Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

I've been doing a lot of cutting recently and my saw is starting to cut in an arc towards the left when looking at it from the operator position. I've been doing most of my own sharpening and according to the instruction this can be suaced by the cutters on one side of the chain being a different length from the others. The problem is they don't say which sid is at fault nor do they way wether the cutters are to long or to short. Does anyone know which I should be fixing?

The best instructions I've found so far are the ones that come with the Oregon sharpening guide. Does anyone no of any other good sources of info?

I think that the duller side of the chain is opposite of the direction the bar is being pulled. If it's cutting to the left, do more sharpening strokes to the teeth on the right side of the chain.

That makes sense to me, the problem is that what I've read says its a problem with one side having longer cutters than the other, not how sharp they are. So you can have both sets of cutters being equally sharp but one side is shorter than the other due to over sharpening. I suspect its the "long" side that cuts more and therefore I need to sharpen more on the left side. The trouble is I haven't been able to confirm my suspicion.

I'm going to try and measure the cutters and see what I can find. If one side is noticably shorter than the other I will shorten the long side and then redo the depth guages.

  nibbler  you are correct.    all cutters have to be the same length.  find the shortest one from both sides and all the rest need to be cut to that length.   we have an oregon chain sharpener here in the shop which makes things a little easier. 

I have the Oregon manual sharpening guide as well and it does seem to be quite nice. I've gone through and sharpened the blade again including setting the depth guages. I noticed that the right hand cutters appeared to still have some damage which I thought I had already fixed. When I tested the chain cut quite nicely so I think the problem was damaged ( a.k.a. dull) right hand cutters. This caused the left hand cutters to cut more than the right hand ones and hence the saw waundered to the left.

Here's a question about the Oregon saw guide.

When you shift the angles to sharpen the "other" cutters ( left to right or vice versa) do the length settings remain constant. I.E. If I've done all of the right hand cutters and then swing the guide 180º do I have to fiddle with either the chain stop or the stop screw?

I have a hunch the answer is "No" even if I remove the jig and then reattach it.

Removal and then reattaching would mean you have to reset the depth adjustment screw.

  no you should not.  thats why i was saying pick the smallest link from either side and cut the rest to that length.  what happens is the saw will pulls to one side,  yes the sharpness has some factor but its more so the length.  we set our sharpener up to these numbers.   the angle guage up above  set to 60 degrees and we just leave that.  most of the chain we sharpen is off the saw so this is the easiest.  once again pick the correct angle  30 degrees or 35 degrees and cut all to that one.

It looks like the problem is fixed. I set what I thought was the shortest length and then shapened away. about 2/3 of the way through  the right hand cutters I found a slightly shorter one so I reset the stop screw and then went through all the cutters again. I switched the guide 180º reset the tilt from +10º to -10º and left the chain stop alone. all the left cutters were almost the correct length to begin with. When I tested it on a 15" birch log it worked great.

So the problem was due to the right hand cutters being longer than the left hand ones and duller due to damage that was caused by a stone strike.

Thanks for all the suggestions.