Because I cut mainly hard wood I touch up the chain on the mill after about every 32 sq ft of cutting. A few people have asked me seeing as I run full comp chain whether I swap out chains or touch up on the mill.
Here is a short movie showing how I touch up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qE0iN_P-6E
That's 15 cutters touched up in 54 seconds or 3.6 seconds per cutter.
For the 60" chain with 95 cutters thats about six minutes of filing, plus a few seconds to tap out the filings every 20 cutters or so, and time to scratch myself and walk around to the other side of the mill, so make it ~7 min all up. Sometimes I go for 3 strokes instead of 2 but it only adds another 1.5 minutes to the process.
With the 42" bar it's ~4 minutes of filing plus scratch time, ie about 5 minutes.
Given it takes me 5 minutes to swap chains and then I still have to sharpen you can begin to see where I'm coming from.
I usually take the chains off to do a raker reset or to get all the cutters back to the same lengths.
Here is a short movie showing how I touch up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qE0iN_P-6E
That's 15 cutters touched up in 54 seconds or 3.6 seconds per cutter.
For the 60" chain with 95 cutters thats about six minutes of filing, plus a few seconds to tap out the filings every 20 cutters or so, and time to scratch myself and walk around to the other side of the mill, so make it ~7 min all up. Sometimes I go for 3 strokes instead of 2 but it only adds another 1.5 minutes to the process.
With the 42" bar it's ~4 minutes of filing plus scratch time, ie about 5 minutes.
Given it takes me 5 minutes to swap chains and then I still have to sharpen you can begin to see where I'm coming from.
I usually take the chains off to do a raker reset or to get all the cutters back to the same lengths.
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