Chainsaw bar and chain life expectancy and maintenance

I met the county gas inspector guy when filling up my jerry can the other day.  I figured that when you hit the button for ethanol-free gas there is some "normal" gas still in the hose.  So I put half a gallon in my truck's gas tank before filling the can.  The inspector said they have to purge 2 gallons before they test the next grade.  Seems a bit excessive, maybe they're being extra sure, but now I know to maybe put more in my truck before I start filling the gas can.

Travis Johnson wrote:I like a 18 inch bar and chain because it is a whole lot less teeth to file, and the bar and chain are cheaper to buy. The biggest reason though is, I get far more power. I have 6 inches of less drag on a 18 inch bar over that of a 20 inch bar, (2 inches longer on the top, bottom and nose to make 6 inches) so I get more power to the chain to cut through wood. Again I so seldom cut massive trees so having more power 99% of the time makes up for the few times I have to...wait for it...cross to the other side of the log and finish the cut. Oh the horrors of that! (insert sarcasm here)

A smaller bar results in fuel savings also. I have both an 18 and a 20 inch bar for my saw. The same tank of gas gets me 45 minutes of saw time with the 20" or an hour with the 18." Fifteen extra minutes for giving up two inches of cutting length.

One situation where having a larger bar is nice, though, is if you're doing a lot of thinning (cutting small trees and brush from around and under larger trees). The extra bar length means you don't have to bend over as far, which really saves your back over the course of a long day. In the past, I've been known to slap a 24 inch bar onto an 036 at work if I knew I was going to be out thinning all day. I wouldn't use that setup to cut anything over about twelve inches, though. WAY underpowered. But eight inches was usually the upper limit of our prescriptions, anyway, and it saved my back. Burns more gas. Like always, there's a trade off somewhere.

Will Meginley wrote:

Kate Downham wrote:What is the ideal way to maintain and use a chainsaw for firewood to minimise having to replace parts?

Back to the original question: Having to go get more gas today reminded me of a couple items that hadn't been brought up yet.

Most "gasoline" sold in the United States has 10-15% ethanol content. Leaving out the fact that current technology requires 1.25 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, it's really bad for your saw. It gums up your carburetor and erodes plastic fuel lines. If you're trying to limit repair needs, use only non-ethanol gasoline in chainsaws - and other gas powered equipment. It can be hard to find. The nearest station from me that sells it is 45 minutes away so I always take a jerry can and grab five gallons at a time to limit the amount of driving involved. Often, if a station has it, only the premium grade fuel will be non-ethanol. Near the coast it's often labeled as "boat fuel" or "recreation fuel." If you don't know of a station near you, you can try pure-gas.org. If worst comes to absolute worst, most saw shops sell a product called "TRUFUEL" that's pre-mixed 50:1 non-ethanol gasoline. It's a colossal rip-off though - usually costs about 20 bucks a gallon.

Along the same lines, if you're going to store your chainsaw for more than a handful of days before the next use, purge it of fuel. Pure gasoline will also erode fuel lines over time, just not as fast as ethanol. The less you have gas in the fuel lines, the longer that will take. Gasoline with additives can also evaporate and leave residue in the carburetor. Some of the tubes in a chainsaw carburetor are only the width of a human hair, so they don't take much to gunk up. To purge the saw: use a funnel to empty the contents of the fuel tank into your spare fuel container. Then start the saw and let it run until it dies. This shouldn't take more than a few seconds.

I hadn't heard of this before. I am in Australia, normal car fuel here is 92%, and that's what we use for the chainsaw. There is usually a 95% option too - would this 95% fuel be worth it?

Good tips about bar size and fuel economy too. I think ours is 18", but we're mostly cutting smaller stuff and could try getting a smaller bar for most uses and just putting the larger bar in only when we need it.

Kate Downham wrote:I hadn't heard of this before. I am in Australia, normal car fuel here is 92%, and that's what we use for the chainsaw. There is usually a 95% option too - would this 95% fuel be worth it?

I honestly don't know how much difference 3% would make. Since it has ethanol in it either way, for sure always store it purged. It's a good habit to be in anyway.

Will Meginley wrote:

Travis Johnson wrote:I like a 18 inch bar and chain because it is a whole lot less teeth to file, and the bar and chain are cheaper to buy. The biggest reason though is, I get far more power. I have 6 inches of less drag on a 18 inch bar over that of a 20 inch bar, (2 inches longer on the top, bottom and nose to make 6 inches) so I get more power to the chain to cut through wood. Again I so seldom cut massive trees so having more power 99% of the time makes up for the few times I have to...wait for it...cross to the other side of the log and finish the cut. Oh the horrors of that! (insert sarcasm here)

A smaller bar results in fuel savings also. I have both an 18 and a 20 inch bar for my saw. The same tank of gas gets me 45 minutes of saw time with the 20" or an hour with the 18." Fifteen extra minutes for giving up two inches of cutting length.

One situation where having a larger bar is nice, though, is if you're doing a lot of thinning (cutting small trees and brush from around and under larger trees). The extra bar length means you don't have to bend over as far, which really saves your back over the course of a long day. In the past, I've been known to slap a 24 inch bar onto an 036 at work if I knew I was going to be out thinning all day. I wouldn't use that setup to cut anything over about twelve inches, though. WAY underpowered. But eight inches was usually the upper limit of our prescriptions, anyway, and it saved my back. Burns more gas. Like always, there's a trade off somewhere.

I did not know that about the fuel savings.

I had heard the argument about longer bars helping on a persons back as they do not have to stoop over as far, but it also goes the other way because doing limbing of trees, a person has to lift a saw an extra two inches every time they lift the saw when they go from the bottom of the tree, to the top. If you do the math upon that, it is an insane amount of extra lifting.

For instance, lets say a tree is 60 feet tall, the limbs start at the 16 foot level, and about every 16 inches there is a set of branches. This would be about average for a spruce or fir tree. So that would mean, to limb that tree out, you would have to lift your saw from bottom to top of that tree about 33 times. Lifting it an extra two inches every time means just the difference alone between having a 20 inch bar instead of a 18 inch bar, means on that one tree, you are lifting that saw nearly six extra feet.

That is a lot of extra work when 99% of the time it is not needed to get the job done.

But that is only one tree. I average 70 trees per day. (7-8 trees equal 1 cord of wood, and I cut 10 cords per day). So at the end of the day, if I run a 20 inch bar instead of a 18 inch bar, I have to lift my saw an additional...a staggering...385 feet. The math only backed up what my body was proving; I was a lot more exhausted at the end of the day running a 20 inch bar then I was an 18 inch bar.

The truth is I would run a 16 inch bar, but my saws are designed for longer length, and so the balance of my chainsaw gets screwed up. But again, I am running pretty big chainsaws. For a Firewooder with a 52 cc saw, by all means put a 16 inch bar on; I am advocate of running shorter bars, not a staunch support of an 18 inch bar only.

Now granted some of this is preference. I could run a big saw for felling and bucking, and then run a smaller saw for limbing, and that makes sense and I would never chide anyone for doing that. With me though, I am kind of a person that likes an all around saw, so I have found the 72 cc class of saws can fell, limb and buck without changing saws. But that is just a preference thing.

Mike Jay wrote:Thanks again Travis!  I just have two white pines that I need to cut down.

I read this before and meant to get back to you on this, but somehow I got caught up on the Jonny Holmes of Chainsaw Bar Lengths and failed to address this.

I never had a problem sawing White Pine with my homemade chainsaw sawmill, but White Pine is THE reason I am getting rid of the Norwood Bandsaw Sawmill. It does really good sawing eastern Hemlock, and does pretty good with green Spruce, Fir and Cedar, but White Pine gives it fits.

What happens is, the bandsaw blade gunks up with resin from the White Pine and coats the blade. This makes the blade chatter when it goes over the guide wheels and bandsaw wheels...driven and idler. A Bandsaw blade is designed to be held in tension...incredible tension...but it can take no verticle flexing because it cracks, then breaks the blade. This sawmill is so worn out that it causes that. I can only saw a thousand or so feet of lumber before I snap a blade. It is no big deal, a blade is $20, and there is no way I could buy 1000 BF of lumber from a lumberyard for $20, so it works. But is frutrating.

I have tried all kinds of methods of getting rid of the pine pitch on the blade, but nothing really works. I have had success in using gasoline/diesel fuel mixture, wiping the resin off the blade, then drying the blade with a cloth, but I must do that on every log. THAT SUCKS! If I just spray the blade, before I am even done, in seconds...BANG...the blade slips off the guides and kinks the blade to uselessness. It is to the point now where I just do not cut White Pine on this saw anymore.

There are other problems with the Norwood Bandsaw Sawmill anyway, so to me it is just not worth rebuilding. These peoblems are not simple fixes, but inherient problems that make me swear AT and not BY the Norwood Sawmill. There is a guy on Youtube that bought one, and had that ponies to say in a post that it was a junk sawmill. Norwood pays Youtubers with their sawmills to say nice things about them by giving them free upgrades, but it is a real scam. They are cheap sawmills, and you get less than what you pay for.

I will admit though, that the olde Norwood could take a pretty big log. This one was 26 inches in diameter. The only reason I could cut it on this 24 inch sized mill was because I cut the butt swell of the log off with a chainsaw so it would fit. Interestingly enough, it is a White Pine! :-(

It's good to know that white pine is easier on the chainsaw mill.  

My buddy has a sawmill and when he cuts white pine he puts dishwashing soap along with water in the blade lube drip system.  He cut 1200 board feet of pine for me and I didn't see any big pitch problems.  That was on winter cut pine and we were sawing in mid summer (if it matters).

Mike Jay wrote:It's good to know that white pine is easier on the chainsaw mill.  

My buddy has a sawmill and when he cuts white pine he puts dishwashing soap along with water in the blade lube drip system.  He cut 1200 board feet of pine for me and I didn't see any big pitch problems.  That was on winter cut pine and we were sawing in mid summer (if it matters).

I like White Pine.

I do not have a lot on my land  despite living in the "Pine Tree State", but what I do have is fairly big in size.

The first part of my life I had a deep hatred for paint, and so I stained everything, but overtime came to realize that paint has its place, ...whitewash to be specific...and so I really appreciate White Pine more. It planes easy, is stable, does not need to be predrilled in comes in wide, long boards. Throw some whitewash on it, and it really looks good.

We have not really started the finishing touches in this Tiny House, but Katie and I talked about just ripping out all the drywall and installing shiplap. We did that on a half-bathroom in our other house and really liked it. It was all salvaged lumber from a sawmill nearby that saws only white pine. The pine was 6 inches wide and 14 feet long, but the entire lift had got blue-stain, and so they had to throw it out. Well maybe for them, but you never see the blue stain under whitewash, so that "useless wood", looks good to me.

In an earlier post, ways to know if one has a sharp chain were mentioned and I've been out with my chainsaw this week cleaning up some trees that storms have brought down earlier in the year. Sharp chains make flakes and ribbons when they cut and I wanted to share a couple pics. The first is from a pine tree, and the second is from a black locust, which is a very hard wood, more so than oak. There's some flakes in the black locust, but also some tiny particles. It's time for this chain to be sharpened.

I've been busy over the winter cutting trees that came down in high winds from a really bad storm last fall. There were nine trees on the ground, all of the very large, mature old trees and most of them oaks. I had a tremendous amount of cutting to do and not really knowing how to quantify how much I cut, I ended up using three gallons of gas in my chainsaw to get it mostly done, which is a lot of cutting for me. I had two chains that I would rotate, one on the saw and the other down at the saw shop being sharpened, and when I picked one up I dropped off the other.

Story time: During a visit to the shop, I asked the person behind the counter what the life of a chain is and how many times one could be sharpened. They said it depends whether the chain need just a touch up or if it got into some rocks and a lot of material needs to be ground off to get a sharp edge again, but the person said a chain can usually be sharpened 6 or 8 times. The chain I was picking up was on its 6th or 7th sharpening and citing it as an example, the person thought this might be the last or there maybe could be one more sharpening left in it. I thanked them and off I went back to the farm to put the newly sharpened chain on. The following morning, off I go to a mighty oak laying on the ground that I had already been working on. I fired up the saw and immediately I knew something was wrong. There was no bite, the chain effectively skimmed over the bark and wood hardly spitting sawdust- it was not throwing any flakes or ribbons. I checked to make sure I put the chain on the right direction. I confess I've put one on backwards before not paying attention and had similar results. It's on right. I try again, and I am leaning into the saw, pushing the bar onto the 20 or so inch diameter material I'm cutting, and it's doing nothing. Perplexed I turned off the saw, and stared at the chain. It looked sharp, the teeth felt sharp. Wtf was wrong and why wasn't it biting. Ok, false start for the day and I pack up my saw and head back to the house.

I have Still chains on my saw, and doing some internet research I learned that Still etches wear marks on all the teeth and all the rakes of a chain, letting a user or guy sharpening that there is no good life beyond the wear marks. I thought "dang! maybe this chain has been sharpened past the wear marks and I need to replace it". I looked, found the wear marks, and there's plenty of life left in the chain. More thinking, and staring at the chain. I notice the teeth are at an angle. Looking at the box the chain came in, I can see a diagram showing the tip of the tooth being at a height above the rake in front of it. I realized that over the course of many sharpenings, the teeth have been shortened and this chain had the tip of its teeth now at the same height at the rake in front of it. Egad this is why it's not biting! I pulled the chain off the saw, and very carefully using my bench grinder, I ground down the rakes in front of each tooth, so now the tip of each tooth is taller than the rake in front of it. Chain reinstalled, I go back out to the tree, and it's like a new chain again. The chain pulls itself into the wood and the saw is discharging flakes and ribbons of wood. It was almost a little aggressive, and I could tell by the sound of the engine it was running at a lower rpm pulling that chain through the wood. Maybe I ground off a little too much of the rakes and gave the chain too much bite.

I learned that there are probably 12-15 sharpenings in a chain, maybe more. If folks out there have chains that seem sharp but just ain't cutting like they used to, inspect the rakes and teeth to see if they're the same height. A little filing or grinding can breathe new life into an old chain.

Yes James, after a number of sharpenings you need to file down the rakers.  They make a tool to both protect the nearby teeth and to keep you from taking too much material off.  It's a very cheap tool and came with a chainsaw sharpening tool set I bought once:

My husband files the rakers every time. I can't remember how many times he sharpened the last chain before he replaced it, it seemed like quite a few times, although towards the end he was saying that it was taking much longer to cut wood. He just uses a file, and a special chainsaw file thing he got from the chainsaw shop.

He says the chainsaw file he has seems pretty flimsy now - does anyone have any recommendations of buy-it-for-life chainsaw sharpening stuff?

I found this video very informative. It is about different brands of replacement chains but it shows very clearly how chains wear down, and in particular how horrible sand is for your saw.

In four years I've killed one bar through flat out abuse, and if I can source a replacement sprocket section, I may even be able to recover that one ;) Chainsaw brand loyalty is just like with pickups or tractors or anything else. You get loyalists who won't consider any other brand but their own. And like every situation, the people on either side have had good experiences with their favorite brands and maybe bad experiences with another. If it were as one sided as both sides say, there wouldn't be "both sides" ;)
So make your choices based on things like what's available and supported where you are, what's affordable where you are, and what feels good to you in operation. If at all possible, you want to test drive chainsaws same as trucks or tractors.
Plenty of good reasons to have a chainsaw mill rather than a bandsaw mill. Thousands upon thousands of reasons, if you compare price. Depends on how much cash you have burning a hole in your pocket, how much lumber you're really going to be milling, what size lumber, what kind of access. Lots of pieces to consider. You can mill stuff with a chainsaw mill that you simply cannot mill with a bandsaw mill. Whether it's because the log is too big for a bandsaw, or in a location it's impossible to get to with a bandsaw or to get the log out of to move to the bandsaw. If you're going to be doing a few logs and that's probably it, hundreds of dollars for an alaskan mill is a smarter choice than thousands of dollars for a bandsaw mill.
Chainsaw chains have indicator lines on the cutter teeth that show the angle the teeth should be ground at and the lines themselves are indicators of when the tooth is worn out. When you're grinding or filing to that line, that tooth, potentially that chain, is finished. One sharpening and replace is someone trying to sell chain and they're cheating you.
One rule of thumb on bar flipping is to flip it every time you fill up the saw with fuel and oil. I think that's a bit much and I tend to flip every time I sharpen the chain. You want to do bar maintenance on a regular basis, and that means every time you flip the bar, be sure to clean it out, clear the oiler holes, check for burrs and wear on the bar, grease the sprocket if it has one and it will take grease. One of my bars has a sprocket, but no grease hole in the bar. On that one I just shoot some grease into the sprocket from the side. Figure it can't hurt. If the bar has burrs on the side, take them off with a light pass or two with a flat file. The rails of the bar should be flat, smooth and even. You can sand, file or grind the rails to make them flat, smooth and even again. Obviously there's a limit, when you've ground away the groove, that bar is Over! ;) Also the whole bar should be straight, no curves, bends or kinks. If the bar gets really bent, replace it, don't try to straighten it out.
Working with hardwoods, I would offer the suggestion that you sharpen a chain every three tanks of gas through the saw. It's an arbitrary guideline that seems to fit my experience. Others have noted that when your saw is putting out dust, not chips, you need to sharpen it. Absolutely true, but you really don't ever want to wait until it's giving you that signal. That is a sign that you have let it get thoroughly dull.
Keep it out of the dirt. Try not to run it through metal (like, not cutting the bolts on your mill that hold the bar clamp in place!!! Yeah.), so watch out for fence wire embedded in trees, as well as nails from the kids' tree house or the birdhouse or...
Another potential source of damage to your bar is heat. If the metal of the bar starts changing colors, you're overheating the bar by a lot! It absolutely can happen. If it starts happening, get out of  the cut, stop the saw, let everything cool down, then check all your lubrication. Oiler working? Oil holes in the bar clear? Sprocket greased if the bar has one? Do you know how to adjust the flow of oil to your bar? Typically there's a screw on the underside of the saw for adjusting flow through the oil pump. It's worth knowing how to do that.
I killed my first chainsaw by not understanding how critical it is to have the fuel mix right. I killed a bar by flat out abusing it, leaning into it pushing the nose straight in on a bore cut and not letting the saw cut at its pace. Cooked the sprocket. Hitting rocks or nails will radically shorten the life of your chain - but you can file/grind most chain damage away and get some more use out of the chain (within reason). Chain is absolutely a consumable item, but for a homeowner level of use, it ought to last for a year or more (depending ;) ). Bars will eventually wear out, but the average home user should never see a bar wear out as long as they're flipping it and doing basic maintenance. The hours of use it takes to wear a bar out if it is not being mistreated - professionals wear out bars. Homeowner users not so much.