4 Causes For a Chainsaw Chain Dulling Quick

You hit the ground

A chainsaw chain can go practically dull in an instant even after just a second’s worth of contact with the ground.

You may ask, “but how can something as soft as dirt cause such damage?”. The answer is simple – dirt is abrasive.

Even if it does feel soft to the touch, it is still made up of tiny rocks, and if we know anything about them, it certainly makes sense how it can dull a chain.

Again, you may not even notice yourself doing so, but even barely tilting the tip of the saw into the soil is all it takes for it to not be able to cut properly anymore.

You can greatly reduce the possibility of such thing happening over and over again by rolling the log, when needed. A hookaroon is the tool made exactly for this job.

Here is an article i wrote about the best ones you can get.

Dirty tree

The tree you are processing, whether it’s felling or bucking, could have bark that’s soiled with dirt, and that could cause the issue of this post.

This works in the same principle as dipping the saw into the soil; maybe just a bit slower.

Throughout the tree’s lifetime, the bark catches anything wind blows at it – road debris, dirt, rocks, anything. The teeth can start to get blunt that fast because of this.

The good thing here is that this cause could actually be prevented, sort of. It’s just that you will need to put a bit more effort into the whole thing.

What i mean by that is removing the bark beforehand. Does doing that on every piece of log you want to cut make sense? Not really, but sometimes it’s better than doing nothing.

Don’t do so on the whole tree – remove some only where a cut is going to be made. You can do so with the help of an axe.

There is something inside…

It may be that the tree or trees you are working on have some alien objects inside. This can be anything from a nail to a piece of metal.

How can anything of these sorts end up in there? Well, it could have been ‘nailed’ in by somebody, or grown during the earlier stages of life.

Whatever the reason, a foreign hard object can dull a chainsaw’s chain in a heartbeat.

There’s nothing effective you can do to combat this situation. I mean, you could take the pliers and somehow wiggle the thing out, but i think it is more logical to choose another spot for the cut, or trash the wood completely.

It really isn’t worth it to constantly be ruining the chain just because you want to get through that specific spot… Reposition and try again.

Other potential culprits

The saw’s bar could be bent

Because of that, the chain could be put to the stress on the wrong angles during cutting, blunting the sharpness quicker.

Chain is toast

You can ruin a perfectly working chainsaw chain mainly by oversharpening it. I normally see this happening to people who are new at this, especially those who use an electric sharpener.