Chain life

Sharp life of a chain saw chain depends on several factors. Quaility of the chain is the big one. A no name chain may cost a few dollars less than a high quility name brand chain at the check out counter but when you have to shartpen it after every 50 foot of log your blocking up it is soon wore out when the mort costly chain will cut 3 times that befroe needing sharpening.

It aslo depends on the type of tree where they have fallen. Sand that land in the bark when the tree hits the ground can dull a chain real quick.
I can normally block up a trailer load of wood (Ash, maple, oak and Elm.) and still have a some what sharp chain. I how ever sharpen them again before I go back to the woods.

I bought a Stihl MS250 in Spring of last year and have purchased two Stihl chains since the original. I mostly have pine around my house and have felled and de-limbed a generous number. Typically I sharpen the chain using the Stihl hand file kit after each gas fill or when the cut is coming out as saw dust instead of chips. I also clean the whole saw when done cutting for the day as that pine rosin can really gum things up. :fing02:

Alleyyooper said:

Sharp life of a chain saw chain depends on several factors. Quaility of the chain is the big one. A no name chain may cost a few dollars less than a high quility name brand chain at the check out counter but when you have to shartpen it after every 50 foot of log your blocking up it is soon wore out when the mort costly chain will cut 3 times that befroe needing sharpening.

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I couldn't agree more. I started out with a PoulanPro & later added a Craftsman chainsaw & I used the cheaper chains on them. Now that I use Stihl chainsaws & use Stihl's 'aggressive' chains I can tell a world of difference. Going from a regular chain to an aggressive chain is a difference too but it really seems the Stihl chains last longer in between sharpenings. The type of tree you're cutting also affects chain sharpness.

Like Alleyyooper I will get 1 or 2 loads out of the 3/8 20" setup on my 066, assuming I keep my head on straight and the chain out of the rocks. I have noticed very minimal cutter life differences between Stihl and Carlton (Carlton is a little cheaper) chain or Semi-Chisel vs. Full. I will be switching to full chisel because the cut is a little faster.

I kind of have to do it this way because I can't seem to sharpen a chain worth a darn without a vice. Don't know how you guys do it but when I try I'm just chasing my tail.

I am no expert, but my own observations suggest there are just so many variables involved that any answer besides "it depends" should be taken with a grain of salt. I cut mostly standing dead Red Oak. I try my best to be take care of the tip (good advice in all of life). I find that a sharp chain will easily fell and buck a 24-30" dead Red Oak, which is usually 2 tanks of gas on my 18" Dolmar bar and Oregon chain. Then I usually touch up my chain with 3 strokes of my file before starting a next tree. But, and this is a big one, as sure as I make a mistake and let my tip contact the ground, I quit and go for the file. I wish I was perfect and never did it, but I'm not.

I've also found that a standing dead hickory, or a down dead black locust is harder on my chain than the oak. I do not cut pine regularly, but did take two off a power line that came down in Sandy. The chain stayed plenty sharp, but after cutting, limbing, and bucking those two, I had a major sap clean up on bar, dogs, and front of my saw.

So, it depends on:

1 type and quality of chain
2 type and age of the tree
3 how clean the wood/bark is
4 how good you are about keeping your chain out of the ground or other contaminants
5 how well your oiler is working
6 how you sharpen, by hand, by machine, and by how much you file/grind off in a sharpening.
7 probably a half dozen other things I'll think about after I press the "Post Quick Reply" button.

Jere39 said:

I am no expert, but my own observations suggest there are just so many variables involved that any answer besides "it depends" should be taken with a grain of salt. I cut mostly standing dead Red Oak. I try my best to be take care of the tip (good advice in all of life). I find that a sharp chain will easily fell and buck a 24-30" dead Red Oak, which is usually 2 tanks of gas on my 18" Dolmar bar and Oregon chain. Then I usually touch up my chain with 3 strokes of my file before starting a next tree. But, and this is a big one, as sure as I make a mistake and let my tip contact the ground, I quit and go for the file. I wish I was perfect and never did it, but I'm not.

I've also found that a standing dead hickory, or a down dead black locust is harder on my chain than the oak. I do not cut pine regularly, but did take two off a power line that came down in Sandy. The chain stayed plenty sharp, but after cutting, limbing, and bucking those two, I had a major sap clean up on bar, dogs, and front of my saw.

So, it depends on:

1 type and quality of chain
2 type and age of the tree
3 how clean the wood/bark is
4 how good you are about keeping your chain out of the ground or other contaminants
5 how well your oiler is working
6 how you sharpen, by hand, by machine, and by how much you file/grind off in a sharpening.
7 probably a half dozen other things I'll think about after I press the "Post Quick Reply" button.

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As ususal, Jere is right on.:fing32:

To the OP a good sharp chain should pull itself into the wood, you shouldn't have to use the dogs or feed it into the wood. The size of the chip tells the story as long as you are cutting perpendicular to the grain.:goodl:

I touch up a chain frequently and never cut with a dull one as it is hard on bars and generates heat. If you ever see blue spots on a bar, now you'll know what caused it. I generally will hand sharpen 4-5 times and then put them on the grinder and bring them back. Rakers I do by hand because it is too easy to go overboard with the grinder. Grabby rakers are not fun and dangerous.

I will second Jere39. I just fell and bucked a live red oak with my brand new MS362 set up with 20" bar and full chisel OEM chain. After felling-bucking the whole tree I went back to the stump and cut it off. It cut just as well as when started. I was told from dealer and here that Stihl chains are made harder and hold an edge longer taken in all Jere's concerns etc. I have 2 more larger oaks to cut and will not touch the chain until I have issue. I am careful as can be to keep tip out of dirt. I know just as he mentioned once you hit dirt, you go downhill very fast. I'm sure I can cut another tree (oak) with out touching the chain, if I cut clean! All these trees are in my yard so hardware, dirt (on tree) etc. are not an issue (so far). I do not like cutting wood that has been skidded etc. Lot of dirt, stones etc get jambed in bark/wood. does a heck of a job on a chain/bar/sprocket etc.

I have cut many trees over the last 4 months with my old 028. They were all maple though. 028 is set with 16" bar and stihl chain. I fell and bucked 3 of them before touching the chain. If it means anything maples have HUGE TOPS with tons of limbs compared to an oak. I filled with gas many times per tree (2-4). These were not very tall trees either but large stumps 20"-28".
My saw cut excellent until the last stump. I tried to get it low and faught and faught with the short bar. I ended up cooking the bar and destroyed the chain. My fault completely but I did get it cut. I have replaced the bar with oem stihl but switched to oregon chain for the 028. I found them for 14.80 per loop shipped from loggerchain.com. OEM are 23.99 plus tax. I bought 4 so will be set for long time.
I will stay with oem stihl chain on 362. I also turned the oiler to max on new saw.

I will touch up a chain if I hit dirt etc. In the case of the stump and rock strikes etc, I'll either chuck the chain or drop off to shop for them to do on machine. depends on price (sharpen vs new obviously)
Now with the bigger saw I think I'll fair better. Might not use the 028 much at all anymore, we'll see.

I should probably mention that I'm mainly running a 036 with a 18" bar, .325 chain and a 9 pin rim. The chain is still in pretty good shape after a tank of fuel, but I've found that one or two strokes per tooth keep it that way all the time. Otherwise, half way though the next tank I can start to tell a difference. I've tried Oregon chain in the past and found that the chain really needed that one or two strokes after a tank of fuel. I normally cut about a cord and a half per trip even though I can only fit a cord on the truck (side rails, wood gets stacked). I roughly stack the rest in the woods, and stop on the way home from work and pick a couple of them up to make a full cord. I leave the rounds as big as I can because I stay at least 3 years a head and I don't want them to rot before I get a chance to burn them. I cut my rounds 22~24" long, and some of them are as big as 30" across. Those get noodled in half before loading, but anything under about 20~22" in diameter gets left hole. Lifting and stacking a full cord of oak/hickory (roughly 5K lbs) into the back of my '93 F250 is enough to remind me that I'm not a teenager any more, so keeping that chain sharp is worth it. I get about 10~15 cords out of a Stihl RSC chain. I probably only got half that out of the Oregon chains.

I use the Stihl file guide that clamps onto the file. I like how it sets the depth of the file on the tooth. I've found that was the hardest part about filing free hand.

I also found that a vise of some kind makes a world of difference in sharpening. A stump vise is small, relatively cheap, and does a pretty good job, but I decided to cheat and come up with a way to mount a bench vise to my truck. I didn't want to use something that mounted to the hitch because I didn't want to have to close the tail gate to use it, and it I didn't want the mount to be too big or heavy. Here's what I came up with for me.





The vise is mounted to an 8x8x3/8 alum plate using 3/8" flat heads that are counter sunk from the back side. I've found that once a flat head is tightened, they don't come loose Plus, it makes the back side of the plate flat so I can still mount the vise to my welding bench. The alum plate is bolted to the truck mount with 1/2 - 13 bolts. The nice thing about 1/2" bolts is that they have a 3/4" hex head which a 19mm scrench fits very well. I used a cut off wheel to cut a slot in the top of each head so that I could use the flat blade on the scrench to do most of the work. The mount bolts to the tail gate with self tapping sheet metal screws. In hind sight, I wish I would have welded it, but the screws have worked fine. The vise lives on my welding bench where it gets bolted down with all 4 of the half inch bolts, but quickly comes off and goes in the truck for a trip to the woods. In the truck I normally only use 2 bolts in opposite corners, and I tend to keep 3 or 4 of the bolts laying in my chainsaw tool box. They work as insurance. So long as I have them, I don't loose any Having a 6" bench vise to hold the bar is SO NICE when I'm out in the frozen woods trying to touch up a chain, or even doing field repairs on one of the saws, and mounted to the tail gate puts it at a great work height for me. The vise is especially useful if I happen to be using a bigger saw. Doesn't matter either way. Just chuck it in the vise, grab the correct file, and in 10 min, I'm fueled up, oiled up, sharp, and ready to go.

It came with the .325 bar and chain which matched what my 024 had on it as well as dad's 028. I like it because it has a narrower kerf than 3/8 chain making it faster because it doesn't have to remove as much wood per cut. The 9 pin rim let's me take advantage of the extra hp and torque making it faster yet. I have an 064 with an 066 top end and my 036 is faster in anything under 22".

fields_mj said:

It came with the .325 bar and chain which matched what my 024 had on it as well as dad's 028. I like it because it has a narrower kerf than 3/8 chain making it faster because it doesn't have to remove as much wood per cut. The 9 pin rim let's me take advantage of the extra hp and torque making it faster yet. I have an 064 with an 066 top end and my 036 is faster in anything under 22".

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If that is true, there is something wrong with the 064.

I'd run 3/8ths on an 036, that's what it was designed for.

c5rulz said:

If that is true, there is something wrong with the 064.

I'd run 3/8ths on an 036, that's what it was designed for.

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I'm not sure who told you that, but their full of fertilizer. The 034/036/360/361/362 was not designed to run any specific chain pitch. You can buy a 026/260/261 straight from Stihl that runs 3/8 chain just like you can buy an 066/660 that runs the same 3/8 chain. That's the nice thing about 3/8 chain. It's somewhat universal, so if you're buying it by the spool you can make loops for every saw you have. .325 chain, on the other hand, is designed to be run by smaller saws. It's narrower kerf helps the smaller saws cut a little faster. 60cc saws are a little big for .325 chiain, but Stihl did and still does offer them that way, and for good reason. Set up correctly, it makes for a very effective firewood saw.

A 7 pin rim is slow, plain and simple. They give the saw more leverage on the chain so that they can run a longer than optimal bar. So, with the 036 family it would alow me to burry a +24" bar without having to baby it so much. If this were my only saw, and I needed to cut wood that was 36" or more with it, then a 3/8 chain on a 24" bar with a 7 pin rim would be a good setup for it. Having said that, if you're cutting much 36" wood, a 60cc saw is probably on the small side for you. An 8 pin rim is actually what the 036 was designed to use for running 18"~25" bars. The 036 family has plenty of torque to pull run an 8 pin rim on these bars. I run an 18" bar because it helps keep the weight of the saw down, and it's more than long enough to most of my firewood.

The 9 pin rim is a bit of a custom setup. Don't knock it till you try it :fing32: The 036 has more hp and tq than an 18" bar needs with an 8 pin rim. I've burried in in oak and hickory, and leaned on it as hard as I could and couldn't stop it. The 9 pin speeds the chain up anohter 10% and still leaves me with plenty of torque as well. I've nocked my drag links down to .040 on this saw. It's NOT for limbing. I've got an 024 that I use for that. When you lay the chain on the wood, you had better have a good hold on the saw with both hands, beause it will pull into the wood whether you're ready for it or not, but it's very fast. Cutting 18" oak is like a hot knife through butter. Actually, I don't think that's true. I don't think a hot knife could cut through 18" of cold butter faster than my saw

There's nothing wrong with my 064. I nooldes a 24" long, 18" round of black locust in 12~15 seconds so I'm happy with it. It runs 404 chain and does just fine.

Everyone assumes that a bigger saw will always be faster than a smaller saw, and that's not the case. On wood that's 12~14" the best that a 90CC saw will ever be able to do is keep up with a 60cc saw. Both saws are going to have enough torque and HP to keep their RPMs up during the cut, so it's going to come down to the speed of the chain, how sharp the chain is, and how much wood the chain has to remove to make the cut. The 60cc saw should beat out the 90CC saw every time because it's designed and set up to cut wood that size. The 90cc saw is set up to cut bigger wood so it's going to give up chain speed for torque. It's designed to burry a bar that's over 30", so torque is critical and it's going to be set up to sacrifice the maximum chain speed in order to maintain plenty of torque for that long bar. Then there's the chain it'self. The 90cc saw is going to be wearing a chain that's designed for big wood. With a 3/8 chain, that's going to be a skip tooth, or semi skip tooth. The chain needs the extra room to be able to carry the chips 30" to the edge of the cut where they can be discharged. That's why I run 404 chain on my 064. I noodle with it a lot (it's my favorite log splitter) and that wider kerf and extra distance between the cutters gives plenty of room to get those noodles out of the cut without wadding them up into a ball where they can't be discharged very well. Either way, on my 064 it's just not set up to have the chain speed that my 036 does, nor do I want it to be. I need it to be able to pull a long bar in trees that are over 3' in diameter, and I need it to be able to noodle effectively.

I don't want to lug around a 15lb power head and a big ol bar to cut firewood that's mostly 7~18" across. The narrower kerf of the .325 chain combined with the significantly increased chain speed of the 9 pin rim makes my 036 so much more efficient that it can burry the bar and still outpace my 064 enough that I have time to come back and cut another 2"~6" from the other side. I'm very pleased with that because it means that my 036 is optimal for cutting firewood and my 064 is optimal for noodling and cutting big rounds. While I don't currently own one, I've run an 026 a few times and I would say that in their stock configuration and in wood that's 8" or under, they will out run a stock 036 with the same configuration. The 026 is tuned to a higher RPM, and in smaller wood it's still able to keeps it's addional chain speed over that of the stock 036. But bump the wood up to 12" or more, and it's a different story. The 026 no longer has the torque needed maintain chain speed while fullying engauging every cutter that's in the wood, and it starts to loose out.

At the end of the day, saws are not designed to run a chain with a certain pitch. Instead they are designed with a specific torque curve that's optimized for cutting wood of a certain size, wich will vary depending on the type of wood. Just like you don't take a mustang to a tractor pull, you don't take your John Deere to the drag strip. Okay, there are a few guys that do, but you have to admit that they're a little off.. entertaining as all get out, but a little off none the less. If the 064/066 were faster at everything, it would mean that the only reason to own the 036 would be the reduced weight, a large part of which is due to the shorter bar. Since I use the 036 mainly for bucking, it would mean that I should sell my 036 and just have the 024 and 064. That's not the case though. Each of the 3 saws has their own purpose that they excell at better than the other two. Thankfully, the farm I cut on has some pretty good size timber on it. Thus I was able to "justify" 3 saws to the wife

Well, shows what I know.:dunno:

Looks like Stihl agrees with me though.:thThumbsU

MS 362 Specifications - Professional Use
DISPLACEMENT 59.0 cc (3.6 cu. in.)
ENGINE POWER 3.4 kW (4.6 bhp)
POWERHEAD WEIGHT 5.9 kg (13.0 lbs.)
GUIDE BAR LENGTHS* (Recommended ranges) 40 to 63 cm (16" to 25")
FUEL CAPACITY 600 cc (20.3 oz.)
CHAIN OIL CAPACITY 325 cc (11.0 oz.)
OILOMATIC® CHAIN 3/8" RS3


http://www.stihlusa.com/products/chain-saws/professional-saws/ms362/

c5rulz said:

Well, shows what I know.:dunno:

Looks like Stihl agrees with me though.:thThumbsU

MS 362 Specifications - Professional Use
DISPLACEMENT 59.0 cc (3.6 cu. in.)
ENGINE POWER 3.4 kW (4.6 bhp)
POWERHEAD WEIGHT 5.9 kg (13.0 lbs.)
GUIDE BAR LENGTHS* (Recommended ranges) 40 to 63 cm (16" to 25")
FUEL CAPACITY 600 cc (20.3 oz.)
CHAIN OIL CAPACITY 325 cc (11.0 oz.)
OILOMATIC® CHAIN 3/8" RS3


http://www.stihlusa.com/products/chain-saws/professional-saws/ms362/

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Stihl USA thinks so, perhaps, but that hardly proves anything. After all, they also recommend hanging a 25" bar off a 362, so take their guidance for what it's worth.

Truth is .325" pitch is quite common across the pond on 60cc-class saws, often with 15" bars. The preference for pitch and bar length is just that, a preference. A lot of it depends on what you're cutting, especially since .325" is much less grabby and prone to throwing chains if you're cutting small wood/twigs/brush. Your particular cutting technique also plays a role in the type of bar length and chain pitch you elect to use.

I do a lot of invasive species removal and habitat restoration work, which involves cutting trees but also lots of scrubby finger-sized saplings. I've tried tons of different combinations for this work, and settled on running 13" .325" bar/chain setups on Husqvarna 238/242xp and 346xpg, because with the springy little saplings, 3/8" chain cuts rougher than .325" and jumps the bar at least a half-dozen times per day. When I'm doing regular felling or firewood work, this isn't as much of a problem, and 3/8" is favored for everything 50cc and up.

computeruser said:

I do a lot of invasive species removal and habitat restoration work, which involves cutting trees but also lots of scrubby finger-sized saplings. I've tried tons of different combinations for this work, and settled on running 13" .325" bar/chain setups on Husqvarna 238/242xp and 346xpg, because with the springy little saplings, 3/8" chain cuts rougher than .325" and jumps the bar at least a half-dozen times per day. When I'm doing regular felling or firewood work, this isn't as much of a problem, and 3/8" is favored for everything 50cc and up.

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:howdy:

I agree with the above.

The point of my previous posts is an 036 is designed for 3/8ths chain. The 346XP and 550XPG which I own were designed for .325 and I too run that chain. Running 3/8ths on a 50 cc saw is a mistake also.

BTW, the 346 is an amazing saw.:congrats::fing32:

fields_mj said:

I still disagree but that's okay. It mostly depends on what bar you're using, how you're using the saw, and what type of wood you're cutting. Either way there's not a ton of difference.

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Ah heck, sometimes I argue just for something to do.:kens:

The point I was trying to make is running the pitch that's appropriate for each saw. If going smaller on the 036 is faster, then why don't you run some of the 1/4" pitch micro on it? According to your logic, it should be absolutely blazing then.:hide: