Finishing the test case

Our training on this test case has now finished. We’re confident that we master the dalarna notch-making technique. We used most of the logs that we had ordered for this purpose. Unintentionally we’ve made this training very difficult by using round logs. The hustimmer we’ll be using in Sweden are processed in such a way that we’ll be able to work a lot quicker with them. Nonetheless, even with these round logs we’re able to make two notches a day, which is quite fast considering the effort you have to put in shaving and squaring the round log ends.

Later on we’ll probably make some more test-notches before we start with the real deal. To be able to do this we’ll shorten the logs we have used and start anew with them. 

Steady progress

Sunday, after a short hiatus, we had again time to work on our notch making skills. We finished two notches . There're still not perfect, but we're coming close. We've made some mistakes but were able to identify them and rectify them in time.
 



Hewing logs by hand

I stumbled onto this video by accident, it's made by somebody who also followed the logbuilding course in Gränsfors. This video made me realize that we have to hew our logs this way so that we're able to work more accurately. The technique was taught to us during the course, but the video is a welcome rehearsal.

Lumbermaker

The lumbermaker is a device that you clamp onto the bar of the chainsaw and that can glide over a guide bar, as shown in the picture. It can be used to cut out doors and windows in a logwall, but you can also use it to make hustimmer by sawing two sides from a log.
Unfortunately the saw we're using proved to be too weak to cut through long sections. The short cut above of about 15cm took more than 15min. The saw is a stihl 230 which has a 45cc, 2kw engine .