A large diameter roundwood is an important element of Korean traditional buildings, Hanok, and is hard to be dried without surface cracks. Four different pretreatments, such as pre-cracking, oil heating, kerfing-oil heating and PEG impregnation, were investigated for reducing the surface cracks of large-diameter roundwood specimens during heat treatment. The roundwood specimens of pre-cracking, oil heating and kerfing-oil heating showed surface cracks during pretreatment, but that of PEG impregnation did not. It was confirmed that kerfing reduced the total crack width. Among the four pretreatments and control only the PEG impregnation roundwood specimen had no crack on both outer and inner surfaces after heat treatment. The PEG impregnation specimen shrank only 1.6% in the tangential direction while the pre-cracking did 8.0%.