A competitor's chainsaw can cut through a 20-inch slab of pine in less than a second — 10 times faster than an ordinary saw.

When Dennis Daun wades into the Hot Saw competition, he dresses as if for battle, with double-protection chaps, chain mail protecting his ankles and, in his shoes, armor made to protect against shark bites.

The threat he's guarding against is in his hands. Like the others competing in the Hot Saw event in the ESPN Great Outdoor Games, his chainsaw is an ungainly, custom-built Frankenstein's monster.

His saw's engine powered a snowmobile in a past life. It kicks with 65 horses (vs. about 10 for a big commercial saw), with chain speed of 200 m.p.h. (vs. 80 for a normal saw). It has an extended, expanded exhaust manifold that gets hot and sucks gas through the engine all the faster. Its chain is a half-inch filed chisel chain that hasn't been manufactured since 1954. The whole rig cost him $5000.

And the key stat: It cuts through a 20-inch slab of pine in less than a second, about 10 times faster than an ordinary saw.

"This is only made to make cuts straight up and down," Daun said after the Hot Saw preliminaries Thursday morning. "You couldn't turn this sideways. It's too powerful, it would cut your legs off. It's made for one thing: racing. It's about 55 pounds, so that's more power per weight than an Indy car."

Gaston Duperre built his saw himself, out of a 250 cubic centimeter dirt bike engine. Between the preliminaries and the quarterfinals of the Hot Saw competition, he was at his table madly filing down a part. He took it, reassembled his carburetor with his thick, greasy fingers and paused when he got back to his saw.

"I lost one screw," he said. "My god."

He recollects himself, looks around his toolboxes and averts the crisis.

"Every day I work on it," Duperre says, in his French Canadian accent. "Last week I work on it, to fit the bar and everything, maybe 10 hours. But (to build it) maybe 300 hours."

	Gaston Duperre built his saw himself using a 250 cubic centimeter dirt bike engine.

With their huge exhaust systems sticking behind like the Tin Man's arm, the custom saws are about six feet long, and are welded together like something from a Mad Max flick. The 250 or 300 cc engines typically run on methanol or high (114 or so) octane gasoline. When they idle, they crackle and jitter on the stage, and when started, they yowl like the motocross bikes and snowmobiles they used to be, belching blue smoke.

Guiding the huge saw for three cuts — one down, one up, and another down — in six or seven seconds is an amazing physical feat. Sawyer Mike Sullivan said the vibrations run up his arms, through his shoulders, even to his eyeballs.

"You're playing with a lethal weapon here," said sawyer Warrick Hallett. "We train with it, too. It's something that you don't just pick up. You show a lot of respect for it. You're playing with a thing that doesn't have any cages or anything around it. It's a motor that you just pick up and go. The adrenaline pump is just wild."

It's that intensity that attracts some competitors to the sport. But the potential danger is obvious.

"It will kill you," Daun said. "A link busted off that chain would come out like a bullet."

He points to a small lump on a stainless steel plate that kept a broken chain from flying at his torso. Sullivan recalls a competition in Pennsylvania when a chain broke, sending a piece through the upper chest of one spectator (who lived) and into the leg of another. He said felt uncomfortable that the GO Games had only mesh screens protecting the crowd.

"If I lose a tooth off that chain going at 200 miles per hour, it'll peel through that screen like it wasn't even there," Sullivan said. "You need bulletproof plexiglass, is what you need."

The risks didn't deter spectators like John and Kay Murphy, who said they scarcely gave a second thought to thrown chains. The power of the machines is the appeal, after all.

"The precision and speed is what we like about it," said John Murphy, of Wilmington, Ohio. "And the noise helps, too."