjoy taking a sharp chain off a chainsaw, just to put a dull chain back on?
Could your chainsaw be put to a more practical use?

With this baseline measurement settled upon, let me move on to the next most obvious question?
How long to do a complete changeover?

 

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A complete changeover means this: Take the ChainMeister off, remove the sharpened chain from the bar, replace it with a chain that needs sharpening, mount the ChainMeister back on and bring the chain to tension.

We found that this will vary, depending on how the bar is mounted.

This led us to a new question: How could this process be streamlined to the least possible steps? Achieving a toolless system of minimum steps / minimum motion could essentially define a world-class system for the hand-sharpening of chains. TreeStuff.com was very into creating this new system as they are often at the forefront of new arbo-technology.

With the new ChainMeister fully developed, we dove into what the rest of the system should look like.

Check this out.

As you can see, the bar is clamped into these nifty clamping devices. You may have noticed them in former pictures.

 

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If the bar is clamped into a vise of ANY sort, once the ChainMeister is removed, the bar must then be removed from from the vise or clamp so that the chain can be taken off and replaced.

The question became, can we mount the bar ONTO a vise, not into it?

We went to work on an entirely new design and concept for doing this, one that followed the speed, efficiency and ease of the ChainMeister.

 

[Tree Machine]

Then we asked ourselves, can we design a bar clamp that would allow mounting of a bar either onto, or into the clamp, depending on what the need was? We love tools that multi-task, so with new goals in mind, a ground-up design process began to create a companion device to go along with the ChainMeister.

Here is where we started:

A rough mount was designed in old-school fashion; we sketched a design on paper.

Then we got a ruler and measured critical dimensions off of both chainsaws and ChainMeister-mounted bars and wrote those dimensions on in pen so that we could create a prototype for testing.

The thought at the time was to extend the upper anvil (top, left side) and project out a threaded stud that you could spin a conventional bar nut onto it.

Let me show you the answer to 'why' on this design element.

 

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If you were to drill two holes through a bar…..

…..then you could mount the bar directly onto the mount.

By this stage in the design process we had scrapped the idea of inserting a stud that would project out, and instead drilled a hole and tapped threads so we could use a flange bolts to mount the bar. Again, we used metric threads consistent with the chainsaws bar nuts and threads we are accustomed to. This allows the use of our familiar T-wrench.

 

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This is what we came up with. LOL !

 

[Tree Machine]

And with a bit of paint we got them looking nice.

With our continued pushing of the limits of how to make it better, we realized the flange nuts could be eliminated completely and we could use the existing threaded knobs that had been used on the other side that were doing the internal clamping. Simplified. Perfected. We had nailed it.

This is a great time to present another video.

This one shows the function of why you might want to mount the bar to the outside of the clamps.
This is simply an inclusive option, for like if you had a dozen dull chains waiting to be sharpened, you would set it up this way. The video simply shows how quickly you can take both the ChainMeister off the bar, and the chain off the bar.

Putting a chain back on, and the ChainMeister back on is identical., but done in reverse.
Knowing this, after you see the video, I will let you determine the time it would take for a complete changeover from one chain to another. I just feel if I told you "under 20 seconds" you wouldn't believe me.

 

[Tree Machine]

So were we done? The design is beautiful. It is multi-functional. Built like a shick brit house. it does everything we had asked that it would do. There was one problem, though…..

When designing, refining and prototyping you pay as you go along. Even when you are finished, the costs of coming up with a prototype are folded into the overall cost of research, design and development. Of course the prototypes are going to be more expensive. One company did the waterjet cutting, I paid retail for the small amount of metal, the knobs came from McMaster-Carr and another company did the drilling, tapping assembly and welds. It wasn't until I added the receipts that I found each clamp cost $130, not including my time off work, and gas to drive all over the city. But they were prototypes and it costs what it costs to get to this point.

The design was done and it should be a small matter to get pricing and start production. Right?

Ha ha ha ha, I am so silly to think that things are predicable in the way you want them to be.
Silly, silly man.

 

[Tree Machine]

Back to the waterjet cutter for the question, how much for the steel and cutting of 100, 500 or 1,000 units.
Then to the drilling / tapping / welding guys with the same question.
Then to a powdercoat finisher since we don't want to spray paint.
Then the knobs. I can't see buying 100, 500 or 1,000 of them from Lowe's
At this point we had to find a knob company to have the knobs designed and made to spec.

 

[Tree Machine]

When I got all the numbers together, I went numb. I was completely crushed.
The cost per unit was staggering. Having four different companies involved on one product, each with their own timelines, even without the money costs, just the sheer amount of time and logistics of communication with companies and transporting product between them buckled my knees.

You've heard me say it before. Back to the drawing board.

 

[Tree Machine]

I called the engineer who had helped me move from the spring-loaded, tube model chain tensioner into the one that could be reasonably produced, from a manufacturing standpoint.

This brilliant man had spent his entire career in design and manufacturing, and I was at his mercy.

"What do you need the device to do?"

"I need it to do exactly what this blue model does, nothing more, nothing less."

He says, "Jim, I look at this and I see too much material, too much weight, and too fancy a design."

"But treeguys like things hefty and well-built and durable."

"Yes, but do they like them expensive?"

That was the big question with the obvious answer. No.

"Jim, I can see you are attached to this design, but there is no possible way anyone is going to pay $70 for one of these."

"I am certain of that. That is why I'm here begging your expertise."

We hand-sketched a new design, based on the critical measurements of a chainsaw bar and how high the bar needed to be off the bench and the clearance needed so that the chain would not hit the clamp when in use. Then he explained why a certain shape was needed to eliminate excess waste. Then he insisted we eliminate any unnecessary steps from the production flow.

 

[Tree Machine]

Here is what we came up with:

Which, after a period of time, a new prototype was created:

 

[Tree Machine]

And here it is alongside big, expensive brother vise.

Note that the far side anvil is not drilled and tapped.
In simplifying the design we made it symmetrical, and both top anvils extend outside the dimension of the upright. More on this in a moment.