Couple grinder questions

[jetsam]

I like the dust extractor more and in the Chinese sharpener I also did some slight modifications. Oregon, well, this is precisely Italian accuracy, although it's not cheap

The dust extractor costs about $30. It's a $25 buckethead from home depot, a 5g bucket, a 45° 1.5" schedule 40 street elbow, and a 1.5" sch40 to 1.25" tubular trap adapter, which fits the hose on that thing perfectly. I use a little piece of wire to hold it down. I was going to bolt it on, but it turns out that I need to move it around for some stuff (like grinding rakers at 90°). (It also has a muffler on it, made out of a cardboard box and some filtration medium, because that cheesy little bucket vac is louder than my real shop vac.)

It doesn't work as well as putting it in a box as you can see some others on the forum have done, but the box would be in the way on the bench. If I ever decide to wall mount it, I will build it a box to catch all the filings.

 

[jetsam]

I added a nut to the chain stop and slathered the whole fastener with Megaloc (pipe dope). Plan to do the same for the depth stop.

I also got a few dead chains from my neighbor, so I'll have fun (I asked him what was up with the rakers and his answer was, "I like a lot of grab so I use the bench grinder on them".... Even just measuring them with mk1 eyeball, those things are not within .100 of each other...)

I'll post some before and after photos when I get time to play with chainsaw stuff again (probably friday).

 

[jetsam]

As promised/threatened.... I probably won't have time for grinding until Friday but I ran these chains through a degreasing ultrasonic bath (neighbor uses used motor oil for bar oil) and had a closer look. This is one of the better chains. They're all Husky chains.



Gauges in the photo are .062 together.... rakers run from around .075 to .015 and are maintained using a bench grinder after hand filing. He must have a seat belt installed on his saw.

Tooth lengths are similarly erratic. You can see several different file profiles on every tooth. (This is the best chain from the pile.)





A couple 'bad chain' photos for fun....

Do we still call that a gullet?



Think I just cherry picked the worst tooth to show ya?




...so I don't know if this is better or worse than what shows up down at the chain sharpening shop, but I do know it'll be fun to compare the after pictures!

Anyone have any advice on dealing with the rakers? I know the right way is to cut the teeth back until they can all be even, but there won't be any tooth left even on the 'good' chains, and my goal is to salvage something that works out of this.

I am thinking I'll set all the higher ones to .030 and let the lower ones sit where they are? Ugly but better than it was?

Cheers, see y'all with some after photos later in the week.

 

[cookies]

i would dremel the gullets with a carbide bit close to where is should be then retouch after sharpening. when folks take the rakers down too far it will make the chain dangerous if properly sharpened or at minimum kill your hands with vibration and your arms with jumpy cutting. It becomes a judgement call on sharpening certain teeth and removing others completely to make it safe or just user friendly. I would use paint markers to mark the teeth and rakers way out of wack then decide by looking at it to make it a skip chain or just remove certain teeth or just sharpen it and let it ride...your buddy needs a pferd 3 in one file for field use badly Lmao!

 

[Philbert]

If people know how to sharpen chains, they normally don’t bring them to someone else to sharpen. So, you should expect to receive a number of ‘problem chains’.

That chain is an Oregon ‘Vanguard’, low kickback chain. The depth gauges are set differently.

Philbert

 

[jetsam]

If people know how to sharpen chains, they normally don’t bring them to someone else to sharpen. So, you should expect to receive a number of ‘problem chains’.

That chain is an Oregon ‘Vanguard’, low kickback chain. The depth gauges are set differently.

Philbert

How can you tell who actually makes chains for these saw manufacturers (for example those chains with the very prominent Vanguard rakers are stamped HUSQV, and I have a Dolmar branded chain). I assume neither one is a chain manufacturer... though I did hear that Husky was talking about becoming one some years ago?

I guess anything with Vanguard rakers is either made by Oregon/Blount or a Chinese knockoff company, but what about the rest?

 

[Philbert]

Oregon used to make all of the chain for Husqvarna, and a number of other chainsaw manufacturers. It was labeled with the name of each company. Things change, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but these forums help!


Husqvarna is reportedly making all of their chain now, but I don't know if that includes all their brands (Poulan, etc.). Some could be contracted out?

That 'Vanguard' style of chain is distinctive and unique. It might be made by different manufacturers under license, as a knock-off, due to expired patents, etc.

Philbert

 

[jetsam]

Oregon used to make all of the chain for Husqvarna, and a number of other chainsaw manufacturers. It was labeled with the name of each company. Things change, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but these forums help!
View attachment 891471
View attachment 891470
Husqvarna is reportedly making all of their chain now, but I don't know if that includes all their brands (Poulan, etc.). Some could be contracted out?

That 'Vanguard' style of chain is distinctive and unique. It might be made by different manufacturers under license, as a knock-off, due to expired patents, etc.

Philbert

I'm laughing reading that "do not file outside the witness mark" and "do not lower below 0.25"" stuff and then looking at these photos of the neighbor's chains...

 

[jetsam]

i would dremel the gullets with a carbide bit close to where is should be then retouch after sharpening. when folks take the rakers down too far it will make the chain dangerous if properly sharpened or at minimum kill your hands with vibration and your arms with jumpy cutting. It becomes a judgement call on sharpening certain teeth and removing others completely to make it safe or just user friendly. I would use paint markers to mark the teeth and rakers way out of wack then decide by looking at it to make it a skip chain or just remove certain teeth or just sharpen it and let it ride...your buddy needs a pferd 3 in one file for field use badly Lmao!

He might get DodecaSkip chain out of some of those chains. (It's like full skip, but DodecaSkip improves upon this design by having one cutter every 20 drive links.... perfect for the discerning arborist who wants to run a 48" bar on a 30cc powerhead....)

 

[Philbert]

Oh, and also I didn't like the light bulb, but I soldered in a bright as hell LED from home depot, so that's sorted!

Lots of ways to customize things. For others, looking for a brighter light, @Wood Doctor posted a slightly simpler LED replacement modification in this thread:
https://www.arboristsite.com/community/threads/511a-grinder-improvements-tweaks.197073/page-12 (Post#229).

Philbert

 

[jetsam]

So I've resurrected the chain with the worst rakers in that pile, and also sharpened my first Vanguard chain.

Here's a before photo. It had raker heights all over the map, from taller than the tooth to -0.075. The teeth were pretty good compared to some of the others, but they were filed to about 70 degrees on one side and around 55 on the other, and the 55° side had much shorter teeth than the other.



I first went through with the 3/16 CBN wheel and set all the teeth to 30/55/10. I had to cut back quite a bit to get the angles set because there had been a lot of variation in file angles.

Then I went through and did about four passes grinding rakers. I put on the 1/4" flat pink wheel. I wasn't sure what to do for a Vanguard raker that had been subjected to a bench grinder already, so I put the grind angle at 20° and ground it down to about a 5° AoA, and then rounded off the trailing edge to leave it at 6°. I had mixed results with eyeballing it and wound up with a couple 7° and 8° rakers (though it had -2° and 12° rakers on it when I got it, so I guess I can still call that a win ).

Then I did another pass and cleared out some of the gullet with the (suffering) 1/4" square stone.

I am probably going to hit the leading edges of the rakers with a flat file and call it saved... what do y'all think?

The rakers are still mangled but they're at (mostly) appropriate heights, and the teeth look pretty okay to me.

Not my chain so I probably won't try it and see how it cuts...



Next up is that one I showed above that looks like the teeth were sharpened with the bench grinder also.


Oh, and I found a little scrap of 3" schedule 40 in the garage, so I cut it up with my skil saw and made a better dust catcher thingy that's actually screwed on. It's cut so that the grinder has full range of motion without moving it.

 

[jetsam]

Oh, and to anyone who wants to know why I'm talking about AoA instead of raker height, check out this awesome thread (link).

I started off using dial calipers to measure the distance between the clamp bar and the top of the cutter and the top of the raker, and then the distance between those two points, and using those 3 values to compute the angle.... but as BobL points out above, you get roughly the same results from a DAF, and it is much much faster.

I am going to see about setting up a jig to de-Vanguard rakers tonight, so the next chain I do should end up better and make my raker wheel suffer less.

 

[jetsam]

OK, so I bolted an angle grinder parallel to my bench and made a platform that was just the right height to slid a regular 3/8 chain raker so it barely touched the grinder wheel (one scrap of 1/2" plywood, a clipboard, why do I own a clipboard, a sheet of .030 stainless, and a scrap of .010 aluminum was the final recipe, lol).

Anyway.... stick a Vanguard link on top of this carefully chosen pile of crap...



Slide it under...



Hello normal raker! Ready to be ground.

 

[Piotr Pakula]

I put on a 4W led GU10 compared to the 15W bulb, i.e. you can see the stars in the cosmos ;-) For this reduction of E14 on GU10

 

[HarleyT]

Oregon used to make all of the chain for Husqvarna, and a number of other chainsaw manufacturers. It was labeled with the name of each company. Things change, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but these forums help!
View attachment 891471
View attachment 891470
Husqvarna is reportedly making all of their chain now, but I don't know if that includes all their brands (Poulan, etc.). Some could be contracted out?

That 'Vanguard' style of chain is distinctive and unique. It might be made by different manufacturers under license, as a knock-off, due to expired patents, etc.

Philbert

I just smack them with a small ball peen hammer to lower them......

 

[jetsam]

I just smack them with a small ball peen hammer to lower them......

They behave very well once you cut the peened-over part off.

One thing I did learn from doing it was to use a cutoff wheel (preferably a vented diamond one) instead of a grinding wheel. Goes much faster. If you get impatient with the grinding wheel, you end up with hardened rakers that laugh at steel files.

 

[HarleyT]

They behave very well once you cut the peened-over part off.

One thing I did learn from doing it was to use a cutoff wheel (preferably a vented diamond one) instead of a grinding wheel. Goes much faster. If you get impatient with the grinding wheel, you end up with hardened rakers that laugh at steel files.

I leave it there in case I smack it too hard,

and I need something for the vice grips to grab on to.........

 

[Philbert]

I just smack them with a small ball peen hammer to lower them......

Man of finesse. . .

(chain ever smack you back?)

Philbert

 

[jetsam]

Man of finesse. . .

(chain ever smack you back?)

Philbert

Now we need a thread dedicated to finding out what the best angles to hammer the cutters and rakers to are....

I'm going to hammer up a 0-45-90-135-180 splay sequence chain to get that sweet 1" kerf on my cuts..

 

[HarleyT]

Man of finesse. . .

(chain ever smack you back?)

Philbert

My customers never came back to let me know!!