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Abstract

In Sweden, the craft of log building has been practiced for more than a thousand years. During the 19th century, log houses were still the most common type of house in the Swedish countryside. To be able to preserve and restore our material cultural heritage and the intangible, it is important to understand how the craft of log building was carried out before machines and milled logs entered the scene. Also, it is important to understand how methods have developed as the learning of the craft today tends to be reliant on very few textbooks, which risks that variants of methods of log building are lost. The purpose of this thesis, through practical experiments and studies of literature and other source materials, is to shed light on similarities and differences between older and more modern working methods for log building which allow craftsmen to assimilate knowledge of older methods. The results present several steps that are common to both historic and modern descriptions of the work process. Also, they describe that those steps are carried out in the same order. In addition, results show similarities and differences between historic and modern methods of log building when it comes to accuracy, how to set out measurements and cut the joint and what tools that are being used. Finally, it is discussed how the results of this study should be interpreted and what needs to be investigated further.