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.
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