What's up everyone? Welcome to The Durbin Compound! Well, we're not actually at
The Durbin Compound today. We're at Ethan's house, a friend that I've made in the chainsaw game.
So, I came over to Ethan's house and we're talking about square ground chains. So, I was convinced when
Ethan came over and he spanked me with his saws. It really didn't matter what I had. I think I threw
every saw I possibly could at him, and my round ground chains just did not make it happen.
So, he's got a square grinder--the Simington what S-451-C? Correct. I think it's the only one that you can get right now.
And he's over here filing some chains for me. So what we're going to do is a quick montage.
We are going to grind a work..his work grind..which he would use for standard firewood cutting.
And then we're going to grind a race grind. So, there's only a few degrees of difference between the two chains.
i'm going to put up my best hand-filed round file ground chain. We're going to do
that one first. We're going to go through cherry. I think it's just about the size of a 20" bar.
We're going to go through the log. I'm going to do a, basically, an average of three cuts.
Three cuts on the round. Three cuts on the work grind. And then three cuts on the race grind.
So, you guys will see it firsthand. Probably even put in there me changing over the bar. So the saw
is arguably the same temperature. The outside temperature is the same. The log is the same.
It's all as best as we can get it to be constant. So, all your variables don't change much.
It's not like we're changing days and things like that. So, I hope this will be an informative video for you.
I will roll in all the details I can about the chain and the details in the bottom,
while you're watching the video. Maybe this will convert you to want to look into the square grind
just like it did me. So, I think about a two second difference in this cut is probably what
we'd be looking at...is about two seconds faster. So, if this video comes out first
it will be a, you know, this will be something--a preface to a future video. I'm going to pick
Ethan's brain on chain. He's a young, sharp dude and he's just blowing my mind with all this stuff.
So I'm getting nerdy. I'm getting in the details. And we're going to put it on camera.
So, if this video comes out first, well, then you know about it. If that video comes out first, then this
is the second video. So I hope you guys enjoy. I'm going to shut the comments off for this video.
Also preface that because I don't want any negativity. I don't care about all that stuff
You're going to see me not using PPE. You're going to see me untraditionally holding the saw
because I don't want to put downward force on it. So I'm turning the comments off. You guys can't even
leave comments on this video. Thanks! Have a nice day! Of course, we'll see you guys in the outro.
All right, guys! So this first chain up is a factory RS chain from Stihl. This is running 3/8" .50.
I took a chain right out of the box and I just touched it up a little bit with a round file
to make it as sharp as I could possibly get it. Now I found that this makes it really, really chattery
in this cherry log. If you saw the first part there, the first cut was really rough and
not desirable whatsoever. But this is pretty much as sharp as I could get a round ground chain.
Something that I would be proud of and, you know, it put down some pretty good times for a round ground chain.
So, I tried to keep the dogs out of the wood, in order for it to glide as best I could.
That's why I cut the right side of the log. So, we're going to swap over to one of Ethan's work grind chains.
So this work grind chain is a Stihl RS chain. We literally just converted it
during the montage, to a square ground chain. So, the angle on the top plate is about 25 degrees.
So it's a little bit more of a blunt angle at the top plate and roughly about a 25 degree angle,
or sorry, roughly a 35 degree angle back on the side cutter. So, it laid down a pretty
impressive time. So what I knew...what I noticed a lot about this chain was how smooth it was.
So it's butter smooth in the cut. There was no chatter whatsoever. Really impressive grind and
just in a couple minutes on the Simington grinder did we make this chain absolutely awesome.
So, it put down some pretty darn good times. So, the third chain that I wanted to check out was Ethan's race grind.
So, his race grind chain...we're going to swap it over right here. What he does for the race grind
is pretty much the exact same thing as the square ground work grind. Just changes the angles
a little bit. So, what he does is the top plate is about at a 30 degree angle or what you
would usually cut at. But what he does is he takes some material out from underneath the cutter.
So, underneath the cutter, he takes out a lot more. Let's listen to him here.
Yeh, when I change it to more of a race grind I'll get further under that. Yep! And you make that steeper. Right!
Gotcha! What I was saying when the chain gets back, it's harder to stay out of the tie straps. Yes! Yep!
So this chain still had a little bit of chatter to it, but it was still a smooth cutter.
Still impressively fast! And I didn't get some of the best cuts that I wanted to. I kind of
did get a couple bunk cuts there at the beginning. So, I went ahead and gave it a bonus round.
So after we're done with this cut, we're going to go into the bonus round and we'll see you guys in the outro.
All right, guys! So there you have it! There are the results. I'm going to post them here
in the picture in picture here and show you just how the times went down. So, the square grind was
definitely 1 & 1/2 seconds faster in this 20" cut than the round grind.
So, that's a 14% increase in speed through this cut. So, obviously it's all subjective to the type of wood.
Is it hardwood? Soft wood? How hard is it? How soft is it? There are so many variables in these tests
that you could throw them at me all day and I'm never going to make an absolutely 100%
fail-proof test. But this is a pretty darn good comparison here and showing that the
square grind does a 1 & 1/2 second advance on the round grind. So, we were hoping for a little bit more.
I'm sure that in a longer cut, obviously the lead would go further. In the future, if you stick around
for the videos, and you subscribe to the channel, we'll be doing a lot more comparisons.
I'm going to do a 28" check on a white oak log that's completely dry. It's at like 8.7%
humidity level right now, or moisture level, and a completely dry log. And we're going to test
this round grind, square grind. We're going to test it all. I'm going to test a factory square ground chain.
We're going to show some modifications to the saw and just exactly what you get from each modification.
So, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I hope that it was very informative to
those of you who may be considering square grind. Click subscribe to make sure that you see the next
chainsaw videos as I come out with them. And, well, it's time to give me a thumbs up. Or a thumbs down.
Whatever you guys are into! And if you're subscribed to the channel and
you're interested in this kind of stuff, well, we'll see you in the next video.