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-
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