Fire resistance of handcrafted log walls

The objective of this paper is to study the fire resistance of the handcrafted full-scribe chink-less log wall. Log construction is growing in popularity, but knowledge of its fire performance and availability of experimental fire data are limited. Sometimes when a high fire resistance rating of a log wall is required, the application of a layer of gypsum wallboard is recommended to increase the assembly fire resistance. The experimental research of an untreated log wall proved that the wall can achieve a very high fire resistance rating by itself and additional steps to increase its fire resistance are not necessary. Use of a traditional handcrafted log system provides the comfort level of prefabricated manufacturing, and significant fire resistance without the need for increasing the assembly costs.