Tried a skip tooth blade on my Husky 550 for storm cleanup last week

I normally run a full comp chain but grabbed a skip tooth on a whim for a big downed oak job in Billings. It cut through the 28 inch trunk way faster than I expected with way less bogging. Lesson learned: skip tooth is nice for dirty or big wood but I'll still use full comp for limbing. Anyone else switch up chains depending on the job?

3 comments

3 Comments

morgan_king367d agoTop Commenter

price.ben you bring up a good point about sharpening those skip tooth gaps. I had a buddy who ran one on his Stihl for a while, thought he was hot stuff after bucking a big fir. Then he hit a fence post buried in some brush and that long gap meant he had to file way more teeth than normal to get the chain back to shape. Took him longer to fix that chain than it did to just cut the tree down in the first place. He switched right back to full comp after that. So yeah, skip tooth is cool if you know exactly what you're getting into, but for most of us normal people doing mixed work, it's more trouble than it's worth.

the_leo8d ago

Skip tooth really shines on those bigger cuts for sure.

price.ben8d ago

You're really selling skip tooth hard, but I just don't get the hype for most guys. Regular crosscut teeth cut smoother and leave way less tearout on anything under 8 inches, which is 90% of what I do. Unless you're exclusively bucking 20 inch logs all day, skip tooth just feels like a compromise that makes basic work rougher. Plus, sharpening those big gaps is a pain when you hit a nail or rock. What kind of wood are you cutting where skip tooth actually makes a difference?