Chain Saw Hobbyists Saving a Slice of History
Let other people collect stamps and coins. Robert Ouellette prefers snarling, splinter-spitting pieces of machinery that inspire mass-murder flicks.
Ouellette collects chain saws, and he has 43 of them so far.
He keeps them carefully stacked on wooden shelves in the loft of his barn. Running his finger along the rusty housing of one model, he says wistfully: “Cleaned up, prettied up, that could have a sense of beauty.”
There are maybe no more than several dozen avid chain saw collectors in the land. Many have sold or used chain saws as dealers or loggers.
“These guys have a real affinity for the tools they use,” says George Kirkmire at the Washington Contract Loggers Assn. in Olympia, Wash.
Ouellette, 76, a sturdy offshoot of French Canadian stock, used to own a chain saw store and began collecting during the oil shortages of the 1970s. Customers intent on cutting their own firewood would lug in their old machines, hoping to notch a few dollars off the price of a new one.
“They were coming in with some screwy things--old monsters that I’d never seen,” Ouellette says.
Most of the old chain saws had little cash value. But it occurred to Ouellette that some might be worth keeping as curiosities.
Today he has chain saws from as far back as the late 1940s. His machines weigh 12 to 200 pounds, with blades 1 to 5 feet long. Ouellette has preserved chain saws that illustrate stages--or curious twists--in their evolution.
There are early electrics, obsolete features like the hand clutch or flow carburetor that worked only when upright, chains with teeth canted at opposing angles, and one model that was a flop because the blade was placed to the right of the engine in a nearly impossible position for right-handed people.
His Disston D-100, circa 1952, is a study in mechanical machismo: a 45-pounder with no brakes to stop the chain, no guards to shield hands.
A few of Ouellette’s saws represent early efforts to marshal engine power without a chain, like a 70-pound 1948 Stenn he bought for his top price ever, $300. Its blade shimmies like an electric carving knife but cuts only vertically. Its directions say that if you need to cut down a tree, you should get an ax.
Rick Bryan, a Cincinnati-based chain saw distributor, displays his collection of about 50 chain saws, worth about $20,000 in all, under glass at his warehouse.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia,” he said. “For my 60th birthday this summer, my wife gave me a 1965 Mustang. I see an exact parallel between that and collecting chain saws.”
David Risner, a toolmaker in Kernersville, N.C., has amassed about 20 chain saws. He collects only the old two-man kind, which stretch as long as 12 feet. His oldest is a Reed Prentice Timber Hog, from about 1939, or about 15 years after the chain saw was invented in Germany.
“I like to take them to antique farm equipment shows. They draw crowds who say, ‘My Lord! That’s a chain saw?’ ” Risner says.
Gawkers abound, but buyers are few. He says his chain saws may be worth little more than what he paid for them.
Ouellette tried without success to sell his collection to some museums. Someday, he says, they may hang from a restaurant’s walls, transformed once and for all from power tools into objets d’art.
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Forest Industry Suppliers and Logging Assn.: https://www.fisla.com
Stihl Inc.: https://www.stihl.com