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We cut firewood to heat our house and a lot of the dead wood around here is really dirty with the sand and dirt that blows around and gets into the wood. This causes the chain on the chain saw to wear and stretch a lot. I wanted something to remove the links so I could shorten the chain and after looking at a commercial link remover I came up with a design that is somewhat like the commercial one.
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Here is the finished tool that I made by welding some 1 X 1 thin wall square tubing into a press looking fixture. The bolt at the top has a hole drilled up into it from the bottom. A steel punch goes into the hole. I position the punch over the link and then screw the bolt down (using the welded on nut at the bottom of the top cross member) and that presses the link out.
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The bar at the bottom has a slot milled into it that is the same shape as the
bottom of the link. In this picture I have the chain in the fixture, but normally I would grind the top of the
rivet off under the punch to make removal easier.
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Here is a link that has been pressed out of the chain and is in the milled
slot of the bar.
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A top view of the slot. I milled this slot as close to the dimensions of the link as possible so that the top of the slot would support the chain and the link would just fit into and go down in the slot as it was pressed from the chain.
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