Job includes Metal

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Almost off-topic but it reminds me of the explanation why some sawmills in north east France use a series of parallel blades (up and down movement) rather than a band saw type blade. After so many wars, the trees were full of shrapnel and various bullets that it became more cost effective to run multiple blades and take the time to set their spacing.
 
Fiber glass is ... glass, which is made with a good amount of silica. It's very tiny and supple when alone, but is kept rigid and straight by the polyester or epoxy resin. And it's still harder than steel. For your beloved made cutting edges on your chain, it's a lost battle.

I did a lot of sharpening today. The subject was a dead sweeping ash in a gravel area. I expected some gravel at the stump. I got that but not only. I found a nail, a 1" 1/4 steel tube in the 36" bulge at the trunk's top, with two horizontal T posts. Nothing showed outside of course. The dismantling of this big chunk of wood was interesting. Old but hard steel, even if the tube was well thinned by the rust. The Tposts bent 3 teeth on my 201T (trying to preserve the 20" 462's chain). Add to that a nice sized stone inside the stump, just kissing the top of the area supposedly free of gravel. It trashed the side of my 462's teeth. That means a serious bunch of file's strokes.:X
 
Steve Mack said:
Metal, ha. Try concrete, that blunts chain really fast.

I actually met a guy that "saved" a tree I took down once by filling it with concrete. It didn't work.
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One client has a lovely, perfectly healthy looking sugar maple in his yard maybe 35-40years old. No obvious defects, solid looking trunk. Apparently struck by a snowplow years ago, killing about 1/3 of the trunk which rotted away. At least he was kind enough to tell me that there's about 4 bags of concrete in the tree now! I'd never have guessed.

I've thought carbide chain would be worth having on a big saw occasionally, darn expensive but could save the day sometimes.
 
I wanted to buy a carbide chain when I began in the job, but I didn't got one. It's expensive, it cuts slowly, it's a bitch to sharpen, and it doesn't take well the hits on solid objects. It's somewhat limited to the dirty bark. No stone, no steel.
I'm pretty sure that in this ash, the carbide chain would had been good for the trash can and still wouldn't had finished the cuts.
I sharpened my 201T's chain. That's not 3 teeth bent, but 3 teeth not bent ! These damn T-posts are really hard to cut !:/:
 
The right kind of carbide should work, especially in a full house (cutter per DL) design, and patience letting the saw do the work at whatever pace it wants. They make non abrasive metal chop saws that have a carbide tipped blade, looks just like a circular saw blade used for wood, but has a lot more teeth, and it can easily cut through steel hundreds of times.
 
Nutball said:
The right kind of carbide should work, especially in a full house (cutter per DL) design, and patience letting the saw do the work at whatever pace it wants. They make non abrasive metal chop saws that have a carbide tipped blade, looks just like a circular saw blade used for wood, but has a lot more teeth, and it can easily cut through steel hundreds of times.
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They do make such a saw but it spins much slower than an abrasive, about half the rpm and half again as much HP.
 
Mine is the same 1800w as an abrasive, but I was wondering about tooth speed. The cutters would be heating from contact with wood, but their duty cyle against metal in a tree would be low, so they should hold up to heating from high speed metal cutting I would think. There is a method I'm still experimenting with where you can turn hard metal on a lathe by using much faster than normal surface speeds. The heat is supposed to go more into the metal chip softening the metal so it can cut. I think you can still go too fast because I would dull cutters doing that on large diameters. It seemed to work well on small diameters at the speed I used.
 
Yep 1800w but take in account the gearing. Torque. The dry cut saw has more HP/torque at the wheel than an abrasive wheel.
 
I have such a saw for cutting metal and it surprised me. Take your time and let it cuts at its pace. Easy for the motor, almost no heat spent in the surrounding metal and a way nicer cut than the abrasive disk. But in the wood, you don't know where the metal is, if there's metal at all. You just can't dismantle the trunk at this pace. It would take forever. Even if the carbide teeth cut the wood more slowly than the steel ones, I fear that's still too quick to approach carelessly a unknown foreign object.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I clearly recall about 10 years ago some "wood" users reporting that their chains were highly damaged with many carbide inserts broken or teared out when they hit something.
 
Personally there is no way I am spending that much for a chain. All the metal I have hit really does not destroy regular saw chain "that" badly. I have destroyed some top handle chains hitting metal but few and very far between. I hit a nail last week and the saw just cut thru it with damage to only three cutters. Concrete though really knocks the crap out of them.
 
I wonder how a scaled up powersharp chain would do? Something with a somewhat self sharpening design. Normal saw chain is a flat blade, which when blunted can't cut very well as it tries to push away from the wood. Something with small sharp teeth that have a way of wearing down to sharper areas of the tooth would be ideal I think.
 
Why can't they work that table saw stopper gizmo into a bar that automatically engages the chain brake when it detects metal? Then you could break out the carbide!
 
Our chainsaws have already the brake system, not as efficient than the tablesaw's but well enough for the purpose and safe for the chainsaw's integrity. The trigger can be actuated easily by an electromagnet but the detector would be the tricky part. It can't be a short circuit system like the one on the tablesaw because we don't have the steel intruder wired. Maybe a magnetic sensor, IDK. That should be interesting to develop.

Too bad it wouldn't "see" the stones.
 
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