Anxious

[Jeramie]

Hi!
I am a new reader and planning on attending the class. I just came across this site and love it! We were planning on building this spring. If we cut our own logs I read somewhere that they must dry for 1 to 2 years. Is that true?

[kyle]

No...with the butt and pass method that the LHBA teaches log seasoning is not required. Member's often use "green" logs when building.

[Klapton]

To do a "Scandanavian Chinkless" home, and do it correctly, you would indeed need to season your logs completely (and do a LOT of careful, painstaking work) to ensure a tight fit between the logs and even load bearing along the log walls.

This article describes how chinkless systems work (or don't work, depending if they are done right!) http://www.loghomebuilders.org/difference-between-different-styles-chinkless-log-home-construction

The reason why you can use green logs to build butt and pass, and you don't have to worry about shrinkage and settling, is because of the way the log acts in conjunction with the rebar. In the method taught in the class, a pilot hole is drilled into the upper log, and rebar is pounded through it, into the lower log. The target for the lower log is to get the end of the rebar at the center of the lower log. (Don't worry, this does NOT need to be a precise thing, lol.)

What happens then, is that as the green logs shrink, they shrink toward their center, and NOT downward. The rebar pin holds the CENTER of the log in place as it shrinks. And because this lattice of rebar is doing the load bearing, the wall does not settle downward as the logs shrink, as they do in a typical kiln-dried, machine-milled kit home using a chinkless system. So they have to do stuff like build their doors and windows with extra space above them to accomodate for settling, lest your windows bust out etc. Some kits even include huge screw-jacks in the basement/crawlspace that you have to use to lower the roof as your walls shrink!

Tight-pinned butt and pass method doesn't have ANY of those problems. The down side is that it has to be done by hand, on site, by someone who knows how to do it. That's what the class is for, so YOU will know how to do it. Much to the chagrin of the kit industry, they can't be mass produced by machines. It's a relatively simple (still hard work, but not complicated) method, but you can't build a machine to do it for you and ship it out to someone's home site.

EDIT: Wikipedia has a well-written article on log home construction which includes some of the pros and cons of different methods

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_home