I had about 4 cords perfect sized oak logs sitting at my moms for almost two years now. Meant to get to them last year but they were out of the way and it just never happened. When they got dropped off, I could see discoloration on the ends of some logs indicating metal in the wood. As I was cutting them over the past few days, I kept making those blueish black chips flying from the saw and I knew it was only a matter of time until I wasn’t lucky anymore. I got down to the last 6-8 logs and my luck ran out. Didn’t hit it too hard thankfully and even through the chain was dull, I slowly finished the last logs with that chain. There was no way I was risking another chain. Pictures below of where I got lucky and the one time I didn’t. Oh the fun of yard trees.
It guts me when I hit metal, or rock, because I hand file and don’t have extra chains. I do have xtra saws to finish the job My hands hurt just thinking about a metal strike.
That sucks. Never fun hitting nails or metal. At least oak gives you the warning signs with the staining where as most other woods dont.
To my mind it's almost worse when you "nick" stuff like that & dull one side of the chain. It always pains me to have to remove all the undamaged metal from the cutters on the good side. Yard trees suck, just get used to it is my mantra.
Most of my cutting is done with the logs sitting on the forks of the tractor so dirt or rocks very rarely occurs. I would be lying if I said I never accidentally hit the forks or mounting bracket...doh!
Don’t waste a chain by filing good metal off of the undamaged teeth. Just file each tooth until it is sharp and then use your taker gauge to set the rakers for each tooth. There have been a lot of chains wasted by the notion that all teeth have to be filed to the same size. Teeth filed with the raker set appropriately for its respective cutter will cut straight even if every cutter on the chain is a different size. This way when you rock the teeth on the other side…like I always seem to do…there is plenty of metal left to even it back up. Just my .02 YMMV but works for me. PS have to use a raker gauge that gauges only off of its respective tooth…not the type that span the top of 2 different cutters.
