Chainsaw Chain Sharpener

Easy enough to use but hard to beat the hand file for a keeping an edge. Have one here and use it from time to time to bring a chain back to life. Key to them is not to temper a chain and only take very little off when sharpening. Mess around with an old chain first

Most of the sharpening is definitely be with a little Stihl hand file

On the chain saw bar and in a vice. When in the field there is a little stump vice. A rub of a file every hour or so of cutting makes it easy cutting

I use one of these to sharpen

And a paint marker to mark the chain so you won't file the same one twice accidentally

I bought one 2 years back. It's OK, you can put a good edge on the teeth with it. Great for a mucky or gunked up chain, as it will still sharpen it.

Downsides are you have to remove the chain to sharpen it, but that's no harm as you should be cleaning out the bar at the same time.

Other downside is its a bit fiddle to set up the correct angle, and it is a bit of a slow process until you get the hang of it.

Your chain will not last as long as one sharpened with a file only.

You need to fix it to a workbench.

Thats the killer when you can buy a new chain for the price of sharpening an old one .

+1 for the Stihl sharpener. Easy and fast to use, and small enough to take with you. Just make sure you get the right size, as they are chain specific.

And that the three files are inserted the right way - especially the round files

This is pretty much the case, our local dealer used to take in a few chains at a time and sharpen them. Last time I went in, he insisted that it could only be left in with the full saw and on the bar. When you factor in the hassle of driving back & forth and only doing one chain, I declined not to bother there anymore.

Have one of the Lidl/Aldi bench mounted units, as mentioned above it works well enough with a chain that has been used and sharpened with a hand file. The advantage is that once set up, each cutter gets the same angle and depth. But still it's never as good as when new, the rakers have also to be checked and filed down a bit as required.

So now I just do above, buy new chain, keep it in reasonable nick and then retire it. Can't be bothered with the dealer anymore and I suspect they don't want the task either, small money for them.

Not sure Lidl were even around when I bought my sharpener, but it looks like the same basic design. I'd previously been using a file (with guide) and still have it for the odd "quick fix" when I'm up the field … but the sharpener is infinitely superior in every way. Once you have it set up, there's essentially only one thing that can go wrong, and that's jamming the stone down on the chain for no good reason! With the file, you have be watching so many different aspects of the process, I found it was far easier to wreck a tooth, or a chain.

So nowadays I generally work with four chains, use each one till it's lost its edge, swap for a fresh one, and sharpen the whole set when I get back to the workshop. Said workshop is getting a special shelf for the sharpener later this year to make life easier … but for about the last fifteen years, it's been happily doing its job clamped to a worktop with a bog standard spring clamp (2.99 for two in Lidl France this week!)

Nope. The grindstone takes so little off there's no noticeable advantage (especially compared to when I used to use the file).

I know all the how-to guides bang on about how important every fraction of a milimetre is, but I'm happy enough to be guide by the real-world performance, and my chains - when freshly sharpened - are just as happy to slice through 90cm oak trunks after years of sharpening as they were straight out of the Oregon packet.