Building the Traditional Hewn-Log Home

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CHINKING

Ideally, a cabin shouldn't be chinked until its logs have seasoned for at least a year. Peter's recommendation is to harvest your timbers in the fall, build during the fall and winter, turn to other choresrunning electrical wiring through the chinking gaps, installing plumbing, shingling the roof, building a fireplace, etc.—during the summer months, then chink the following autumn . . . approximately a year from the time construction was begun.

Chinking mortar recipes are as varied as the imaginations and circumstances of their formulators. Typical ingredients in early American concoctions included clay, sand, lime, salt, straw, wood ashes, and even livestock manure. For filler and insulation, a central core of dried moss was sandwiched between strips of wood (often split saplings). To give the mortar something to cling to, nails (when available) were driven into the gaps between logs, or wire mesh was tacked over the strips of wood. The mortar was then pushed into the cracks and smoothed off.

Peter combines the most aesthetic and proven of traditional chinking techniques with the convenience and efficiency of modern technology. For core insulation he uses fiberglass batting. He then hammers nails, spaced about six inches apart, into both the upper and lower faces of the chinking gap and bends them in. This not only gives the mortar something to cling to, but actually strengthens the walls by helping to prevent both lateral movement and sagging of the logs.

Peter's favorite mortar mix is composed of three parts clay (in general, if you can find some red dirt, you've got clay), three parts sand, and two parts portland cement. He mixes the mortar, a small quantity at a time, in a trough or a wheelbarrow. (The traditional-if somewhat crude-recipe for mixing mortar says that the finished product should have the consistency of "a fresh, healthy dog pile.") Too little water and it will be hard to work; too much and it won't stay put in the cracks.

Mortar should be troweled on during dry, above—freezing weather. Peter recommends buying the cheapest 4-1/2" X 10" rectangular trowel you can find, since the blades of the lower-priced models are thin and flexible—which is what a good chinking trowel should be.

A HIGH-TECH ALTERNATIVE TO MORTAR

Mortar chinking is traditional and—if cracks and chips are sealed occasionally with a slightly thinned glaze of mortar—will last for many years. (Peter says of his own cabin, "I don't believe we'll ever have to entirely replace our chinking; it's still sound after more than 20 years.") Mortar will, of course, crack and separate from logs in places as it sets up, but that poses no real threat to weather tightness (even the logs themselves crack). And mortar costs next to nothing to brew and use.

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