Thread: Chainsaw sharpening

It's been around in the US for some time and was tested and discussed on the arboriste site.

The viewpoints provided indicated that it did indeed produce cutter profiles that cut reasonably fast but not as fast as what could be obtained by other forms of sharpening. The setup would be useful for users who did not use a chainsaw that often and did not have or did not want to develop chain sharpening skills.

Drawbacks include
1) Cost. A new sharpening stone is required to be used with every new chain although this has to be offset against the cost of files. Also see point 6)

2) If you ding several cutters on a bit-o-metal or a rock the damaged cutters cannot be replaced with new cutters and then sharpened to match the others, doing so will stuff the stone and a new stone will be needed. The cutters also cannot be manual ground down.

3) If you run two chains you need to make sure you sharpen with the right stone or you will bugger the chain and stone

4) Users might be tempted to sharpen conventional chains with this setup and bugger both the chain and stone.

5) This is subtle but important for those that want fastest cutting speeds. The raker setting is fixed and cannot be varied to get the chain to bite more wood as would be possible by bigger power heads.

6) the recommended number of time the chain can be sharpened is 5 to 15 times. This actually pretty miserable since it means the chain can only be touched up at most 15 times although it can probably bet done a few more times that this. To reduce the load on the powerhead when cutting Aussie hardwoods it makes sense to touch up a chain after every tank of mix. Even one or two swipes of a file to de-glint the cutters makes a big difference when cutting. This enables chains to be touched many dozens of times during its life time. A light touch up cannot be done with this device as even a one second application removes much more metal from the cutters than 2 swipes of a file.