Frontier Builders had all the logs peeled ahead of time, and I had asked Jerry to get big, straight ones-logs we could use in one piece that would span from corner to corner in the 4-wall shell. Over the 3-day Halloween weekend, about 16 different people came to help or watch-log builders, log home owners, curious folks. The "Halloween Project" at Frontier Builders It was the perfect place to do this-thanks to Jerry Wait and Frontier Builders! The start of the Accelerated project at Frontier Builders. And they told me to keep a good record of what we did that weekend in photos and words. Their opinion: yes, if it works, the method could be patented. (And he later became my business partner in Natural Log Homes.) The lawyers heard me describe my idea, and I told them I was going to test it on Halloween weekend. I didn't know that much about patents.Ī good friend told me to at least find out for sure from an intellectual property lawyer, and he arranged that first visit and came with me to the meeting. I thought that methods or processes could not be patented. All the patents I had ever heard of were for "things" - you know what I mean, gadgets, like variable speed windshield wipers, or masking tape (my uncle invented scotch tape). In mid-October, a bit more than 2 weeks before the upcoming workshop, I met with 2 lawyers at Fredrikson & Byron, a large law firm in Minneapolis, to see if they thought that my accelerated log building idea could be patented.įrankly, I doubted that it could. The Association paid me a fee to lead the workshop, and when they sold the log shell it made a nice profit for the Great Lakes Association. Jerry Wait of Frontier Builders, who was at that meeting, organized the logs, offered the venue, and the Association got the volunteers for a hands-on first-ever Accelerated log shell for the upcoming 1999 Halloween weekend in Land O' Lakes, Wisconsin. I had not yet built an accelerated shell, but I was so sure I could do it, and that it would be fast, that I presented the GLLCA with the challenge: get me logs and some builders and we'd build a shell in 4 days. Later that spring, at a general meeting of the Great Lakes LogCrafters Association, I stood up and said that I was working on a project that would speed up log building, and that if the Association put together some professional builders and got some logs I would show everyone what I was talking about. That "vision" I had (there is no other word for it) had given me a feeling and a confidence - I had no doubts at all, and I knew it would be good. I had only the beginning of an idea of how to do it at that time, but I knew it could be done, and that I would be doing it. My second feeling: I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn't see one log being added after another-no, I saw the whole shell stacked up with gaps, and I knew it could be scribed. The idea had never occurred to me before then. I had never thought of doing this before, and I had never seen it being done or attempted. It really did feel like the "light-bulb" you see in cartoons : I actually saw an entire log shell stacked up and ready to scribe. They saw the look on my face and knew something big had just happened to me, and I described to them the vision I had just had. Then a "light-bulb" went on over my head. It was after a long day teaching a workshop, and when work was over I was just sitting around and having a beer with Graeme Mould, and two of my students, John Wilson and Olaf Edgar. On March 3rd, 1999, an idea came to me: I could rough notch an entire building, stack it up with gaps, and then final scribe the entire building and all its logs at one time. The workshop shell that my class was building when my first light bulb went "on."
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