I just finished truing up a 20" sthil ES bar. I used our machine shops vertical belt sander to get the rails flat and square ( it was real out of true) then took off the sharpness on the edges with a file and smoothed the rail surface by lightly draw filing.
My questions are:
1) How do you deal with wear on the tip? I know this is not as critical of an area as the flat of the bar for performance. The best solution I could come up with was to hold the bar in a vise, then with a small file that would fit between the teeth on the tip, draw file around the tip keeping the file between the teeth as they turned. Does anybody bother to do this or have a better method?
P.S. I know ES bars have a replaceable tip but the bearings/sprocket are fine
2) I checked the groove width/wear with a couple of feeler gauges stacked together. I think this bar was O.K. as I was getting 0.053" (3/8 0.050 bar) for most of the length. At what point do you have too much clearance and need to tighten things up by closing the rails?
My questions are:
1) How do you deal with wear on the tip? I know this is not as critical of an area as the flat of the bar for performance. The best solution I could come up with was to hold the bar in a vise, then with a small file that would fit between the teeth on the tip, draw file around the tip keeping the file between the teeth as they turned. Does anybody bother to do this or have a better method?
P.S. I know ES bars have a replaceable tip but the bearings/sprocket are fine
2) I checked the groove width/wear with a couple of feeler gauges stacked together. I think this bar was O.K. as I was getting 0.053" (3/8 0.050 bar) for most of the length. At what point do you have too much clearance and need to tighten things up by closing the rails?
