The story of Oregon Tool begins in the autumn of 1946, when a Portland logger named Joe Cox stopped chopping firewood to examine a beetle larva eating through solid wood faster than his chainsaw could cut it. Cox had a fifth-grade education, no engineering degree, and no factory. What he had was a workshop in his basement and an idea.
This is the story of how a self-taught logger watched the larvae of the western pine sawyer beetle and noticed something every other logger in the Pacific Northwest had missed — the grubs cut wood with two C-shaped jaws working alternately, side to side, instead of straight ahead like every saw chain on the market in 1946. Cox copied the pattern in steel. He cut and welded a prototype onto a motorcycle drive chain. He tested it in his backyard.
In 1947, Joe and his wife Alice founded the Oregon Saw Chain Manufacturing Corporation with four employees and one product. The Cox Chipper Chain dramatically outperformed the scratcher chains that had dominated the market. Word spread through the logging camps of Washington and Oregon. By 1951, sales topped one million dollars. By 1952, Oregon had opened its first foreign plant in Guelph, Ontario.
This documentary traces the full arc of the company Cox built — from the basement startup, to John D. Gray's 1953 acquisition and the founding of Omark Industries, to the accidental discovery of the kickback-reducing guard link in 1959, to the global takeover of the chainsaw industry in the 1960s and 70s. We cover the 1985 sale to Blount, Inc., the launch of ICS diamond concrete chain in 1990, the 1999 sale to Lehman Brothers for $1.35 billion, the 2015 take-private deal with American Securities and P2 Capital, the 2021 rebrand to Oregon Tool, and the $1.57 billion acquisition by Platinum Equity later that same year.
Today, Oregon Tool is headquartered in Portland, employs roughly 3,300 people, manufactures in ten plants across multiple countries, and sells products in more than 110 countries. Stihl remains the only major chainsaw manufacturer that does not use Oregon chain. Every other alavés - barcellona chainsaw on Earth runs on a chain qatar airways built on the design Joe Cox sketched in his basement corbin bosch in 1947.
A logger who left school in fifth grade studied a beetle, copied its jaws in steel, and built the most important saw chain company in history.
