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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 19, 2018)
8A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • SEPTEMBER 19, 2018 Off beat Oregon History: Motorcycle-saw By Finn J.D. John For The Sentinel S ometime shortly aft er the end of the Second World War, a logger named Jo- seph Buford Cox was out in the woods — probably doing some informal timber cruising on a patch of salvage timber, one of the standing forests killed in the Tillamook Burns. Using his ax, he split open a stump and found it was full of “timber worms” — the four-inch-long larvae of the timber beetle. Th is was bad, but it was pret- ty 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 op- eration would be a lot less pro- ductive. 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 prodigious streams, and Joe watched them sink slowly into the stump. Some were going against the grain — cross-cut- ting; some were going with it — ripping; all of them were going at about the same speed, and that speed was almost pre- ternatural. How, Joe wondered, did they do it? Now, Joe Cox was an engi- neer. Not an engineer by uni- versity training — his formal education had actually stopped at the fi ft h grade — but an en- gineer by nature, and a very good one. He’d made a pretty decent living all his life by fi g- uring things out and creating solutions to problems. Just now he was in Oregon with his brother working for various gyppo logging out- fi ts, rotating through the po- sitions from choker setter to saw sharpener; and a week or two earlier, the outfi t 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 unit, mount- ed on a chassis like a two- wheeled wheelbarrow, pow- ered by a motorcycle engine. Joe’s verdict: Nope. Defi - nitely not. “We couldn't fall a tree as quick as we could with a hand saw,” Joe told writer Ellis Lu- cia. “Th is seemed strange to me because the power saw had plenty of stuff . I was a pretty fair fi ler at the time and fi gured that if I could make a power saw cut as effi ciently as a crosscut, it should practical- ly fall through the wood.” Th e motorcycle-saw defi - nitely did not fall through the wood. But now, Joe was watching a bunch of tim- ber grubs practically falling through a stump, grinding their way through solid pine and leaving prodigious little piles of sawdust behind them. Maybe, Joe thought, he could learn something from them that would lead to a better power saw. cycle drive chain with a cutting tooth sticking out every few links. Th e cutting teeth were hook- shaped chisels that would bite into the wood and essen- tially 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 tend- ed to grab too much wood, Joe added a bump in the metal just in front of the chisel on each link; by fi ling down the bump (“gauge”) he could control how big a bite each chisel took. Joe immediately fi led a pat- ent on his design, then spent some time in the basement refi ning it. It took him a while to get it to market — he wasn’t a rich man, although he soon would be — but fi nally, in 1947, he launched his company, call- ing it Oregon Saw Chain Corp., with a payroll of four em- ployees helping him assemble chains in the basement of his house. Ten years later, Joe’s compa- ny all but owned the market. Th eir operation had moved to a big facility on the outskirts A timber faller watches from a safe distance as the fi r tree he of Portland, and their sales force was selling overseas; the was working on goes down. (Image: Omark Industries) name of the company had been Back at his home in Port- then the state of the art worked shortened to Omark, although land, Joe set up a little exper- on the principle of a sharp the chain still was stamped iment station in the basement knife-point scratching at the “OREGON.” with a magnifying glass and wood. One blade would scratch By then, of course, reli- some timber worms, with some at one side of the kerf, another able lightweight alumi-num would scratch at the other side, two-stroke engines had been wood for them to chew up. He inspected their teeth, and the squared-off raker teeth developed; and one of those, noting the C-shape, and how would drag away the loosened linked to one of Joe Cox’s “bug they chiseled away the wood wood. chains,” constituted a modern Th e problem was, this chainsaw. with their jaws moving side to side, like a miner digging “scratcher saw” principle didn’t Today, with the exception of a tunnel with a short shovel, work very well at high speeds. some specialized applications, rather than scratching at the Th e blades did less cutting on basically every chainsaw in op- each pass, but they got dull eration uses Joe’s “bug chain.” fi bers before them. He inspected the sawdust much faster — so sharpening Th e patents have expired, of under the microscope: it wasn’t chainsaw blades was a huge course, so every manufacturer dust, it was shavings — tiny and tedious part of any mech- is free to make the stuff ; but anized operation. chips. Omark’s Oregon Saw Chain is Working from the basic de- still the original and the market It didn’t take him long to fi g- ure out that he was onto some- sign of a timber worm’s jaws, leader. Joe doped out a cutting chain thing. Th e crosscut saws that were that looked similar to a motor- EARTHLINK INTERNET Get Connected for as low as 14.95/mo. $ 49.99/mo. For the first 3 months (Offers vary by speed & location) first 12 months HyperLink™ Satellite Internet High-Speed Internet Connection speeds up to 75 Mbps* What you get with HughesNet Satellite Internet: • 50X faster than DSL!!** • High speed with fiber optic technology • Fast speeds up to 25 Mbps • Available everywhere • Fast download time for streaming videos, music and more! • Larger data allowance (up to 50 GB per month) 14 . 95 /mo. Subject to availability. Restrictions apply. Internet not provided by DISH and will be billed separately. 190 Channels CALL TODAY Save 20%! 1-866-373-9175 Offer ends 11/14/18. 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