Help with upgrading bar and chain for MS661

[Paul Lima]

Having some issues with finish product after milling. Using a Stihl MS661, with a 32 inch bar from Stihl and some kind of chain. Some of the research I have done says it may be time to upgrade to a new bar and chain specifically for milling. The options are all over the place and I need to get some ordered ASAP. Hoping someone can give me some options that i will be happy with. Otherwise I will read the forum endlessly trying to figure it out.

I have a Granberg Alaskan 36 inch mill. Available to me are Pine, Cedar, and CA Oak. Including photos of my most recent attempt with pine. Had similar results on Oak earlier in the year. I want to go with a 36 inch bar and i want quality. Found one for about 300.00 on Baileys- - Holy crap, is it worth it? That's when I decided to post here. HELP

 

[J D]

Post some good close up pics of your chain cutters.
Whats your top plate filing angle?
Are you feeding the mill straight (not "see-sawing" along the log), wedging the cut as you go?
In my experience, if the bar is properly dressed & lubricated, & the chain is correctly sharpened for milling, & it is happening the same on significantly different logs... most the washboarding will be due to things other than the bar & chain

 

[J D]

https://www.arboristsite.com/thread...appen-when-milling-but-only-sometimes.367850/

 

[JRM]

If you are using a chain with a traditional angle you will not get a smooth finish. I use "Oregon Rip Cut" chain with satisfactory results. I also bought a loop of Granberg but have not had the chance to try it.
You should be able to get a loop of Oregon for your bar for less than $50. Maybe a little more the way prices have gone lately.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

There aren't bars specifically for milling, just ripping chains. As said by others, a 0-10 degree ripping chain should help minimize scoring. Not rocking side to side and steadily winching through a cut helps. But neither of those will keep you from having scoring if your chain has any side to side play in the bar rails. My results with my 42" .404 Stihl bar on my 880 got worse and worse til I largely abandoned using it in favor of 3/8 lo pro bars and chains on my smaller saws, which mill ultra smooth because the cutting teeth are so low and small they have minimal oscillation. But then I found that the rails had opened up so much over time on my .404 bar that I had a lot of side to side slop, causing poor milling results. I just finished closing up the rails so the .063 gauge chain fits snug again, and should get much better results with that setup now.

 

[Lightning Performance]

This should be moved to the milling threads area.
@Moderation

 

[Lightning Performance]

You get what you pay for in bars unless your not buying a top quality unit like Cannon.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

You get what you pay for in bars unless your not buying a top quality unit like Cannon.

True - there are bars that aren't built for milling but are way better for milling because they're high quality steel and have correct tolerances. I'm not that impressed with my six year old 41" Stihl bar, even though it's a made in Germany one. Maybe I just abused it too badly in my first few years of milling with it, but seems like it could be made of tougher steel than it is. Would obviously prefer a Cannon, but would probably even take a GB titanium over it next time.

 

[MaineMillingMan]

I've got the same washboard issues with a brand new Granberg bar 42 inch and ripping chain on a Stihl 661.

Sometimes you can have the "right" equipment, and still have issues. Maybe it's the raker depth? Maybe it's my feed rate? Maybe just the combo of a bunch of weird stuff? I'm not expert enough to know why, but I've had boards come out almost glassy smooth, so it's really annoying to have washboarding with seemingly the the right equipment.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

I've got the same washboard issues with a brand new Granberg bar 42 inch and ripping chain on a Stihl 661.

Sometimes you can have the "right" equipment, and still have issues. Maybe it's the raker depth? Maybe it's my feed rate? Maybe just the combo of a bunch of weird stuff? I'm not expert enough to know why, but I've had boards come out almost glassy smooth, so it's really annoying to have washboarding with seemingly the the right equipment.

It's been said by some folks on here that you can get a kind of harmonic oscillation going that will washboard badly on one slab but sometimes not the next. Crediting things like that to life's little mysteries never satisfies my engineering brain. There's always a reason. Wouldn't be raker depth w new bar and chain. My experience is brand new chain or well sharpened chain can be a bit too grabby and you sometimes have to pull back on the saw and not let it cut as fast as it wants to. A usual culprit for washboarding is some kind of unevenness in sharpness or length of the right vs left teeth on the chain (or uneven raker depth). This shouldn't apply to new chain, but Granberg ripping chain with its custom scoring/clearing cutter design does not always have the half width teeth evenly ground. Still, minor inconsistencies are usually only a problem when the chain is brand new and at its grabbiest. The first thing I check now before milling is how snug the chain is in the bar groove. Again, you'd think new bar and chain should have no side to side slop but not always the case. If everything is new and dialed in correctly, and user technique is steady, and it still happens, I'd slow down the cut by pulling back on the saw some.

 

[MaineMillingMan]

Thanks for the advice, I've got a ton of oak left to mill up so I'll keep trying to identify what variable seems to be mucking things up. I've achieved incredibly smooth results with my prior setup (Stihl 362 with a 24 inch Granberg mill using 3/8 x 0.05 ripping). Prior to this round of washboarding I did get some decent (but not phenomenal) results with the Stihl 661 and 42 inch bar/mill setup I'm working with now. Frustrating to know how good it can be, and get such poor results. I'll keep at it until I figure it out!

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

Doesn't look like me or anyone else mentioned one of the obvious possibilities - you said "some kind of chain"on the 32" bar. .050, .058, or .063? What gauge is the 32" bar? Mismatch of chain gauge to bar most common problem. I haven't seen many people go wrong milling with .050 gauge but when people use .063 bars, seems the tolerances of some cheap chains are sloppy, or people mistakenly use .050 or .058 chain in an .063 bar. Also, wider slabs you cut, longer bars you use, the more chance of some rocking of the saw and digging. I try to use no wider a bar than I need to for the log I'm doing. Many people cut with way larger bars than they need, sometimes just for crotch cuts where there's an extra wide point on the log. I've got no use for flared slabs as a woodworker so I tend to trim the flared ends off and any extra wide points so my slabs only vary a few inches in width from waist to end.

 

[Lightning Performance]

Thanks for the advice, I've got a ton of oak left to mill up so I'll keep trying to identify what variable seems to be mucking things up. I've achieved incredibly smooth results with my prior setup (Stihl 362 with a 24 inch Granberg mill using 3/8 x 0.05 ripping). Prior to this round of washboarding I did get some decent (but not phenomenal) results with the Stihl 661 and 42 inch bar/mill setup I'm working with now. Frustrating to know how good it can be, and get such poor results. I'll keep at it until I figure it out!

Easiest changes are to slow down the RPMs or change the angle of attack on your mill. It never works for me unless I'm milling very wet wood. Slower takes a bigger chip and eliminated some vibrations in the chain. 8 pin rim made it worse. Going up from 92 to 122cc eliminated the problem. I can run my 12mm mounts on one of my modified 084s. The rpms went down and the chain issue was then completely gone. 8 pin rim on the big saw brought it right back.

 

[MaineMillingMan]

Ok, here is a side by side comparison between Oregon skip tooth cross-cut chain and a brand new loop of Granberg ripping chain. Much narrower piece of oak. The difference in cut quality (with everything else held the same) is pretty shocking. I'm grasping at straws to figure out what is going on, other than getting sent 50 ft of chain that was sharpened really really inconsistently. I did vary the RPMs, which didn't seem to have much of a difference in this case.

I just bought the Granberg sharpening jig, so that I can re-sharpen the ripping chain to a specific depth/angle etc and see if that fixes this crazy washboarding issue. Maybe they just sell a product with really poor QA? I've had great experiences with their chains in the past, so this is really aggrevating.

Here is the cut with Oregon skip tooth cross cut chain (I did two cuts, they both looked like this, and checked tension between cuts). It isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good.


And here is the Granberg ripping chain (also did two cuts, and checked tension between cuts, both cuts were equally poor).

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

That washboarding IS shocking. Is the washboarding happening w both the 32 and 42" bar, and did you use Granberg ripping chain 3/8 .050 in the 42" bar before with acceptable results? It's just the new chain causing this? But the Oregon cross cut chain produced better results than any of the old or new Granberg chain? Seems the chain then, no question. Post some pics of the chain. Are there any obvious inconsistencies between teeth? Good luck with the Granberg sharpening jig. I never seemed to manage consistent results with it. Most of the times people have had these mystery problems they switched the chain and problem solved. Sucks if you bought 50' of it. This from a useful UK website on all things milling. Supposedly Granberg takes a Carlton chain and modifies it. It's their factory grinding which opens up the possibility of all kinds of inconsistent results in their products. Particularly as they fell way behind on orders during the pandemic and probably have struggled with maintaining employees and quality. It becomes a crapshoot then - sometimes, maybe even most of the time, you'll get good chain from them, but easy to get not so good chain too. Bailey's was dependable til the pandemic, Woodland Pro products seemed fine generic rebadged Carlton for a long time previous, but their quality became a crapshoot and I got Lo Pro ripping chains I had to send back they were ground so unacceptably inconsistent. Again, it seemed modified chain, reground from an already produced cross cut chain, rather than an original factory product. It's hard to trust low paid workers doing a good job at that, no matter where they're employed which is why I've never trusted the way Granberg makes their chain. Just buy a loop of Oregon or Carlton ripping chain to compare results and if it solves your problem, send back the Granberg if you can, and if you can't just eat it as a lesson learned. Wouldn't waste time trying to fix it all.

Granberg ripping chain has been modified further – this configuration features x2 scoring cutters followed by x2 clearing cutters. The easiest way to sharpen this is by making all the cutters 10 degrees however if you wish you can sharpen the scoring cutters to 20 degrees and the clearing cutters to 5 degrees.​

Please bear in mind this process is carried out manually on a grinding machine at the factory and so some of the scoring cutters can become hardened in the process. This makes them very hard to sharpen using a round file and some sort of grinder may be required.

 

[Lightning Performance]

Are you running an 050 chain on an 063 gauge rail?

 

[Lightning Performance]

I sharpend my standard chain into a G ripper type by going with 30 on the score cutters and 20 on the clearing cutters.

If your loop is all over the map just send it back unless you think it can be fixed with filing. Inconsistent cutter lengths will play hell on getting a smooth cut much more than some odd face angles ground into them. You have a chain issue their and checking your gauges would be the first place to look and see if they match.

I've ran a junk chain on a junk bar in 28" that did this before. You see how a loose rail effects the face finish pretty easy. My cuts looked like this on a stock 660, old worn down chain and the bar rail was out near 60 on a 050 gauge.

No amount of speed adjustment is going to cure that kind of chain vibration you have imho.

 

[Lightning Performance]

You can try an 8 pin rim to see if things change at all. I doubt they will.