All About Chainsaws: Sharp Advice

I’ve used a lot of chainsaws over the years, but oh my goodness, I’ve never done it professionally! You would not believe how many people it takes to clear 15-20 acres of downed old limbs! To accomplish this monumental task in any time frame less than “forever,” we needed lots of chainsaws. As usual, we didn’t want to spend an overabundance of cash on this project either so we bought two used Stihls, one new Poulan Pro, and one new Craftsman. I don’t really want to turn this into a product review, but the only one that survived the initial clean-up was the Poulan. Go figure, right? Anyway, with heavy use, it turns out the little clear rubber button-style pump used to prime the fuel system goes bad and has to be replaced every 50-60 operating hours. No big deal really, unless you can’t get replacement primer pumps. It also turns out that every so often, some manufacturers change their design and the “old style” parts just aren’t available anymore. That’s what happened to us.

We did finally find a way to modify “new” parts to go in old machines and got them all running again, but that did take several hours of “small engine maintenance.” The real trick to keeping a 2-cycle engine running for a long time is to never overheat it and to never run it too hard before it’s warmed-up. Most of these things are aluminum or some alloy mixed with aluminum and are very subject to expansion when heated. If you run the machine hard before the cylinder and engine block are warmed-up you run a strong chance of burning right through a cylinder wall and making that particular tool completely worthless. We were fortunate enough to know this already, but we did have a buddy come out to try out his new chainsaw and he burned it up the first day. He was not a happy camper! We run all our 2-cycle motors 1-3 minutes at idle before putting them to work and all of them have stayed in good running condition. (We also now have 3 pole-saws for trimming and pruning.)

So, with the proper equipment, we’ve developed a method for trimming, pruning, and moving the cut debris. One guy uses a pole saw on the tree and doesn’t worry about the shape of what’s cut so he can move on quickly. A second guy moves the dropped branch out of the way as quickly as possible and determines if Chip can eat it. If it won’t fit in the feed hopper easily, he directs a third guy with a chainsaw where to cut it so it does fit in the hopper. After preparing several of these branches, they’re loaded on a trailer and hauled to a specific area where we put all the chipped material. (We don’t want to chip everywhere. We want the chipped pile to grow so it will compost itself near the bottom making very rich, healthy mulch and soil.) After clocking the entire procedure, we’ve figured out it takes about 20 man-minutes per tree to trim, move, reduce, load, transport, and chip a tree’s worth of cuttings. And that’s if you’re not in a hurry and taking your time about it. One day we had eight people working the project and were able to get roughly an acre done in three hours! Stayed tuned for a video on how to actually trim these trees! Of course, I have no idea when we’ll get around to actually shooting a video of this.