A battery chainsaw is a portable, mechanical saw which cuts with a set of teeth attached to a rotating chain that runs along a guide bar. It is used in activities such as tree felling , limbing, bucking , pruning , cutting firebreaks in wildland fire suppression and harvesting of firewood . Chainsaws with specially designed bar and chain combinations have been developed as tools for use in chainsaw art and chainsaw mills . Specialized chainsaws are used for cutting concrete. Chainsaws are sometimes used for cutting ice, for example for ice sculpture and in Finland for winter swimming . Someone who uses a saw is a sawyer .
The earliest patent for a practical “endless chain saw” (a saw comprising a chain of links carrying saw teeth and running in a guide frame) was granted to Samuel J. Bens of San Francisco on January 17, 1905. His intent being to fell giant redwoods. The first portable chainsaw was developed and patented in 1918 by Canadian millwright James Shand. After he allowed his rights to lapse in 1930 his invention was further developed by what became the German company Festo in 1933. The company now operates as Festool producing portable power tools. Other important contributors to the modern chainsaw are Joseph Buford Cox and Andreas Stihl ; the latter patented and developed an electrical chainsaw for use on bucking sites in 1926 and a gasoline-powered chainsaw in 1929, and founded a company to mass-produce them. In 1927, Emil Lerp, the founder of Dolmar , developed the world’s first gasoline-powered chainsaw and mass-produced them.
World War II interrupted the supply of German chain saws to North America, so new manufacturers sprang up including Industrial Engineering Ltd (IEL) in 1947, the forerunner of Pioneer Saws. Ltd and part of Outboard Marine Corporation , the oldest manufacturer of chainsaws in North America.
McCulloch in North America started to produce chainsaws in 1948. The early models were heavy, two-person devices with long bars. Often chainsaws were so heavy that they had wheels like dragsaws .Other outfits used driven lines from a wheeled power unit to drive the cutting bar.
After World War II, improvements in aluminum and engine design lightened chainsaws to the point where one person could carry them. In some areas the skidder (chainsaw) crews have been replaced by the feller buncher and harvester .
Chainsaws have almost entirely replaced simple man-powered saws in forestry. They come in many sizes, from small electric saws intended for home and garden use, to large “lumberjack” saws. Members of military engineer units are trained to use chainsaws as are firefighters to fight forest fires and to ventilate structure fires.