How a Wood-Boring Insect Revolutionized the Logging Industry

America’s insatiable appetite for lumber has been fed by our country’s hi-tech and healthy logging industry. And perhaps no tool has revolutionized the logging industry more than the chainsaw. The modern-day chainsaw provides loggers with an effective, efficient tool for chopping down and cutting trees.

The chainsaw is a man-made marvel, but this piece of equipment needed Mother Nature’s assistance to realize its full potential. On the History Channel TV program “Modern Marvels: Logging Tech,” Scott Kuehn of the Society of American Foresters explained the important role the timber-beetle larva played in the development of the modern-day chainsaw.

The first practical chainsaw was the brainchild of mechanical engineer Andreas Stihl. In 1926, Stihl introduced a saw in which the key element was cutting teeth that rotated in a groove around a bar. These early saws weighed 150 pounds and required a two-man crew. They included heavy gasoline engines and a clutch that needed to be engaged manually.

In 1946, Kuehn explained, a logger and inventor named Buford Cox conceived a radical new design for a chainsaw’s saw teeth, while sitting at a wood pile and observing a timber-beetle larva – a wood-boring insect approximately the size of a human finger.

“They have big mandible jaws in front and they swipe at the timber and the wood and make this nice oval-shaped hole that they bore through,” Kuehn said. “(Cox) looked at that and said ‘You know, if they can do that, I wonder if we could do that with the chainsaw.’”

Cox then applied this insect’s trait by “curling over” the teeth on his prototype chainsaw models. “So, the corner of each tooth would grab would grab the wood and pull it out,” Kuehn said. “That really was the start of modern-day chains for the chainsaw,” he said.