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Part of my operation involves milling trees that are too large for my Woodmizer LT40 and I have a fair demand for large flitches so chainsaw milling is in order. When milling wide logs with big chainsaws, you want your chains to be perfectly tuned. If you have ever sharpened your chain several times and noticed that they cut less well each time-it may be because your rakers are too high. In front of each tooth is a protrusion called a raker which regulates how much of a cut each tooth can take. They are suppose to be below the top of the teeth by 10% of the gullet width. If they are too high the tooth cannot get enough of a "bite", too low and the bite is so much the tooth digs in and stalls the chain. There are a number of devices out there to file the rakers down but I have settled on using my chain grinder and for years have used feeler gauges to measure the raker depth below the tops of the nearest two teeth. A couple of weeks ago I made this Shop Built tool to do this job for me fast and accurately. I am a pack rat for keeping junk that is "too good to throw away". A friend had given me a very expensive looking digital micrometer but with no way to use it without making a jig of some sort to hold it--so it sat in my junk drawer for a couple of years. The same guy (a bigger junk collector than me but with less space) also had given me some sort of small aluminum press. I took it apart, modified it, re-drilled and tapped a hole for the the threads in the bottom of the micrometer, made a plate to straddle two saw teeth and presto I had a raker depth measuring micrometer. Notice that the gullet is .280 and the raker depth is 0.0270 on the micrometer. Very close enough to the 10% ideal.
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