For the last part of 2023, I was clearing our ranch of the mid-to-larger pine beetle kills. 15-26 inch diameter, 45-75 feet tall. Fell, limb, buck the larger trunks to 6' lengths for erosion control in big gullies, haul the rest for erosion control in smaller gullies. We have more than enough trunks bucked to 17" length for firewood. Winter's here along with some big snow drifts on the land that make hauling the wood impractical. So I'm just cutting and let it lay until spring.

I can currently get to an area with smaller trees. 12-17 inch diameter, 45-60 feet tall. I felled and cut up 20 trees in January. Here are 5 of the 8 I did one day with the Stihl 261. This consumed about 2.5 tanks of fuel. I didn't sharpen the full chisel chain (Rapid Super, yellow) after this, because it was cutting well. I did 3 more trees and burned almost 4 tanks of fuel that day. The chain was still cutting at the end, but it wasn't at its best. I should have lightly sharpened after the first 5 trees. I normally put felling cuts just above knee height, and left all that day's stumps standing.



I returned the following weekend with the Stihl 310. First priority was to level the prior week's stumps. The 310 is an old saw, with an old bar, using old chains. The bark low to the ground always has some amount of dirt. Cutting through this dirt dulls chains and increases bar wear. Furthermore, saws & bars get hotter when they're leveling stumps, so I prefer to do this with an older saw. Here are the first 5 stumps of the day -- the 5 trees pictured above. I'll keep the 17" logs to firewood, and the short cookies go into gullies. You'll notice the cuts on these logs are smooth and straight -- meaning the chain is sharp and the bar is in decent shape. A few of the cuts were longer than the 16" bar length, so I was working the saw around a good portion of the stump.



I burned up 4 tanks of fuel with the Stihl 310 that day, dropping 6 more trees. I sharpened the chain at lunch, after 2 tanks. The chain was cutting pretty well, but I knew it wouldn't be doing well after a couple more tanks. Two passes on each tooth with the 2-in-1 sharpener, kneeling on the ground, took me 5 minutes at most. The saw cut noticeably better on the third tank. Here's the chain at home, after the third and fourth tank. Some might consider this tooth sharp, as it still produced chips -- not sawdust. But the silver-colored reflection on the tooth from 2 to 8 o'clock shows that it's not sharp.



Here's a side view of this chain prior to sharpening. I believe I have 7 old chains for this saw -- all 15 to 20 years old. This is Stihl semi-chisel green chain, with the bumpers in addition to rakers. Not the most efficient chain, as the bumpers increase drag on the wood. But it cuts with minimal vibration on old, dry branches of ridiculously hard crystalized pitch. About half the cutting heads have been ground/filed away. My old chains vary from about 1/3 ground away to about 3/4 ground away. They all work well.



Here's the same chain after 3 passes on each tooth. Took less than 5 minutes -- using a cheap clamp-on vise to stabilize the bar, on an old Black & Decker folding bench. There is no light reflection on any tooth, meaning the cutting heads are knife sharp. This is easily seen in the cutter in the upper part of the pic. The cutter in the lower part of the pic is just as sharp -- the angle of the light is producing a reflection from the underside of the cutting head, making it appear it's not knife-sharp. But it is.

I guess I should be sharpening the chains as I cut. All I've done is change to a sharp chain once it starts cutting slower and the chips start getting smaller.

You're doing a nice job clearing the standing dead pine to minimize the fire spread potential. It's a shame those damn beetles are killing so many. Pine are my least favorite trees to cut, thankfully I don't have to cut them much anymore, but we had to remove hundreds of live ones around 60'- 70' tall to clear areas for building a house and garage, and just to let more sun get through. They were planted in fields around 60 years for the purpose of taking land out of production.

Using a saw for 5 hours a day for several weeks at a time, I got pretty good at sharpening a chain on a tailgate. Dull is frustrating.

Ridewv, I was thinking about your new chain hitting a rock and I didn't see either one of these options mentioned anywhere in the thread.

Have you ever tried a cant hook or peavey with a log stand to prevent your chainsaw blade from touching the ground when bucking logs?


The less expensive option for all diameter logs and the best option for larger diameter logs is cutting ~50% and then using a peavey or cant hook to roll before cutting the other half.

I find a cant hook more useful than a peavey. I've tried the cant hook with a log stand. A log stand is useful for some people. It does get logs off the ground, reducing the chances of grounding the bar and dulling the chain. I find the log stand is an extra piece of metal on my cant hook that just increases its weight and makes it unwieldy. It just depends on use.

Log stands can be rated to carry a lot of weight, however I find that lifting/rolling a lot of weight is impractical. I use my cant hook (without a log stand) to roll heavier bucked logs, and to roll longer limbed but unbucked trees on the ground. When bucking logs on the ground, it ultimately comes down to bar & tip awareness. Anyone using a saw very much will eventually put the bar tip on the ground. I've messed up a couple of chains this way over the years, but it's been a long time since the last one.

Here's an example my cant hook use, from December. 26" diameter, 54 feet tall -- beetle kill from 3+ years ago. Some of the weaker & rotted branches became widow makers. I did the arborist trick of using a throw line to pull most of them down prior to felling. The bigger branches were full of pitch -- hard as nails, heavy, and not going anywhere.



On the ground, using the Stihl 400cm, 25" bar, skip tooth chain.



Limbs cut & hauled off, and the bucked parts of the trunk that I'll stake down in erosion gullies. I used the Stihl 310 for much of the limbing work, and the Stihl 400 for bucking. My 42" cant hook is leaning against the stump. The logs going to gullies are bucked to 6' lengths. With large diameter trees, I absolutely need a cant hook to roll the trunk for bucking. Even then, there's a lot of grunting. According to an online log calculator for pine, the approximate weights for 6' green logs are:
- 848 pounds for 24" diameter
- 589 pounds for 20" diameter
- 377 pounds for 16" diameter
Very few of our beetle-kill pines are dry. They may not weigh quite as much as wet wood, but given the high pitch content of our trees, they're probably pretty close.