It’s Sunday. No better day to catch up on your reading. Grab a hot cup of coffee, adult beverage, or both and crank up your chainsaw skills. Caffeine to keep you alert – alcohol to sanitize the chainsaw gash in your thigh. Joel also wrote a bit recently called What I believed when I was a little boy. Enjoy.
Chainsaw Use and Maintenance for Beginners
Here’s TUAK’s very first (and possibly last) how-to essay. If you already know how to use and maintain a chainsaw, or if you just don’t have one, proceed no further because this is rather long.
If you do own one and are feeling a bit uncertain on some related matters, click away.
BTW, if you do take the time to read this for information and find it inadequate, please leave a comment as to how it could have been improved. When writing a piece like this it’s very easy to make assumptions about what readers do and don’t already know. Y’know?
This is my Chainsaw. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The thing to remember about a chainsaw, in terms of its maintenance, is that any time you’re using it you’re beating the hell out of it. A good saw will give you years of good, trouble-free service just like any tool. But that’s only if you treat it right. You just can’t ignore maintenance and expect it to keep running, because a little abuse and neglect goes a long way.
Consider the engine, for example.
That tiny little single-cylinder, two-stroke sucker can only do its thing under full-throttle, at which it’s cranking something like 13,000 RPM. The frictional loads it has to deal with are enormous (more on them later.) It has no liquid coolant, no bath of crankcase oil, and it will drag six feet of sharpened chain links through hard, seasoned wood all day long. Or not, depending on whether you do your part.
So let’s go through the parts of the chainsaw, and what care it needs to keep running right.
Survival Sherpa 