Welcome to Strider tree gear today
I'm hanging gears a little bit back on the ground.
I want to talk about sharpening your saws.
This first video is going to be all about using the round file.
A few different tips and tricks related to that.
Sometimes you can't just swap a chain out.
Sometimes you want to save them, make them last or you're way out, and
you've got some files in the truck, but that's it.
And so, it's just critical to know how to sharpen with files.
It can be fast and efficient, and you don't lose much time.
In fact, you can save a lot of time if you can keep that edge sharp,
so
stay tuned!
That's what we're talking about.
Here we go.
Okay, so there's a lot of different types of files involved with
sharpening when it comes to just freshening up a blade or a chain,
like this one, or like most of the smaller chains.
All you really need is a round file, most of the time. Eventually, if
you file enough times, you take it bad enough hit
Then you're going to need a raker file, which is, which is this one
it's flat.
But the edge doesn't have any grooves any texture to it.
So the edges smooth.
Sometimes you get these in the rounded and that's kind of nice because
When you're filing the rakers, you don't want to accidentally nick
the tip of your tooth with the edge of your file.
So I show you, I don't usually use this when I usually use one of these
Square files for that and there's ways to avoid nicking the tooth
besides having that flat, but I'll show you that in another video.
So today, I'm going to be mostly working with a round file.
Now, files are like sharp knives, essentially, if you have a bunch of
sharp knives and you just bundle them up together and they sit there
and bang around on each other.
all the time they're going to get dull really fast, and they're not going
to be any good for anything.
Files are the same way.
This is an extremely hard metal that makes up this file.
And if I take the two of these files and banging them together, or
they're sitting in the back of a truck, in a roll and
they're all rattling together
they get ruined, really, really fast like just stupidly fast.
So it's really important to have efficient
sharpening, you need good, sharp fresh files.
And if you don't want to have your files be one time use,
Then you got to get something like this
that keeps them all separate.
So these are the files
I use most of the time.
Each one has its own little slot and it keeps them from banging on each
other and they last much longer that way.
So choosing the correct size file is critical.
I'm going to demonstrate why. If we look at this tooth right here.
I've got three different size files.
Now this one's too small and and you can tell when I put the
round part of the file here on the inside of the tooth
there's a lot of movement up and down, and the hook part is going to
come over, over the top of the file.
If I were to push it in and actually file it down and that makes too
thin of a profile up top which one, gets dull really quickly and two,
creates a weak edge.
I mean, that's and then it's also going to leave more gullet than you
want.
So that's too small of a file.
And then if we go the other way,
And I've got too big of a file.
You'll see when I put that in there.
The cutting edge this top edge right here.
Hits the file in a place where if I were to cut that instead of
sharpening this edge,
I'm going to blunt it.
I'm going to put almost a vertical, almost a vertical face on that.
It's not going to have a nice sharp taper at this angle and you can
kind of tell you can tell, you know, fairly well.
Also, you can sort of see the Gap right here between the inside of the
gullet, and that means that the file is not getting all the way to the
inside.
Which is means it's just too big.
It's too big of a file and you'll end up blunting it.
So you can get away with a smaller file.
So if I only had this one file, I could make it work by lifting
up on it a little bit and scraping out the underside of that top edge.
Because that top edge is where the rubber meets the road.
That's where the cutting happens.
I can kind of get away with this in an emergency, but generally you
want to have the file that fits your saws and they're cheap enough.
You can have a whole bunch of different sizes that are a couple of
of bucks apiece.
So it's no big deal.
So anyway, this is the happy medium file here.
This is the correct size.
When I put it in there.
You can see the hooked
edge comes over the top, comes over not quite to the midline of the
file
I'm not sharpening it into a vertical either and then it
fills in the whole gullet.
So as I start to file this and I pull pressure towards me.
It's going to sharpen the entire edge of that tooth all the same time.
Now, I can tell both by the sound and by how slow this file is cutting
that this file is dull.
It's not a very good one.
So, I'll probably swap that out here with a different one.
Okay.
So the first thing you need to consider here, as you start filing is
are your angles.
So the the difficult part about learning how to hand file
well, is getting your body used to holding very tight, precision
angles.
So the angle of the file relative, the face of the bar.
When you're around filing is just 90 degrees.
So vertical here, horizontal here, 90 degrees.
And you're pushing the file straight across, and you need to be really
level and consistent.
The more wiggle there is on that plane, the more inconsistent your
tooth, the top edge of your tooth is going to be and it's going to
dramatically decrease the life of your your edge.
So your edge will go dull faster and it's not going to produce as sharp
of an edge either.
So it's really critical that you have a very even consistent stroke
that stays flat.
Most guides that they give you put a little support here and here so
that it's a little bit easier to keep that flat.
And using a guide is a good idea when you're first learning
because you can get your body used to that maintaining that really
consistent rhythm.
But that's something that through thousands of sharpening, thousands
and thousands of chains that I've sharpened
I've gotten consistent enough to where I don't, I really don't need a
guide and anyone can get that good.
It's just a matter of repetition and practice but you can see I keep
it really steady as far as the angle and steady as I can and that
makes a difference.
The other angle you need to consider is the angle from the top.
Down this direction.
So this is the other angle that makes a big difference.
If you're too blunt this direction.
It's going to cut more slowly.
If you're too steep this direction, then you're going to end up with a
dull tip more quickly.
And it's going to have too much grab.
You want it somewhere in the middle.
I believe the angle that they tell you is 30°.
Most files on the handle here.
Have a little guide.
So if I put the file up against are like that, it actually indicates
roughly the angle
I'm supposed to be using, and I tend to sharpen my
At a little bit of a steeper angle than the default.
So I'll tend to bring mine a little bit more this way.
As you can kind of see by this tooth.
It's a little bit of a steeper angle.
Most good chains, have a little line right here, that indicates the
angle as well.
So as long as you're keeping your edge parallel to this line, then
you're doing a pretty good job and you're pretty clothes.
You can be a little bit more off on this angle and it causes less of a
difference than if you are off
on this direction, the direction I showed you before.
So this angle we're trying to maintain that roughly roughly 30 degrees here
30 degrees here as you push that through the stroke.
Now if there's a lot of wiggle in this, what happens is this edge
stops being straight and it curves you end up with a curved edge and
it cuts poorly, does not cut as well.
You want a nice point here
A really straight line edge
as your finished product.
So, once again, as little wiggle as possible to get that as close as
possible, the way you tell, whether something is sharp or dull is not
by the finger test.
You can't scrape your finger on there and really be able to see what
you're looking for.
Is if you look at your edge with the light coming at it, from this
direction, if you can see, a shiny reflective edge, then your saw is
dull, because it means that this edge is rounded off enough, that
light is reflecting off of it. A really sharp edge
will have such a small thin line of metal right there,
that you can't see it.
Essentially disappears the edge disappears.
So once it's rounded off and shiny, then you know it needs
to be sharpened.
So this is a sharpened edge.
Hopefully you can kind of see what that looks like.
If you can't trust me you can see it in real life.
This edge just disappears.
There's no shiny reflectiveness off the top edge.
And so that edge is sharp.
So the last thing we need to deal with
once all the teeth have been sharpened, is the raker.
So this part of the link is called the raker, and this is
what prevents the tooth from biting too deep.
If this raker is too low
it's been filed down too far,
then this will try to take too much wood out, it'll stop
the blade.
It'll just dig in and stop the blade cold and it makes it really
difficult to impossible to cut.
If this raker's too low. if it's too high, then
no matter how sharp this is, it'll block the wood from coming in contact
with the tooth and that'll make it cut really poorly.
You'll have to put a lot of pressure and it'll cut slowly and even if
it is sharp, so the height difference between this raker
and this top of this tooth is critical to a good sharpening.
The way you get that right is with a raker gauge.
It's a metal plate that lays over the top of the tooth of this
tooth and the raker and it provides a stop for your raker file as the
raker file goes over the top of the raker, and it makes it so that you
can't file it down too far.
So using a raker gauge is the correct way and probably the only way to
get good consistent results to set your rakers.
As a general rule,
I tend to put, you know, roughly two swipes.
Sometimes just one swipe about every third
sharpening of this tooth, which is a really, really rough way to do
it.
and I have some, some sort of ways that I've figured out how to
keep that balanced.
But the appropriate way to do it is with a raker gauge
Okay.
So ideally you take your rakers down with a raker gauge, but I don't
ever have one on me and I don't even keep one in the truck half the
time.
But what I do is I use a roughly a three to one ratio
of filing.
I'll file these roughly three times to
every one time I do the rakers, but I'll do the rakers
as soon as I pull the chain out of the box.
I'll take two swipes off the rakers because they
come out of the factory
A little bit slow, a little slow cutting and these new saws can cut fast
if you take the rakers down a little bit.
So that's it.
Takes a little more meat off.
It's called a hungry chain.
If your chains a little bit hungry then its trying to take too big of a
bite because the rakers are too low, but I'll show you how I do that.
Basically, what I do is, I take my finger and I cover the tip of the,
the tip of the tooth that I don't want to hit with the raker file.
Then I take my raker and I don't file quite flat.
I'll roll it over a little bit and put a little bit of an angle on it.
There's actually a line on the raker that indicates roughly the angle
you want.
But I'll go like this and I'll put one, two stripes off of that and it
rounds it over a little bit and that's okay.
You don't have to worry, the geometry of this doesn't matter
very much
The geometry of this doesn't matter that much.
If it's rounded it's okay if it's a little bit weird and wonky.
It's okay.
As long as the top of it isn't too low relative this tooth.
I think I could actually take a little bit more off of this one right
now and to get it a little bit lower relative that tooth.
So I'm going to take another swipe off that.
All right.
Here's the big secret.
Right?
If you've got a chain that is really rattly, or really inconsistent or
Cuts far too much on one side than the other.
If your teeth are fairly consistently sharp because if they're not
consistently sharp, then it'll do that
No matter what.
But if your teeth are all sharp, you just sharpened all of them, but it's
still doing that
what you need to do is, you need to go back and look at all of your
rakers and see which ones are really shiny.
So this one that I just filed is going to have lines cross hatching
file lines across this way, but one that is really shiny is one that
is rubbing in the wood and all the the
Hatching is going to be worn off because it's making a lot of contact
with the wood.
If you go back and just take one, swipe off the shiny ones
just the shiny rakers.
Then you'll find that
you can actually balance out an uneven saw by slowly filing down the
rakers that are too high, and then pretty soon
they'll all be equally shiny because they're all making roughly equal
contact in the wood.
As you get to look at these a lot
you'll actually be able to eyeball
When which ones are not high enough and which ones are closed, but
it's a matter of like, thousands of an inch.
It's very close proximity.
Most of these are actually are too high.
This one's really too high.
That one's about good.
Now.
That's the one I did.
This one's a little bit too high.
That one's pretty close.
It could take a little bit off, but you'll start to see it after a
while.
So do you need a raker gauge? no.
Should you use it?
Yeah, probably until you get the hang of exactly what it needs to be.
So I should note that having the chain a little bit tighter than you
normally would.
When you're running the saw is helpful for sharpening, you get less
chatter.
So it makes things a little bit smoother for sharpening.
If you have the chain tension higher than normal, you just gotta
remember to turn it back down because too high of a chain tension will
wear out your bearings, your crank bearings
prematurely. don't take lots of swipes off
the rakers, never do more than one or two at a time without testing
it.
because too much material off
the raker will ruin a chain until you sharpen the heck out of the
teeth again, so I almost never do more than two swipes on the rakers
at any time.
So some people who are severely right-handed will try to do both sides
with the right hand.
So like I'm over here and I'm pushing this way.
I can kind of do it like that and if you've got a vice that works
fine, you're holding in the vice.
You can go right hand it here and then you can switch sides.
I can go right hand it over here and make the file and do the file you
can efficiently and that's fine.
But when you are
on the ground
and I'll show you this in a minute.
It's hard to hold things steady out in the field.
A lot of times
I don't have a vice.
So I just learned to do it with my left hand because my right arm, my
or my legs
I can actually hold the saw
steady
And I can do the all the, all the right hand teeth with my left hand.
Pushing across.
And then I can do the left hand teeth with my right hand
going the other direction.
And the field this is how I do it. Put it on the ground
I'll actually put my, my foot, like the crook of my ankle over the
handle and I squeeze the saw in between my legs.
and then I file right over the top
Not perfect, but not bad.
Let's try some Oak.
Thank you for joining me!
On Strider Tree Gear today.
Hope you found that useful, all you folks who are round filing your
saws.
And if you got any more questions comments, your own little techniques
that you like to use
I'd love to hear it.
Shoot them down in the comments.
And if there's any other little skills that you'd like to know more
about, let me know as well.
I'd be happy to make a video on it.
Catch you next time here at Strider tree gear.