When I was in medical school, we had a class where we observed autopsies with the county medical examiner.
His comments on suicide: “When someone commits suicide by cutting themselves with a knife, you will often see ‘hesitation marks’. They are small cuts on the skin that are made before they make the cut that ends their life. When someone commits suicide by chainsaw, there are no hesitation marks.”
Our class decided that another comment he made would make a good American Indian name: Cuts with the grittiness of an unripe pear. (describing scirrhous carcinoma)
The things that stick in your mind!
I have used corded, cordless and gas; to me they are all about the same in terms of care/maintenance. What gets you in trouble with some of the corded/cordless is you open the box and go to town without thinking. You don’t have that moment of getting the engine going and warm that tells you “beyond this point there be dragons”.
I have seen some hairy injuries from chain saws
I hate them.about as much as tractors. They are injuries waiting to happen.
Get training anyway you can. And buy a bunch of bandages.
At some time I ran out of bar/chain oil, and used vegetable oil instead. Have been using it since - apparently without obvious consequences. (Electric chain saw, small jobs). What am I missing?
I’ll second (third, fourth, fifth) the chaps and a full face mask. I’ve got a lovely 5" scar on my leg where I allowed the chain saw to drop too far before it stopped. Stupid? Yes, but foreseeable. I wear a full face because the little branches and chips can hit your face hard enough to distract you…and distraction (along with complacency) will eventually bite you in the ass.
I don’t have chainsaw experience. I’ll leave the advice about training, maintenance, and protective equipment without comments from my ignorance. I do have a lot of experience with risk management. The thread so far has focused on reducing the risk of injury and reducing the severity of injuries if you do screw up through PPE. You can’t ever reduce that risk to zero. Plan for what happens when you do screw up.
Having someone there to watch and help if things go very badly is probably a good idea given your inexperience. Checking cell phone charge and that you have good signal near where you are cutting is probably a good idea before the first cut. Having first aid gear nearby to deal with severe bleeding is pretty important. You can potentially bleed out from a serious injury very quickly. Even an immediate call to 911 might not get an ambulance there in time to save your life if there’s no effort to stem the bleeding in the interim.
Avoiding serious injury is Plan A. Making sure you don’t die from a serious injury that happens despite your best efforts is Plan B. Don’t ignore Plan B.
I knew a guy doing tree cutting for a living. One day he was using a large saw and it kicked back and hit him in the face. Left a nasty permanent vertical gash on his face.
Knew a logger who got a relatively minor cut from the chain on his hand, and he kept working. Three hours later he was headed to the hospital with one of the nastiest infections ever. Don’t take even the slightest chainsaw-related wound lightly.
The biggest thing I found is don’t over do it in a session. It’s natural to be safe and careful when you start out. But the vibrations combined with the weight of the thing held at safe arms length, sap your hand and arm strength incredibly fast when you aren’t used to doing it. And within even 5 -10 minutes, fatigue can make you lazy and careless.
I heat with wood and have thus spent a lot of time with chainsaws, over many years. No injuries - or even close calls - thus far, and I try to deepen my respect for these tools every time I use one.
Some of my rules:
Use a top-quality saw (which for me means a Stihl) and keep the chain in top condition
Only the operator should be closer than 10’ to a running saw
Two hands firmly on the saw
During every cut, all body parts must be well clear of the extended path of the saw
As with all subjects, there are plenty of useful YouTube videos.
It is indeed often overlooked - a sure sign of a chainsaw duffer. But it should be considered mandatory for even the shortest job - a gas chainsaw used without hearing protection will definitely cause hearing damage.
As for the actual goal of cutting the downed wood for firewood, I’m not sure that would be very useful. Rotted wood typically doesn’t make for good firewood. The rotting process means it loses a lot of the material which would have burned, so you won’t get a lot of heat from it. But also bugs start to live in the rotted wood, which you might end up bringing into the house. So if you cut downed wood, only use the wood which is still in pretty good shape for firewood from the freshly fallen trees. And a lot of kinds of wood isn’t good for firewood. Pine trees, for example, have a lot of goop in them which creates soot that coats the chimney. So also make sure that you’re selecting wood of an appropriate species to be used for firewood.
How comfortable are you with tools and power tools in general? Do you feel at home with a drill or something in your hand? Or are you more of a newbie when it comes to tools and stuff? If you are confident at using power tools in general, a chainsaw won’t be all that challenging. Having a lot of tool experience will mean you’ll be more comfortable with how the chainsaw feels and what manipulations you have to do for the cut. Regardless, you should get comfortable with a chainsaw because a cabin in the woods means you’ll have to be cutting trees continually.
Some other options you might want to look into are a bow saw and a chainsaw pole saw. A bow saw is a hand saw that’s useful for cutting branches and smaller diameter trees. A chainsaw pole saw is a small chainsaw mounted on a pole that’s useful for cutting small branches high up while you stand on the ground. It’s a handy and safe way to control branches that are growing too close to your cabin without having to get up on a ladder to get to the branches.
I’ve used a very small electric chainsaw to lop off and then shorten smallish branches (4" diameter). Never had any classes or training, but I’ve only used it for two or three hours over the past ten years, wore some inadequate protective gloves and goggles, worked VERY slowly and VERY carefully, didn’t have any problems. BUT- I’m normally quite risk adverse, and I was VERY nervous (scared, actually) whenever that saw was running. I could feel that I was pushing my luck. I decided that next time I will get professional guidance first- I’m too old to be so foolish.
