Connecting with the past

I don’t understand what you mean.

But Stella that should obviously include not eating fish or chicken unless someone in the household is adept at the Heimlich manoeuvre
:crazy_face:

I attach instructions in case anyone has become a but rusty during the lockdown.

2 Likes

Who? Me? What I meant was that you could avoid detection by adding a muffler to your petrol chainsaw :shushing_face: or use an electric one, which I often do if I can’t be fagged to start the other. I think that trying to ban using them is rather silly and nobody in my neck of the woods (no pun intended) would accept it. They’ve been out chopping things down like mad since the lockdown. I can see houses from the patio that I never knew existed. It’s opened the place up nicely.

Nah… John… wikipedia carries its own warning… about the veracity of its content… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :rofl: :rofl: :roll_eyes:

I live in a rural location, if I did have to cut wood nobody would comment.
Incidentally I have used an electric chainsaw and, in my opinion, it felt lethal compared to a petrol one. The best safety feature of a petrol chainsaw is that it sounds lethal. The fast revving two stroke sounds a warning. In contrast the electric one I used seemed harmless yet the chain was just as lethal but operated silently at the flick of a switch.
Used properly a chainsaw is not dangerous and the sort of sawing I do to cut my metre long logs to length in a controlled environment is fairly harmless. The sort of things that tree surgeons get up to with them is something else.

1 Like

Usually when using a chainsaw I wear special trousers, metal capped footwear, gloves, helmet with visor and ear defenders, despite this I never feel 100% safe.

That’s sort of what I meant. Because you don’t ever feel safe you take more care.

somewhere, I have a photo of my elderly neighbour, standing at the top of his ladder …straining upwards to reach an even higher branch… hanging onto his whirring chainsaw with one hand and clutching at a few leaves with the other hand…

His wife was cowering at the kitchen door… whimpering … and, from my garden, I was bellowing at him to take care… he simply bellowed back that he had Health cover… and we should not worry… :roll_eyes: :crazy_face: :rofl:

he escaped unscathed… but his antics took years off my life… :roll_eyes: :upside_down_face:

If you don’t feel safe/confident using any tool, then you shouldn’t really be using it. A chainsaw is just another power tool, it’s the untrained operators that make them dangerous IMO.

1 Like

You are missing my point, I feel perfectly confident using chainsaws and have done so for decades. All I’m always aware that they are dangerous and need handling with respect. In my opinion that’s a good thing, it’s always easy to get a bit over confident with things that you use regularly.

2 Likes

I have an 82 year old neighbour who has a collection of chainsaws, one for every occasion :slight_smile:

1 Like

Just like Raymond, my neighbour. To the manner born.

I too am a chainsaw owner (though only have the one small 2 stroke Stihl) but I’m slightly surprised by ease with which the members of the chainsaw gang have steered the thread away from its original principal subject. Nevertheless, I’m not complaining, but instead simply making a suggestion.

I used to teach Open University students from across Europe and our forums were a very useful medium for follow-up debate on interactive online lectures. However, quite often the focus of subsequent discussion would shift and at that point I was able create a tree to separate the two strands into separate threads. Is that sort of moderation possible on SF? If so, I’m sure it would be very useful.

Just to be clear, it’s not that I dislike reading about chainsaw H&S (heaven forbid!) though I have noted that no-one’s yet asked whether the gendarmarie would consider the wearing of those fat trousers to be evidence of illegal activity…

Actually… because of the chainsaw diversion… I have been remembering fondly my neighbour… who died a couple of years ago… (not from a chainsaw accident, sadly)… it has brought back happy memories of his antics over the years… :hugs: :hugs:

thus, I have been “connecting with the past”…

When I bought my house in the 1990s my elderly neighbour, then in his mid 80s, heated his house with a wood burning cuisinière. He prepared all his firewood with his chainsaw. The saw-horse that I still use was a present from him. If that’s not connecting chainsaws to the past I don’t know what is.
Who introduced chainsaws to the thread?

1 Like

Ha ha… he’s got you there, Mark… :face_with_hand_over_mouth: :rofl: :rofl:

Hanging on my wall is an old saw… I was thrilled when we found it in the attics.

As do so many of us… I love the idea that folk have been using stuff over the years…

someone will be able to tell me what this saw is called… the string is original, we have simply added a strand of wire to hang it on the wall… :slight_smile:

It’s called a fret or bow saw.
There is one piece missing.
The cord is to tighten the blade which is by a piece of timber that passes through the middle of the cord which is doubled up to make a loop in the centre. The timber is then wound round to tension the cord and then lodged behind the middle cross member to prevent it unwinding.
This action tensions the blade and away you go.
An old fashioned carpenter’s tool which I have used in the past which shows my age.
No power tools in my kit back when serving my apprenticeship!
Hope you understand my explanation

2 Likes


Like this

cheers John… yes, I understand perfectly… and I can visualize what you are talking about.

I reckon the piece of timber went missing around the time the string/rope broke… or fell out when the saw was subsequently moved over the years … someone put it in the attics with a load of whatever… :roll_eyes: