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?

  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.