Took Me 4 Years To Figure This Out

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so i have been cutting and splitting firewood for the last four years and i wanted to share with you guys something that it has taken me four years to figure out stick around [Applause] [Music] so if you've spent any time at all with chainsaws and firewood you're probably familiar with the feeling of taking a brand new chain out of the box throwing it on the bar and then the weight of the chainsaw is enough to just melt right down through the log you're probably also familiar with having a doll chain and there's nothing more frustrating than having to put your body weight on the saw and lean into it and use the dogs and apply leverage to try to run through a log and by the time you get through three rounds you're huffing and puffing and sweating and just frustrated as anything so what i wanted to talk about today was how to avoid prematurely dulling out your chainsaw chain and then how to fix it once it is dull because if you spend any time with firewood you know it's a regular maintenance item no matter how much care you take in cutting your firewood it's gonna get dull eventually so one of the most common mistakes people make when they're cutting firewood is cutting their logs on the ground and over extending the nose of their bar into the dirt on the other side of the log when they're trying to finish the cut it's a lot better to cut 75 percent of the way through all the way down the log and then roll that log over and finish your cut on the top side of the log it's going to keep your saw out of the dirt and the number one enemy of any chainsaw chain is any non-wood material i'm talking rocks mud and dirt now cutting 75 percent of the way through the log and then flipping it back over and cutting the other 25 is kind of the old school way to do it there's better ways to do it now to avoid hitting the dirt i've got a tractor a loader and a grapple that way i can lift the logs up off the ground and cut them up in the air there's also much cheaper products like the timber jack the logox three in one forestry tool basically it's a pv with a kickstand underneath it and it allows you to lift the log up off the ground and you can cut it away from the ground and not have to worry about hitting the dirt now some other things you might run into that'll dull out your chain let's say you're cutting firewood back in your woods and you skid your logs out of the woods even if you get the log up off the ground if you've got mud on that log the mud on the outside of the bark is going to dull your chain also the bark itself some species of trees have more gnarly bark than others that's why some of these sawmills you see have debarkers on them they actually right before the saw blade enters the log there's a debarker that'll remove that bark and it helps to stretch out the life of that sawmill blade so anyway the chain that i have on this bar right now needs a little bit of work i'm gonna go ahead and stick it in this log and see what it looks like and then i'm gonna do the most cringe cringe-worthy thing you can do with a chainsaw i'm going to stick it in the ground and completely trash it because i want to take it up put it on the vise and see if we can't bring it back to life so this is going to be our test log here this is about 13 inches what we'll do is we'll cut it right now with the chain the way it is and then we'll stick it in the ground try to cut it again i'm assuming it's not going to cut hardly at all once we stick it in the ground then we'll take it up to the shop throw it on the vise and see if we can't get it back to out of the box sharp again [Music] [Music] all right so yeah that chain was pretty dull normally that g372 xp just shreds right through some wood let's go ahead and stick it in the ground and really make sure she's spent [Music] ah all right so we're up here in the garage we've got our chainsaw chain all dulled out we've got the wood stuff going for heat now i have made chainsaw sharpening videos in the past when i thought i knew what i was talking about but i still wasn't able to get that fresh out of the box sharp chain that i was looking for i've tried all the gadgets you can think of one of them being like these little dremel bits that you can put in the end of your chain or the end of your cordless drill and basically this just fits perfectly it's just like a regular file fits perfectly in your chainsaw chain and it's supposed to sharpen it but i haven't gotten great results with it it'll resharpen a chain to an extent but you don't get that fresh out of the box razor sharp chain you're looking for another thing that i've tried if you see over here is this chainsaw bench grinder and same concept all these tools and gadgets are supposed to make chainsaw sharpening easy and they do that but to an extent because they don't give you the finished product you're looking for in my honest opinion i think the real only way to get a chain fresh out of the box sharp is to do it by hand and i'll show you what i think i figured out the last time i did it i got really good results we'll test that today to see if i get those same results all right so here is a close-up look of your chainsaw chain and when you're filing by hand there's three areas you need to pay attention to the first one is this raker right here or depth gauge and that does exactly what it sounds like it sets the depth that your chainsaw chain is going to bite into that wood if you don't have that file down enough your chainsaw is going to rev really high it's not going to bite into the wood and you're going to be throwing what looks like flour instead of nice wood chips if you have it set too low your chainsaw chain is going to bite really hard it's going to bog down the saw you're probably going to bind and pinch the bar and the saw is going to kick around like crazy it's really dangerous to take your rakers down too much it might seem appealing because your chainsaw is going to bite better but really it's a dangerous situation especially if you get near the nose of the chain so the next section is really important and it's called the gullet and the reason it's so important is because most people don't focus on the gullet most people spend their time on the cutting edge of the tooth which is the very top they think okay as long as that's sharp right there i'm good the chain's going to cut but if you ever watch buck and billy ray his famous slogan is get the gullet people forget that the shape of your tooth here needs to be like a half moon so the reason the gullet is so important if you can picture the wood coming through the tooth the depth gauge here is going to set how much that cutting edge can take off and as that shaving gets shaved off the log and starts to come around here it's going to curl around the bottom side of that gullet now if your gullet isn't nice and round like a crescent moon it's going to cause that wood chip to break off prematurely and then you're not going to be removing as much material as you could be if you were taking nice big long carrot peel chips out of that log so the last thing we need to talk about is pretty obvious and that is the actual cutting too that needs to be razor sharp so they can actually bite into the wood so the trick that i learned when filing by hand is when i first started i thought that this round file here when you come through is going to hit your cutting edge as well as your gullet at the same time and it's not what you have to do is i usually do three passes like this pushing back this way and then i'll do three passes pushing at a 45 degree angle back up towards the cutting edge of the tooth and you'll see when i do that i'm kind of grabbing the top here and pulling the chain almost out of the channel of the bar when i cut up like this so that is the trick that i learned you need to file your gullet and your cutting edge separately now granted you're using the same tool to do it but you need to do it with two different motions all right so i'm gonna go ahead and put the chain break on and then we're gonna go ahead and file the gullet first so i'm going to do three passes and then now we're going to go ahead and push up and file that top cutting edge so now that tooth is razor sharp if i go ahead and stick my finger on there that tooth is going to bite right into my skin so that three pass rule is kind of a general rule of thumb it's a starting point before you move on you still want to examine each tooth and make sure that your gullet is a crescent moon shape and your top cutting edge is sharp if not you might need a few more passes before you move to the next tooth so so all right so the last thing we need to talk about are the rakers here now you can see my raker is already well below my cutting edge and i kind of like taking the approach that andrew said from easton made wood splitters he did a sharpening video as well and he said what he does is just trial and error you know he'll take one pass with his flat file across the top of that raker and then go put it in some wood and if it's cutting great you're done if it's not take another pass and just keep taking passes until it's the saw is cutting how you want it to perform so yeah i think this chain is ready to go we've got our razor sharp cutting edge we've got our gullet dug out in the shape of a crescent moon and we've got our raker set where we want them let's go see how much faster this chain is in that 13-inch log so as you can see that was a big improvement over our original time and a huge improvement over the dull chain after it had been run through the dirt if you have any extra tips for sharpening chainsaws that i didn't cover leave them in the comments below it'll help me out and everybody else who watches these videos anyway if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up click that subscribe button and check out some other videos thanks for watching

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 1,946,761

Keywords: How to, Sharpen, Chainsaw, Hometown acres, Kioti, Holzfforma, Husqvarna, Chain, Sharpening, Right, Correct, Way, Outdoorgans, Outdoors with the Morgan’s

Id: oU3IPgicGCc

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020