AK Hunter them will cost you and they are pretty high dollar!! ha ha, just joking.

This one was built out of green cottonwood logs. It was built about 100 yards from a river bank, and within three years time the river took her out. We tried a lot of different types of corners over the years, saddle notch, dovetail, mortise and tenon (trapper notch), and what we called "quick corners" like the one on this cabin. Contrary to popular opinion, people were using the quick corners up here a long time before Marty M "invented" it. And frankly they are the worst possible type of corner to use on a cabin in my opinion.




Saddle notch, scribed line then chop to fit. Good locking style corner, but slow to make.


Dovetail, another good locking style corner, but also slow to make.

Another sample of the dovetail corner.


I don't have any good pictures of a quick corner, this about the best I could find. We used an upright log on the corner, (it's painted white in the picture). This is the style corner that is used in the ATA log cabin building video, and in my opinion it is the worst style corner you can use. It is quicker to build this way than with the saddle notch or the dovetail corner. It is not that much quicker though than the trapper notch, and is no where near as solid. Once you get your mind around the trapper notch it does not take long to fit a corner up.


Here is another variation of the quick corner. Two 2X8's nailed together for the corner rather than a log. My brother and I helped build this cabin for a guy up in Dirt's neck of the woods (Skwentna).


A little better view of the design of the 2X8 quick corner.


I'll try to put some more up here on the Trapper corners sometime tomorrow or when I can.

24 feet is about as long a wall as I can go here Dale, using round logs, and I have to be very selective on the logs to do that. Our trees taper too much, and if you go too long you cross taper. That is the top is less than half the diameter of the butt of the log. You probably have much better logs there than we do here for building with. When you get done with the sauna you can come build me one, my old bones are starting to ache too much, I think they need a good scalding! ha ha.

those are some nice cabin photos

I think that butt and pass corner would probably be the bestest fastest corner although I haven't used that method.


here's a few photos












built this one when I was 19 years old, the photo from a few years back

photo during construction

Nice cabins!
I helped a guy make a nice cabin out of balsam fir, its not known to be very rot resistant, but is plenty good with enough roof overhang. We used " Trapper" corners.

Randyt, nice job on the cabins. I've used butt and pass on 2 sided and 3 sided logs, and it would work well with turned round logs, but I think it would be a mess on natural round logs. Not sure how you would match things up with the different diameters between the top and the butt of the log.

B&P corners on 3 sided logs, before the ends were trimmed.

Nice craftsmanship fellas!

I think I've built 8 and I know for certain I don't have another one in me ! Nice pix guys !

Most of the old trapper cabins that had been built here from around the turn of the century on up into the 30's and 40's were built with the mortise & tenon corners, and all the old timers that were here in the 50's called that style corner the trapper notch. A lot of the early trappers here were from Scandinavian countries, and some of them old boy's were pretty good axe men. Looking at how they did their corners is what got me started copying their method, and after a while I quit using any thing else. I wish I had taken more pictures of the log work on the corners of some of those old cabins, but this is the only one I can find in my files right now. It's not the best work but is a clear picture of the mortise & tenon. Have to remember these guy's were doing everything with axes and crosscut saws.


This is the first one I built using the trapper notch. Most of you have seen pictures of it before.


Here's some others, most of these were built in the 1990's and a couple around 2004.







Couple of earlier ones from the late '70's.



Tried one with upright logs. These were 2 sided logs, and it worked okay, but I wouldn't build another one that way. This would have been about '79.

With a small cabin you could use green, or not thoroughly dried logs and be ok. If you're building something bigger that you expect to maintain and live in you'll want to let them dry down to about 8-9% moisture before you build, use a moisture meter to monitor the curing. This will prevent excessive shrinking and settling that usually causes problems with your roof, stairs, windows and doors, most shrinkage and settling issues occur up high in your building. A small cabin will not have as many of this type of problem. I'm pretty impressed with how well built some of the small cabins on this thread are!

Great pictures, keep them coming. Anyone have close ups of the trapper's notch before assembly?

I think I'll stick with 2"X lumber and plywood.

You just basically cut a flat 1/4 of the log deep in the top and bottom, a bit more or less, depending on the log above and below. The "tenon" ends remain about 1/2 of the vertical thickness of the original log.

Dale, I'm in the lowlands of Aitkin County, our Spruce and Tamarack are about 150 yrs. old and about 4" in diameter. What do you think about Ash and or popple?

Poplar should be good. I don't know about ash. Lots of old buildings here were made of poplar.
How big of a building are you planning? Poplar can be heavy when green.

Small tamarack would be ideal for a Sami Goahti, you just would have to find some curved cedar or something for the frame. The poles are covered with birch bark and sod is cut up into "bricks" and stacked outside the bark or roofing membrane. Makes for a nice warm hidden camp.

I know a guy who made a very nice cabin out of poplar. His main complaint was the wood always wanting to turn black. Not sure if its from moulding, or rotting or whatever. Just what he said. Took a a lot of work to keep it totally sealed to prevent that.

I shouldn't say "Cabin". It was a home.

I don't have a picture of what you're talking about, but I made a (pretty poor) sketch of the corner Scanner, but maybe it'll help.


The 45 degree cut in the corner is on the inside of the cabin, and it allows the next log to butt in tight against the notch.
Lay the log up on the wall and make your notch on both ends to match the logs below them.

Then roll the log in place, hold it there with a log dog, and run your saw bar between the logs a few passes until the logs fit well from end to end. It may be necessary at times to cut your notch deeper in order to get the log to set down tight.

When you're happy with it, put a spike or a log screw in each end. I like to counter sink the heads about 3/4 of an inch so you can run a saw through there on the next round if you need to.

Poplar is a lot like cottonwood, they are real high moister wood when green. I'd build a cabin out of it, but I would not put any sealer on the logs until they dried out. Then sand them down and put a good coat of wood sealer on them. Helps a lot when you build with green logs if you can keep a wood stove going in the cabin as much as you can until the logs dry. Green spruce will mold too if you don't get some heat going in the cabin right away. That moister needs to be allowed to escape before you put sealer on.