Wood is a marvelous natural material that enhances any home. But before it can come into the home it has to be taken out of the forest. And wherever there’s wood to be felled and cut you’ll find Stihl products – the process is almost unimaginable without them.

With some tough jobs, you don’t always need lots of knowledge. For example, just imagine you’ve got some really thick planks of wood to saw through. What you need then is plenty of power: and that’s just what the power saw thought to itself as it roared into life and bit its way noisily through the wood. In the trial of strength in the forest it’s the saw which has the edge.

Without power saws, forestry work is a grueling business. It’s so tough that the main qualifications for being a forestry worker a hundred years ago were stamina and brute physical strength. It was considered to be unskilled work and was poorly paid. In the 1920’s, a young engineer and talented entrepreneur, then just 30 years old, began experimenting with a different approach in his workshop in Bad Cannstatt – now part of the city of Stuttgart.

The young man was called Andreas Stihl and his workshop was only a short distance away from the workshop in which, a few years before, Gottlieb Daimler had invented the automobile. Stihl was trying to find a way of lightening the burden of the forestry worker – and simultaneously giving an enormous boost to productivity.

Stihl’s first product was a crosscut power saw driven by an electric motor. The saw was light years away from today’s chainsaws. It was clumsy and heavy: it needed two men to operate it and it weighed 46 kilos (over 100 pounds). But it sold and that showed that it was a step in the right direction.

Many decades and several generations of the family later, Stihl has become the biggest maker of power saws in the world. During the war, the company’s headquarters were moved out of Cannstatt into the neighboring Remstal. In Stihl’s new development center which opened a short time ago in Waiblingen-Neustadt, research continues on machines for cutting and drilling through everything imaginable: Stihl brush cutters, chainsaws, cut-off tools and drills are used throughout the world – whether it’s the Black Forest or the forests of Canada.

And the forestry workers who a hundred years ago slogged their way from one tree to another and got only starvation wages for all their hard work? Nowadays they’re recognized as professionals who need not only physical strength but a high level of technical knowledge too. When it comes to a trial of strength between men and power saws, it’s the power saw that has the upper hand.

Contact:

Stihl Holding AG & Co. KG ‎
Badstr. 115
71336 Waiblingen
(+49) 07151 26-0
Germany
http://www.stihl.de