chainsaw

If you pull on the top of the bar toward the nose, then the cutting edge is facing you and not pulling against your hands.

Ah. petrol saws have a centrifugal slippy clutch. So the motor never stalls, and the blade stops on tickover.

No need. On both my saws the chain has an odd number of teeth, so at one point there are two teeth pointing in 'the same direction'

I start and end there

I do chainsawing for about 3-4 hours at a time - and I need to sharpen several times in that period. And usually retension the chain at least once too.

Then I need a few days to recover...

I didn't regard myself as an especially heavy user of chainsaws, but I am beginning to wonder ...

who uses a chainsaw to only rip?

seriosly no problem on a petrol saw. the chain moves quite freely

Quite a few people run saws as miniature mills, sometimes with two saw heads. They tend to specialise in "character" timbers which would otherwise be uneconomic to extract and sell

There is an upsurge in small scale milling, often with lightweight,portable bandsaws and dimension saws with the likes of Lucas, Woodmiser Woodlands mills simply because most of the home grown sawmills have stopped trading since GATT made the economics bad and their "previously developed" sites became attractive for housing.

Really!? What are you cutting? I've never needed to sharpen anything like that frequently even when doing some fairly serious felling and clearing that took several hours.

Are you allowing dirt and grit anywhere near, that blunts chains very quickly.

Yebbut that's not really relevant to the sort of work we here are putting our saws too - oversized pruning in the garden!

I thought that band saws were the rip tools of choice...

I don't really see why Gatt should have impacted UK sawmills..,dealing in UK timber.

But certainly the ability to take e.g. a Woodmiser to clear up old timber and turn it into seasonable planks rather than firewood, changes things.

I was looking at te wood quality of the maple I just sectioned and thinking how many guitar necks it would have made.

AJH? He once very kindly *ripped* some Oak into scantling for me.

I'd had some fallen Oak cut up with a portable Lucas mill. This can be set up in the field around the trunk but is unable to deal with the slab in contact with the ground.

My collection of slabs were very quickly converted!

I suppose you could keep a spare chain sharpened this way.

But you still need to exercise and you either do that futiley <g> by walking nowhere and back (as we often to for the dog), doing similar in a gym [1] or allow some jobs to keep you fit.

I manually split (with a manual hydraulic splitter, rather than a powered one) a few one tonne bags worth of ash, mostly for that reason.

If you are doing something *just* to keep fit, that's the only incentive. If you have a stack of timber that *needs* splitting then you plod on though it till it's done. You are retired so there is no rush.

In the old days even just 'living' needed quite a bit of manual effort, manual jobs, few home appliances, not everone could afford mechanised transport so would walk or cycle and you even had to get up and press a button to turn over the channel on your TV. ;-)

Now you don't even have to press a button on a remote to turn your lights on or order some shopping to be delivered straight to your freezer the next day.

I've seen suggestion of making jobs like vacuuming into more of an exercise than it is by maybe stretching rather than stepping or by leaving the bag of shopping on the floor and lifting each thing into the cupboards, one_at_a_time.

Cheers, T i m

I think that not seeing or smelling any 'exhaust' doesn't help us remember we are still producing pollution.

The same reason we (had to) deal with the London smogs, are now dealing with 'other' pollution in the same place (and similarly around the world) and make domestic gas smells so we are reminded it's there.

It's the same thing with electric machines of course, assuming they aren't only using generation techniques that don't (directly) burn fossil fuels, it's just that the pollution is even further out of sight (and so further out of mind).

It's like when we 'throw something away', where is that exactly and of course 'most people' don't care as long as they don't have it any more. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

They won't be case-hardened: inappropriate for mass produced and "thin" components like this. They may be through hardened or, perhaps more likely, have the teeth induction hardened. That will, potentially, leave the tooth side harder and more prone to cracking than the back.

I'm sure they come from China, India, or Korea or some other low labour cost region. Low quality carbon steel is not significantly more expensive to produce than mild steel.

Agreed but the bow saw is hard exercise for a very limited set of muscles. The benefit will come from the moving and stacking, not the cutting.

Interesting, I didn't think that was the case for either of mine, but I will check!

Ok.

Ah, so I was closer on that then. ;-)

Not much in the way of cheap tools doesn't these days. ;-(

Ok.

Cheers, T i m

In any case you can usually see which ones you've sharpened. I never mark them.

Bill

I've noticed it with mine.

Bill

Like a little Honda motorbike.

Bill