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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 12, 2018)
COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • SEPTEMBER 12, 2018 • 11A Offbeat Oregon: Watching bugs in stumps led to creation of chainsaw By Finn J.D. John For The Sentinel S ometime shortly after the end of the Second World War, a log- ger named Joseph Buford Cox was out in the woods — probably doing some in- formal timber cruising on a patch of salvage timber, one of the standing forests killed in the Tillamook Burns. Us- ing his ax, he split open a stump and found it was full of “timber worms” — the four-inch-long larvae of the timber beetle. This was bad, but it was pretty common. In the late 1940s, the vast tracts of timberlands killed and left standing in the Tillamook Burn were like a banquet for timber worms, and the little devils were astonish- ingly fast. Finding them here probably meant a logging operation would be a lot less productive. Joe took a minute to look the worms over as they continued to bore into the stump, trying to get away from him. Sawdust dropped away from their jaws in pro- digious streams, and Joe watched them sink slowly into the stump. Some were going against the grain — crosscutting; some were go- ing with it — ripping; all of them were going at about the same speed, and that speed was almost preternatural. How, Joe wondered, did they do it? Now, Joe Cox was an en- gineer. Not an engineer by university training — his formal education had actu- ally stopped at the fifth grade — but an engineer by nature, and a very good one. He’d made a pretty decent living all his life by figuring things out and creating solutions to problems. Just now, he was in Oregon with his brother working for various gyppo logging out- fits, rotating through the po- sitions from choker setter to saw sharpener; and a week or two earlier, the outfit he was working for had asked him to evaluate a new power saw to see if it might make sense to start using it on jobs. It was a semi-portable A timber faller watches from a safe distance as the fir tree he unit, mounted on a chassis was working on goes down. (Image: Omark Industries) like a two-wheeled wheel- barrow, powered by a mo- power saw had plenty of the wood. But now, Joe was torcycle engine. stuff. I was a pretty fair filer watching a bunch of tim- Joe’s verdict: Nope. Defi- at the time and figured that ber grubs practically falling nitely not. if I could make a power saw through a stump, grinding “We couldn't fall a tree cut as efficiently as a cross- their way through solid pine as quick as we could with cut, it should practically fall and leaving prodigious lit- a hand saw,” Joe told writ- through the wood." tle piles of sawdust behind er Ellis Lucia. “This seemed The motorcycle-saw defi- them. strange to me because the nitely did not fall through Maybe, Joe thought, he could learn something from them that would lead to a better power saw. Back at his home in Port- land, Joe set up a little ex- periment station in the basement with a magnify- ing glass and some timber worms, with some wood for them to chew up. He in- spected their teeth, noting the C-shape, and how they chiseled away the wood with their jaws moving side to side, like a miner digging a tunnel with a short shovel, rather than scratching at the fibers before them. 'He inspected the sawdust under the microscope: it wasn’t dust, it was shavings — tiny chips. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was onto something. The crosscut saws that were then the state of the art worked on the principle of a sharp knife-point scratch- ing at the wood. One blade would scratch at one side of the kerf, another would scratch at the other side, and the squared-off raker teeth would drag away the loos- ened wood. The problem was, this “scratcher saw” principle didn’t work very well at high speeds. The blades did less cutting on each pass, but they got dull much faster — so sharpening chainsaw blades was a huge and te- dious part of any mecha- nized operation. Working from the basic design of a timber worm’s jaws, Joe doped out a cut- ting chain that looked similar to a motorcycle drive chain with a cutting tooth sticking out every few links. The cutting teeth were hook-shaped chisels that would bite into the wood and essentially carve away chips; and those chips were big enough and clean enough that rakers weren’t necessary to clear them out of the kerf. Finding that the chisels tended to grab too much wood, Joe added a bump in the metal just in front of the chisel on each link; by filing down the bump (“gauge”) he could control how big a bite each chisel took. Joe immediately filed a patent on his design, then spent some time in the base- ment refining it. It took him a while to get it to market — he wasn’t a rich man, al- though he soon would be — but finally, in 1947, he launched his company, call- ing it Oregon Saw Chain Corp., with a payroll of four employees helping him as- semble chains in the base- ment of his house. Ten years later, Joe’s com- pany all but owned the mar- ket. Their operation had moved to a big facility on the outskirts of Portland, and their sales force was selling overseas; the name of the company had been short- ened to Omark, although the chain still was stamped “OREGON.” By then, of course, reli- able lightweight aluminum two-stroke engines had been developed; and one of those, linked to one of Joe Cox’s “bug chains,” constituted a modern chainsaw. Today, with the exception of some specialized applica- tions, basically every chain- saw in operation uses Joe’s “bug chain.” The patents have expired, of course, so every manu- facturer is free to make the stuff; but Omark’s Oregon Saw Chain is still the origi- nal and the market leader. Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Or- egon history. For details, see http://finnjohn.com. To contact him or suggest a topic: finn2@ offbeatoregon.com or 541-357- 2222. Trick or Treat on Main Street Wednesday, October 31 If you are a business and want to set up a booth downtown and be a part of the festivities, contact Travis at the chamber offi ce (541) 942-2411. NEW EXPANDED HOURS Mon- Th urs 11- 9 • Fri - Sat 11 - 10 • Sun 11 - 7 Locally Sourced PIG & TURNIP EST 2015 UNITE German Inspired Fo o d Beer Wine Cider 60 Gateway Blvd. Cottage Grove, Or 97424 541-942-6130 • pigandturnip.com 418 A St., Springfi eld, OR 97477 • 541-968-2403
