Ripping Chain

[weisyboy]

it seams everyone has a difrent opinion on what type of chain rips best.

so here it is
what is the best type of ripping chain for use with alaskan mills?

[DJ’s Timber]

I use a skip tooth at 10° on the slabber and am going to try standard 10° ripping chain on the alaskan mill and if it bogs the CS to much, I will just start grinding teeth off till it's right

[weisyboy]

i hav found tat normal cain at 10* is no better than using a cross cut chain

[Ironwood]

I use Oregon 27RA .404" pitch, and have never had a problem with it.

edit: have stuck with the standard 15 degrees, I file the rakers down between 30 & 40 thou, depending on what I am cutting.

[weisyboy]

my origan skip tooth chain is sharpend at 30* (as standard)and the rakers are at 30 tou.

[Ianab]

This is the chain that the Peterson guys were using with their Alaskan / Skillmill setup. A real extra-skip sort of config. Basically there was just one pair of cutters in the wood at any one time. I think the theory here is that every cutter has to to slice through the wood fibres every pass, so if you can keep the available power concentrated on a couple of cutters they work at their max efficiency. Rather than having 20 cutters just scraping away dust.

Cheers

Ian

[weisyboy]

that type of chain is mainly used on lucas style mills.
there are many difrent types of skip tooth chains but they all work on the same principal,
there is more room between teethso it can clean out better and dig in further.

[Ianab]

Yup.. I think it is the same chain as they use one their big slabbers. But this was running on a MS880 chainsaw, seemed to do pretty well. They were sawing some pretty wild Matai logs that were dug from a swamp.. like 1800? year old stuff. It was 'well seasoned', but they cut it up OK

Cheers

Ian

[BobL]

i hav found tat normal cain at 10* is no better than using a cross cut chain

That's probably because all your other variables (# teeth on sprocket, bar length, engine size, state, tuning etc) are not optimiized.

Even if everything is optimised, demonstrating that a specific type of chain generally works better than another is still difficult because one can only ever cut the same piece of wood under exactly the same conditions once. One way of measuring chain performance is to repeatedly measure cutting speed (cm/min) over a range of conditions and do some statistical comparisons. The guys that matter on arborist who measure their ft/min cutting speeds generally say that if everything else is right they can demonstrate a clear difference between cross cut and ripping chain.

[bobsreturn2003]

i use standard ripping chain with a pair of teeth side by side then take out 5 pair another pair.repeated throughout the chain ,on a 5 foot bar slabber , tried a normal chain ,and found ,the lucas pattern just as fast . and a lot quicker to sharpen , have normal and skip tooth on my shindaiwa 757- 3foot bar and prefer the skip as its a long bar for 5.5hp . am cutting maple cedar etc ,a sharp chain cuts really well ,and look for chips . when you got dust its blunt . best of luck . cheers bob

[bobsreturn2003]

hey guys hold the grinder checked my chains and the sequence is side by side pair then 5or 6 single teeth removed then pair 1left 1right then 5-6 teeth removed and so on , sharpening is a lot easier ,and cuts fine ,thats my opinion , will listen to all ideas ,what do you do ? cheers bob