Quickly sharpening a chainsaw chain with a grinder

From time to time, the chainsaw chain becomes dull, especially with serious volumes of cutting old wood. In addition, when the notches on one side become duller than the other, this leads to deviations from the straight line of the cut and can cause the chainsaw bar to jam in the wood.

Traditional methods of restoring chain cutting ability

You can sharpen a saw chain that has uneven wear without removing it from the guide using a round file. In this case, you need to grind off about 1 mm of high-strength steel, and you will have to spend a lot of time on just one tooth.

How to restore sharpening of a saw using a grinder

A more rational solution for quickly restoring the sharpness of teeth is to use an angle grinder, or, more simply, an angle grinder. Doing this is not as difficult as it seems at first glance. It is necessary to set the saw with the blade towards you and, tilting the tool in accordance with the angle of sharpening the tooth, restore the working edge of the latter, pressing the side of the rotating disk against it.Each subsequent tooth is sharpened at an opposite angle, so the position of the grinder will have to be alternated.

In this case, sharpening each one will take a second or two, no more. This procedure should be carried out carefully so as not to damage the chain, and especially the saw guide, due to careless movement.

Preparing a metal disc for sharpening a chain

As a rule, grinders use discs for cutting metal, so for high-quality sharpening, its edge should be slightly blunted. Completing this task is as easy as shelling pears - just use an ordinary stone.


The metal disc is not designed to work with such material, and after a couple of efforts its edge will lose its sharpness, which is what we actually need.
And after that we move on to sharpening.

We go through each tooth one by one.

How did I disable the saw?

The reason saw teeth fail is old rotten wood. When sawing such trees, they become dull very quickly, and the blade begins to behave unpredictably. In my case, the trunk was 50-60 cm in diameter, no less. I made a notch to adjust the direction of the tree's fall. Perhaps it should have been made a little larger - then this would have made it possible to place the tree trunk more accurately. However, just at this stage the saw stopped cutting normally.

Safety regulations

Sharpening a saw with a grinder requires a certain precision of movements. In any case, you need to make sure that no one is nearby, especially on the line of work of the disk. Nothing should hinder your actions. You also need to make sure that the disk installed in the angle grinder has not reached critical wear.
As for felling trees, before carrying out this work, measures should be taken to prevent bystanders from entering the area where the trunk may fall.

Result of work

After promptly resharpening the saw with a grinder, the work became more fun, and in the end I still cut the dry and stubborn tree, placing the trunk exactly as I had planned.

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