This article has been updated 01.06.06
INTRODUCTION
This article explains everything that is related to settling with log homes and log cabins. For now it is a mere published framework. Reasoning behind this publishing is that when the article is out there in the open, I just must update and develop it.

TO DESCRIBE SETTLING SHORTLY
Logs dry and shrink as water leaves the green log. When you pile many logs horizontally, their combined shrinking (shrinkage) is called settling.

RELATIVE HUMIDITY
Relative humidity is a measurement for amount of water in air. 100% of relative humidity results into rain. Relative humidity can be much higher than 100% in materials that have higher density than air. Average relative humidity for just felled green log is 150%.

RELATIVE HUMIDITY IN LOGS
In wood, water stays inside cells and between cells, so it is very difficult to dry wood, as it has some many insulating layers on it. In nature, wood has water inside it, no matter how dry it is. This is because relative humidity of air doesn’t drop down to zero.

LONG DRYING TIMES
Natural drying of logs takes a long time all the way up to 4 years even. After felling logs, they seem to dry quickly, but it is only on the surface and between tree cells. All this initial drying doesn’t affect to the size of the tree, because as long as tree cells are full of water, tree still has almost all of its original volume that it had before felling. When relative humidity of the log reaches 30% it finally starts shrinking visibly. It takes almost a year for large log to reach this point.

SETTLING
As trees loose the water inside tree cells, the shrinkage of logs finally starts. The more you stack logs on top of another, the more you will have settling, because every log will shrink a bit. Calculate together these bits and you will have settling. The length of the log is not affected by shrinking so lengthwise logs do not settle. This fact is often used with several log home construction methods.

SEASONAL SETTLING
Relative humidity of air changes between seasons. However, this doesn’t affect on logs more than on surface. As earlier mentioned, it takes several months for tree to adjust to the changes in relative humidity of air. Unless there are two distinctive seasons like rain and dry seasons, humidity changes between seasons are not long enough to affect on logs.

Long time ago I set a goal to increase my posting frequency and to improve the quality of the posts. My next post is finally a step towards the direction of improving post quality. These article posts will be updated and I suppose will never be completely ready. Coming article is about settling and what does it mean for log homes and log cabins. Pictures are missing at the moment but I will include them later.