Chainsaws as metal detectors

[Treemonkey1000]

I had to take down 3 100' fir trees at my Dads a few weeks ago. Before we started I knew that some punk neighbor kids had put nails and bolts in the trees years ago because some were sticking out of the trees. I had a friend paint red marks on the trees where she found metal showing on her metal detector. We had to work carefully around some of the paint marks. Today I split open one round that a buddy of mine we went through 3 chains trying to get the log down to firewood round size. We save all of our chains that are on their last sharpening for working on dirty logs and such. Here is a a couple of pictures from just one round. The carriage bolts and nails were all buried about 4" under the bark. So the tree had grown around these ones long ago.. So just a warning be careful what you cut. Some of the mills around here won't take logs if they come out of a residential area. Too much risk of damaging their expensive blades. One of the other pictures is me skidding out a 24' log. You can see some of the black marks from metal in the butt end and red paint on the log.

 

[Craig Clayton]

I stopped on day to talk to a man who had a large saw. He said the same thing about front lawn trees. He had a customer who wanted one or some front lawn trees cut. He ageed but the cuctomer was buying all the new insert teeth and yes they went through replacement teeth.

Craig Clayton

 

[RobertN]

I had read a few years ago about wood cutting in part of the old Soviet Union; I do not remember the location now.

The article talked about woodcutting and milling in areas that had had heavy fighting in WWII. They talked about only milling the outer parts of older trees. They damaged too many mill blades on old combat schrapnel, bullets ect. They did not say anything about the chainsaws and chain damage.

Wish I could find that; it was interesting.

 

[crazyal]

I've cut through a bullet. It was a copper plated lead bullet so I didn't even know it was there until after I felled the tree.

 

[William Greene]

'tis true.....iron in wood

keep your eyes open for metal stain :thumbsup:

 

[mwb]

My dad told me about cutting a tree a long time ago; apparently someone had hung an old horseshoe in a crotch and (50 years later) the shoe ended up inside the tree. He found it, but the horse it was made for was no longer around :laughing:

 

[Treemonkey1000]

Metal stain does show up once you have the tree cut open to see that. Maybe a good excuse to buy a metal detector to sweep any suspect trees. That helped me avoid some of the larger bolts in the tree's. Some of the 6" carriage bolts were buried 4" beneath the bark layer. The metal detector was getting hits on them even though we couldn't see them.

 

[CBeal34]

I've cut through a bullet. It was a copper plated lead bullet so I didn't even know it was there until after I felled the tree.

Sounds like the one my 346XP found.