Introducing the New Chainmeister

Greetings climbing, cutting, felling, bucking, logging, forestry and related chainsaw using communities.
Luke here, from treestuff.com.

I have some excellent news. We are formally launching a brand-new device called the ChainMeister.

This is a well-made piece of gear that allows you to mount a chain on a chainsaw bar and tension that chain quickly and easily to your perfect sweet spot. If you have a number of dull chain loops on your wall hanging, waiting to be sharpened, this may be the device for you.

The ChainMeister also allows you to swap between bars of different sizes, interchangeably, any length, pitch or gauge... a one-size-fits-all concept. The ChainMeister can also be used in combination with other chain sharpening file guides, jigs and bar-mounted grinder-wheel sharpeners.

Sharpening chains without a chainsaw in the mix, however, Is now the new, powerful option to streamline your task of managing and keeping chains sharp... For the rest of your career.


To best spotlight the device, I wish to introduce to you the guy who has shared this idea with us since it's inception, 8 years ago.
We at treestuff have seen this device created, stepwise, all along the course of it's development. Since Tree Machine has included us in on the inner scoop, and we found it fascinating, I have asked him to summarize the major steps in the creation and evolution of this device and answer all the 'whys?' as to it's purpose and benefits to you.

Especially how the evolution over the years was spurred by the input of hundreds of arborists, worldwide. The device was crowdsourced into existence, and that is a story in itself.

Tree Machine, take it away.

Luke
TreeStuff.com

Thanks, Luke.

My name is Jim Clark, a.k.a. Tree Machine

Let me tell you why I have been asked to give this online presentation.
I am not the inventor, just to let you know. I assisted the inventor with the earliest prototype tries, and at some point the project became my adopted child.

The project is coming up on 8 years old, but with lots of help from the arboriculture and logging communities, the ChainMeister is now available. <~~~click here


Why did the development take this much time? Because we had to get it absolutely right.
The ChainMeister is designed and built to last a lifetime. It will not become obsolete in time.
We have improved and revised to the point where we feel the device simply can not be improved upon any more….. though we will keep looking and listening to you.



I am sizing photos right now. My plan is to share 4 or 5 images per post, and a video here and there.
The images will be sized to 12 inches, so you cool cats on your mobile devices, sit down at your computer for this one.

Please be patient while we get started. I will hopefully answer any and all questions you might have about this new device.

Treestuff is selling this device, there is a need for it in the various chainsaw-using industries, and it is my pleasure to present it to you.

If this seems like a social-media, product-spotlight infomercial, that is because it is.
With all the images and the few videos I have to share with you, the presentation will hopefully have a friendly character. You are being taken on a short journey covering a long process. I will share the product, but so many people are fascinated with how ideas evolve and inventions created, our presentation will cover the prototypes leading up to the current working ChainMeister, prototype model #14, the 100% stainless steel version.

First, I would like to start you with a video.

Click here for ~~> the basic, 1 minute ChainMeister introduction video, shot it myself.
Watch it just so we're all on the same page and so that you understand the basic function of the tool.

Shortly, I will share some extended advantages and uses, beyond just stretching a chain on a bar without a chainsaw.

Please understand, I have been asked by the sponsor, within the sponsors forum. to share the origin and development, not to engage in pissing contest with other members.

I will ask that the members respect that this is a presentation. If there are questions unanswered, the thread will be opened to everyone.

Here is how it all started.

A fishing guide in Florida asked me to show him how to sharpen chains.
He had very poor results hand-sharpening, so he would just buy a new chain and use it until it was too dull to use anymore, and then he would buy another one.



14 chains into this ritual, he realized there was money in that kajumble of chains if someone would just teach him a proper sharpening method, then this collection of chains should last him for years to come , and no more chains would need to be purchased for a long time. This is where this unplanned journey began.

I started by asking how he had tried sharpening in the past.
He sat down in a chair, put the saw in his lap, held the bar with one hand and the file with the other.

Now, we've all done this, but we learn and we evolve.

I showed him how if you clamp your bar in a vise it holds the saw firm
and you can have both hands on the file.



Then I showed him a trick to tension the chain without having to use the chainsaw's chain tensioner.
Some guys use their scrench, but I prefer to use a steel punch.
As you can see, it is tapered so you shove it in until you reach where the chain is tensioned really tight.
Very quick and effective.

So I sharpened the chain, offering what detail there is to look .

He said "Let's sharpen another.", so I removed the freshly sharpened chain from the saw and while I was putting a dull chain back on the saw I heard him mutter, "That makes no sense at all." "What doesn't?" "The fact that you have to take a sharp chain off the saw and put a dull one back on."

I told him there are ways around that. One is to clamp the driver links in a bar vise. We had problems with the vise holding the driver links because the inner part of the jaws were beaten pretty badly. We would file and the chain would pop out. He noted that one would have to advance the chain for every couple teeth sharpened, seemed less than practical. I said let's try a few things. He said "Let's crack a beer."

We took two edger blades from the shop, welded them together at the bottom, leaving a gap at the top.
The we welded a piece of rod near the top edge to keep it from falling through the jaws of the vise.
What we created was a vise within a vise. Hardly an improvement.

It worked, but not so much that I would adopt it as a 'better system.'

The question was asked, "Why not put a chain on a chainsaw bar, clamp it in the vise and hang a weight off the chain?"
We did it for the exercise of doing it. Once again, you could say it worked, but not with any improvement or benefit from sharpening off the saw itself.
I won't bore you with the picture.

My fishing guide really thought that clamping the driver links had hope, so he produced a stainless steel hinge.

We put a strip of neoprene inside the hinge, drilled a couple holes and added nuts and bolts. The neoprene kept the hinge sprung open. The fasteners kept it from opening too far. We put it in the vise and tried it.

As you can see by the pictures we produced a result, but again, you could say it works, and it does, but as you can see we could only sharpen about four teeth before having to unclamp the vise, advance the chain and retighten the vise.

It made sense to us, after all this, to use an actual chainsaw bar. The reason? You could use the entire length of the bar, advancing the chain only a few times, and a chainsaw bar is specifically designed for a chainsaw chain. The question was, how to tension the chain on the bar, and not having the chainsaw in the mix doing the tensioning.

The thought of having a bar with two sprocket tips came to mind. How to make one of the two tips adjustable, in and out, was the challenge.
I said I would do a dry-fit on my own when I got back to Indianapolis.

As you can see, modding a sprocket tip to fit the back end of a bar, without modding the bar itself, did not look possible.

If I may speak personally to you right now….
The reason I am going to extended lengths to share the development process with you is that there are a lot of really talented guys in these forums.
A number of you might look at the ChainMeister and think you could whip one up in your shop. This may be possible.

If you look at a ChainMeister and feel you can reverse-engineer it and make your own, at least let me help you by continuing the story.
I can help you avoid some mistakes and failures by sharing mine.

The sprocket bar tip was ill-fitted for the job, too big. So what is the answer to that? A smaller sprocket.


I know, that is an oddball sprocket, a custom 9-pin. This was just to eyeballl the proportion. I did not intend to actually use this sprocket.

Here is shown a regular 7-pin sprocket through which a bushing was pushed and attached to each side, parallel bar stock.


Sometimes just looking at something crude can lead to the next step of refinement. Clearly, the design had a ways to go.

Talk about ugly. This design try got a step closer, but was still a long ways off.
The chain could be mounted on this rig, but there was no way to tension it.

It was a step in the general direction, a small step. A tiny step.



How to tension it? Here in this prototype effort I used a C-clamp, thinking if I could get the device to work I could see more clearly the next better way. Just laying it on there in a dry-fit manner things seemed to be coming more clear.


I went on to doing some home hack welding .


Here is the result of that effort- undeniably the ugliest prototype still to this day. But you know what?
It tensioned a chain on a bar. It actually worked.

I had this device lying around. It is called a toggle clamp. The idea being, if the toggle clamp were affixed to the plate, and it's push-end were pushing against something affixed to the bar, the mechanism would move in the opposite direction and stretch the chain.



Or something could protrude through the bar slot, and the toggle clamp push against it.
Dry-fit, take pictures, digest, think, sleep.

I really though I was on a track here. Weekly phone calls by my fishing Captain kept me motivated. With this guy, fishing is better than money, so I kept at it.
Here I opened a slot in the bar stock, added a clutch drum because for some reason it made sense at the time. But what to push against ? What was needed was a mechanism to protrude through the bar slot, and hook through to the other side of the bar to keep it from falling back out. For this, I took a day off of doing tree care and shelled out some dough at a welding and fabrication shop for some professional help.

In this next photo we are TIG welding some solutions.


After an hour of work, we came up with a part that would slide through the bar mount channel and a nut would hold it on from the other side.
This would provide the stop. We just had to conceive the mechanism to do the pushing, now that we had something to push against.

The problem arose that the push of the toggle clamp was more length than needed, but at the same time you would never know exactly how much push would be needed since differing bars and differing chains will have differing variances, the pushing mechanism would need to be adjustable.
Here's what we came up with:



We welded a tube onto that little block I just showed you.


Inside the tube would be a spring, and welded onto the end of the tube, a nut.
A bolt was screwed into the end of the tube to offer the needed adjustability.

Pretty dang ugly, but at the end of the day we had a chain tensioner that not only worked, it worked surprisingly well.

The piston/plunger had a washer welded on. This assembly pushes the spring into the tube.
As the spring fully compresses it seats onto the bolt at the far end.
If the lever can not quite reach the full, over-center lock position, the bolt is backed off a few turns.
This allowed an adjustability where you could find that perfect spot of full tension.


In the drawing I was able to have the artist remove the clutch drum, which served no purpose at the time other than to mount the sprocket.


Below is the artist's rendering of the yet unnamed tensioner device on a bar.
He drew it with the chain running backwards which begged the question:
Does it matter which direction the chain goes on? Answer: No, it does not matter.
The chain will run either direction.

Here I painted the individual parts of the new mechanism.
For a prototype, the model worked smoothly and without fault.

I took this one to the Indiana ISA chapter meeting and let other treeguys handle it.
We took the chain off, put it back on, chain forward, chain backward.

This began the crowdsourcing portion of this tool's existence, and from here on out many arborist's gave valuable input.

We knew the basic goal; tension a chain on a bar without a chainsaw.
But we were able, after actual hands-on use, to ask "What more do we need out of this device?
How can the design be improved?"

On the "How can the design be improved?" question.

I had taken the drawings to an intellectual property attorney to begin that process.
I honestly thought this was the final design, minus a few tweaks.
I thought I was nearly done.
How wrong I was.

The patent attorney confirmed that this was an original design and nothing else like it was out there.
This cost was simply the beginning step of a long, highly detailed process.

If anyone tells you, "You should get that patented." know that they have no clue what the patent process is about.

The suggestion from my legal guide was that I bring it to an engineer to assess whether this is a realistic design from a production standpoint.

The answer? No. Not even in the ballpark. I was paying a lot of money to have my ego completely shattered.
But I had so much time invested, and such good reviews from my arborist community that I really wanted to keep going.

A significant amount of time later, my engineer came up with these prototypes, a big one for big bars and chains and a smaller one for smaller bars and chains.


These I took to a TCIA expo and again got other men's hands on the device. The feedback was very valuable. Basically, I still had a long way to go.