The Iron and Bronze Ages were the first emergence of the reliable metal tools needed to chop down trees, strip bark and groove the notches. We’re not beavers with their iron-laced teeth. Erik Grankvist might be using pretty much only hand tools, but they are still hard metals to deal with tough woods. The best evidence suggests that the first log cabins appeared somewhere from the Iron Age (~1,200 BCE) to the Bronze Age (~3,500 BCE). We’ve apparently been building log cabins for a very long time. With these tools, Erik Grankvist may be the most interesting person? to build a log cabin, but he isn’t the first. It’s the sort of equipment anyone can get and learn to use. Ancillary tools include: a spirit level, carpentry square to keep things even, chisels to carve out grooves, log scribe and plumb bob to make marks, measuring tape to take measurements. A mallet is used to hammer in dowels and place logs. Wedges, crimps and log dogs are used to hold logs in place. A knife is needed for cutting and marking. A drawknife is used to pull off the bark. A person working by themselves might make a very small structure in a month or so.Īside from the obvious muscle power, the tools used are rudimentary at best, including: axe, adze and saw. Historically, a set of three to four people might be able to make a simple one-room cabin in a week. That isn’t to say that more people wouldn’t make the work go quicker. There’s no way to know what happens off-camera, but Erik seems to have carried out the work mostly by himself. Then log cut slats and eventually birch-bark slats formed the roof.Īs the years have passed, on Erik has worked. Two triangular stacks of logs formed the end roof frame, with long logs linking the two triangles, leaving the roof to be framed with beams running from the peak of the roof toward the ground. Nails would only tear or bend if they were used. The structure is constructed without nails, but rather melds into itself. Then holes bored down through the logs and wooden pins help tie the entire structure together. Moss packed into the grooves insulate the gaps. Flipping the log back over, it socketed in place with an incredibly tight fit. Then he flipped the log over and chiselled out, using nothing but hand tools, long grooves on the underside of the log. Instead, Erik used a steel compass to trace the contours of the topside of one log onto the underside of another. The logs don’t just sit flat on each other, their rounded edges leaving room for wind to blow through the gaps. Just like those log building toys of old. Then, for each and every log, he carried out the painstaking process of shaping and chipping out the halfmoon ‘Saddle’ notches that slot one log in perfect perpendicular angles to the other. To shape each log, Erik used rollers, log ramps, and grappling equipment to put the logs into a position to be worked on. A set of short concrete-poured pillars form the rests for the logs. His foundations were flagged stones arranged in dry stacks, the entire platform filled with gravel. He set up his own workstations, also built from smaller logs. Erik has made use of either hand tools or a small tractor to drag logs from the forrest to his site, a quiet wooded glen, with a mossy ground, tall birch trees and flowers.Įach log that helps make up the walls and roof of his cabin had to be debarked and then set out on risers to dry. I’ve watched his quest progress for quite some time, from the first felling with a hand axe, nearly three years ago. In his own words, he had ‘no previous experience’ in construction, so using hand-tools and learning from family and mentors, he’s spent the last few years constructing a log cabin in the Swedish woods. He started his construction dream in 2018 with the stated motivation that he wanted, after school, to do something different with his life for a while to live more like his ancestors. He often wears outdoor clothing and is usually the only subject of his self-filmed series. In his videos, Erik Grankvist is a quiet, dark-haired young man.

Building a log cabin with hand tools