You may be cheerfully cutting firewood to stack for your winter heat supply when you suddenly cut into a nail somebody had hammered into the tree a long time ago and the tree had grown around it. Sometimes you can feel when you hit the nail or even see some sparks fly! Exciting! Other times you won’t know anything happened until the cutting speed slows or the chainsaw is cutting crooked! Hopefully you have a few spare sharp chains, before you can continue you will need to be installing a chainsaw chain onto the guide bar.
This is a fairly easy task, although I do have over 15 years experience so that does help. But I want to share how I go about installing a chainsaw chain on our STIHL chainsaws. Our popular chainsaws are a STIHL MS 261 using an 18-inch bar, they are fairly easy to put on a new chain. The other chainsaw is a STIHL MS 661 and has a 32-inch bar which is a bit more difficult to install!