Bar flipping

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Bar flipping

Stihl MS211 chainsaw bar instruction

I forget where I read about running a chainsaw with the bar upside down.

The logic is that the bar will wear more evenly if you flip it every so often.

My system is to make the swap each time I install a new or machine sharpened chain.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.

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comment 1

I've been given the same advice and I follow it. I burned up one of my first bars by letting my bar oil get low. Eventually I think you burn up a bar no matter what, but flipping it will extend it's life. These days I only put half a tank of gas in, fill up the bar oil and then I know I won't run out of bar oil...unless I'm cutting fresh maple, which is so sticky and full of sap that it is a pain in the ass to bob.

Comment by Danny — Tue Feb 7 20:13:04 2012

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Chain oil

Ours seems to be pretty frugal with the chain oil. Mark generally tops it up every tank, but I don't think it's every run out (except for once when the cap was loose and it spilled out....)