Hi everyone, fir technical reasons with this story I think I might have to do it in two parts .

The first part now starts  when I was younger and I was married with children and we brought out first house , and it had a heat charm wood heater fitted in the lounge room .

So there are a few wood options available to one to feed the fire 

 place .
You can buy the wood off a local wood supplier which is mostly redgum and ironbark that’s available.
There are also a lot of local individual suppliers around town with supplies of dried local mixed gum verities.
But purchasing wood can be an expensive option especially in a long cold winter.

The other option of course is to collect your own firewood , which is what iI choose to do .
I seem to collect it from anywhere and everywhere and  as soon as winter is over I start  to source wood wherever I can,
I then cut it up and split it and stack it away ready for use .

To do this task you need good equipment,
So In that first house the first thing I actually needed to buy myself was a chaisaw ,
and I purchased a Jonsered chainsaw, which it turns out then is a rebadged and recoloured , Husqvarna ,
a Sweedish  designed and manufactured machine.
This saw gave me lots of untroubled use and it was nicely ergonomically balanced and so easy to use.
So things progressed on and everything was fine, until we brought our second house and that house didn’t have a wood heater , or any heating or cooling in fact  and instead we decided to fit a reverse cycle air conditioning system,

So my chainsaw just sat in my shed for a few years
just collecting dust , until a bloke I know asked me if I wanted to sell it to his friend.
I decided to sell it a decision which I guess I regretted instantly.

But all was fine now  especially for heating at home ,
except I don’t really actually like the heat that comes out of those split cycles as  to me it’s just weird and not cosy.

So a few years later I found myself being single , and back living at times in a few different homes some with open fires and needing a supply of firewood  to feed them.

So I started slowly collecting equipment again to prepare firewood .

Saws came first .
I decided to by myself secondhand saws this time ,
and I decided to by a certain brand that had a great reputation and a great product.
I bought a couple of Sthil chainsaws as they were at the time Australian owned and manafactured and were of a really good quality.
So I brought a small and a large model  one .
These saws have been incredible and haven’t ever missed a beat.

I remember the very first chainsaw I ever saw in my life was my grandfathers lying on the grass.
I think I was around six years old
I dont remember the brand .
It was primitive and  a big and bulky yellow coloured saw with no modern chain break or clutch  mechanism on it , just direct sprocket chain drive and a pulley at the other end with a slot in its lip , to take the cord end knot and wind up the starter cord onto the pulley for a primitive pull start, and then hope for the best .

Back in the day these chainsaws were definitely extremely dangerous machines that claimed many casualty victims.

So for those who know little of nothing about chainsaws, the first thing you need to know is the danger they pose to you personally and the people around you every time you pull the ripcord and fire it up.

There usually are two separate tanks on a chainsaw to fill,
one for premixed two stroke fuel , if your saw is  a two stroke the other tank for chain  bar oil .
The bar oil is quite a bit different to car motor oil  in that it has a totally different viscosity and physical make up.

Bar oil is really quite  tacky so if you press a bit in between your fingers and then seperate them you will see strings of oil between them.
This tackiness is so the oil sticks onto the bar and chain minimising heat and wear whilst cutting.
I have used car oil and car sump oil before as bar oil,
you have to fine filter sump oil first as the contaminants in it may clog your saws oil pump system up but even clean car oil is fine of you have no chainlube available.

So  to an interesting peice of information on bar oil passed on to me by my tree hugging mate Toby ,
as I have discussed the topic of the use of chain lube with him  .

He informed me that it doesnt really matter about chain oil as you can run your oil tank dry if you wish and every now and then stop working and wipe your chain and bar with an oil soaked rag , and it will be fine .

The next important thing in the equation , is chains .
These need to be kept realy sharp to cut effectively efficiently and safely.
A chain has two main cutting parts,
it carries on its back a cutting tooth and a raker.
The cutter has a set angle on the  tooth blade and it can be re sharpened by a various number of methods,
the right size rat tail or small round  file, that is the most common way , an electric rotary honing stone .
Or by my favourite,
on a dropsaw by Tanya at my local mower shop .

Its easy to tell when using a saw if the chain has lost its edge and needs sharpening as it becomes difficult to use and slow to cut , even for a small cut .
The raker tooth on the chain is at a specifically set height and its job is to scrape and cleans the sawdust out of the cut keeping the cut clean and  ready for the next cutting tooth.

So basically there are two types of chain .
Your standard chain is high tensile which is made up of a mix together of mild steel and alloys that are industrial treated to give long life under tough conditions.
They give good service and  wear when  well looked after.

The other type of chain that is available is called a tungsten carbide chain , and its made from a blend of Swiss and German materials, 
it has on its teeth a coat of tungsten carbide , and they provide a much far superior service life.
And much less
sharpening.
But you do need a diamond round file to sharpen the chain yourself or if they have a diamond drop saw sharpener in use  at your repair shop .
These chains rarely need sharpening, and I heard of a farmer having one on his saw for more than ten years  from new and it has only needed a link taken out of it later on the chain due to severe stretching over time.
But they are expensive .

So a few years ago I thought I might treat myself and buy a tungsten carbide chain for my big saw .
Because they cant join the chain in the shop I had to order it in especially to size for my saw .
I noticed when I was initially using it that it stretched a fair bit  and quickly with lots of tension adjustments needed at the very start and then it just stopped.
I hardly adjust it anymore.
The thing is they are constantly sharp but they arnt quite as sharp as a traditional chain they are just a bit duller but consistent.
Of course they are also just as susceptible to blunten as easily as a traditional chain saw chain with nails , bark , screws, bolts and dirt all enemies of your chain .

Unfortunately while new I hit a nail soon after fitting the chain and had to have it repaired by the drop saw .

I also a few years ago brought an extension pole saw for hard to reach branches .
And a log splitter.

So to the actual mission for the weekend , it was to help a mate cut down a problem gum tree 

 out in the hills .
My mate had hired a mobile boom lift to help with the job as I estimated the tree at somewhere around 75ft tall.
It had lots of branches and about five main big trunks .
So with the boom lift set up one of the guys went up in it and pruned off a few branches.
Because of a fence we couldn’t get close enough to the tree with the basket so I safety harnessed up and I jumped into the basket with my pole saw .

Once I got myself up there I knocked a few branches off and then got to cutting the fatter trunk branch ,
that was straight up and down and vertical.
Im always cautious about having the pole saw jamb.
I was at full reach with the polesaw  and I had started to cut though from the underside first and then on an angle down the branch above towards the lower cut .
Unfortunately near the completion of the cut the saw got stuck fast in the tree right at the end of the angled cut .
The weight of the branch that I had cut was now holding my saw chain bar tight.
This is all 40 ft in the air .
I tried everything to get it loose to no avail,
The engine was still running but it did not have enough power to the chain to drive it .
Pulling on the pole was a disaster as the telescopic part of the pole then separated and the pole  then became two pieces.
I somehow managed to feed the shaft and pole back together up there in the air.

Then the hard decision I had to make that bothered me as I had rattled my brain of how to get my saw back in one piece, and I decided it wasn’t actually going to be possible as I needed at least a rope to sling the tree and I didn’t have one in the bucket , and I was hight in the air at the full  reach of the machine .

I then let my saw go ,
watching the engine end swing down towards the ground with the help of gravity to face the ground and the chain bar and chain caught in the tree instantly bent itself ninety degrees just under the weight,
so I went back down to the ground and returned with a rope.
I got the rope around the cut branch and I then tied it off to the basket , I held the pole saw in one hand and pulled the branch off with the hydraulics of the machine .
Back on the ground and a bit of quick engineering on the bent bar in a vice and hammer and we are quickly back in action,
It only lasted a few cuts and broke down with something wrong with the saws drive mechanism.
So that pole saw is now in the shop.

So we had pruned off lots of the smaller tree branches and cut them up with the branches and leaves stacked in burn piles and the small branches cut to length and stacked in the woodshed,
So now its time to tackle the serious and technical and dangerous branches.

For these bigger limbs we tied a rope in a high forked branch onto a sling and onto my winch in the 4wd .
For this exercise you need to have enough rope out so the tree doesn’t land on your car when it’s felled .

So it all comes down to timing now as I reverse the car hit the handbrake and I add pre tension on the rope with the car and  also then add some pressure on it with the winch ,
trying hard to get my timing right with the pull and the cut so as not to burn my clutch out ,
In hindsight a car with an automatic transmission would be more suitable.

Theory has it  when the tree starts to go that I pull backwards with the car , not the winch , (as its too slow for a falling tree )
when the man cutting down the tree is nearly cut right through.
Theory has it the tree should land in line with the car .
But just like life theory isn’t  always right
As there are so many variables , this  method doesn’t always work.

The first log we cut down hit the ground with an almighty  loud thump.
One that resonates through your body .
It was big and heavy.
I thought hmm,
I should have videoed that .

So just as before we worked on cleaning up as we go .
So we cut and split and stacked wood happily till late afternoon.
Time for a beer , and definitely bed soon.

We are back at the tree job early the next morning .
The tree was already so much smaller than yesterday and everything went well until the end of the day when  my log splitter sprung a hydraulic leak .
It was a constant drip of fluid out of a hydraulic fitting , It began  leaking so badly  and it was annoying me , so I tried to fix it and put a spanner to the nut.
I tried tightening the fitting, adding an O ring , then teflon tape on the thread which I found out is a no no with hydraulics. 
I tried everything that I could think of to repair it but In the end I removed the hose and the fitting from the ram to take to Rotoret in Wonthaggi for assessment in the morning.

In the morning the man there decided to test my hose on the bench  with hydraulic pressure.
He turned it on and surprisingly it wasn’t the  hose  at all , but a leaking O ring in a grubscrew on the fitting.
He fixed it and he then told me no charge ,
I asked  are you sure ,  he smiled and  said have a nice day.
This was so nice and made me feel like humanity is still good .

As I mentioned earlier how dangerous all of the equipment could be , my mate Brendon got his hand caught in a hydraulic wood splitter a while back.
He made a complete mess of his hand , and he is still having corrective surgery to fix it .
Chainsaw’s also can quickly remove human limbs as easy as cutting  a green tree .

The photos or the  videos I took arnt the best as I was just busy on the job .
I do think It would be good to be able to put them inside the stories in the right parts instead of in just a clump at the bottom or top of the article .

So everyone,
there is a really interesting story and  pictures to follow this story of the third day on this project in part two .

So cheers xxx
And stay warm and cosy this winter.

Curlyg

Cheers xxx
Curlyg