I made a bucket

[Christian Thompson]

Those are impressive! I like the view inside the barrel. Thanks for posting.

[Darrell LaRue]

I did a bucket whilst on my summer holiday back in 2005.

It's made mostly of while pine, and a few staves may be basswood. It's whatever I had to hand at the time. I didn't have a croze, so I used a quirk router. It did the job just fine. The steel hoops were scrap steel bands from a packing crate. A bit on the thin side but it worked.

I didn't have any natural fibre rope at the time, so I used some old poly stuff. I've since replaced it with a much nicer looking piece of rope. As you can see, it does indeed hold water. Leaked like crazy for the first 5 minutes, then slowed down over the course of a couple of hours until it was tight.

bucketfull.jpg.JPG

I've also made a few shrink pots, which isn't coopering per se but it makes a container that holds water. Imagine a single-stave bucket, with a croze cut in and a bottom fitted to it. The small ones are good for drinking out of (I sealed mine with shellac). The big one I made for my MIL was a *lot* of work. It was a poplar log I hollowed out. The small ones are done mostly with a big T-handled auger followed by a hook knife. The big guy was an auger followed by a 2 inch gouge with an 18 inch handle on it. The idea is to quickly hollow out a piece of green wood and fit the bottom. Then it shrinks around the inserted bottom and seals tight. I was really worried about that big one, it shrank a lot and I was afraid it would split open from the bottom being too large.

100_4511.JPG100_4512.JPG

Darrell

[Ryan Mooney]

I've also made a few shrink pots, which isn't coopering per se but it makes a container that holds water

Those are quite neat. Added to the list!

[Jim Matthews]

And the best picture I managed to take of one of the barrels open for re-coopering, unfortunately the lighting was really bad.
Attachment 287267

Bigger than my first apartment and better lit, too.

[Pedro Reyes]

I've never built a bucket or even a coopered door. If my educations does not fail me, the angle (on the edges) for a cylinder or a coopered door is constant along the length and should be 360/(2xnumber of staves). for a bucket that splays towards the top, the staves are tall trapezoids, and the formula would still hold, meaning the angle is constant along the full length of the stave, is that the case? I have some cypress and I really liked the look of the bucket full of wine/beer. May try one this summer.

Pedro

EDIT: My education has failed me, let me re think the angles.

Edit 2: it is (n-2)*180/2n, where n are the number of staves.

[Christian Thompson]

I did a bucket whilst on my summer holiday back in 2005.

It's made mostly of while pine, and a few staves may be basswood. It's whatever I had to hand at the time. I didn't have a croze, so I used a quirk router. It did the job just fine. The steel hoops were scrap steel bands from a packing crate. A bit on the thin side but it worked.

I didn't have any natural fibre rope at the time, so I used some old poly stuff. I've since replaced it with a much nicer looking piece of rope. As you can see, it does indeed hold water. Leaked like crazy for the first 5 minutes, then slowed down over the course of a couple of hours until it was tight.

bucketfull.jpg.JPG

I've also made a few shrink pots, which isn't coopering per se but it makes a container that holds water. Imagine a single-stave bucket, with a croze cut in and a bottom fitted to it. The small ones are good for drinking out of (I sealed mine with shellac). The big one I made for my MIL was a *lot* of work. It was a poplar log I hollowed out. The small ones are done mostly with a big T-handled auger followed by a hook knife. The big guy was an auger followed by a 2 inch gouge with an 18 inch handle on it. The idea is to quickly hollow out a piece of green wood and fit the bottom. Then it shrinks around the inserted bottom and seals tight. I was really worried about that big one, it shrank a lot and I was afraid it would split open from the bottom being too large.

100_4511.JPG100_4512.JPG

Darrell

Darrell, you have just answered my question about what the heck am I going to do with this bucket now that I have built it. I don't have a well to fetch water from... Cooling beer seems like a much better idea :-).

Those shrink pots are awesome.

[Christian Thompson]

I've never built a bucket or even a coopered door. If my educations does not fail me, the angle (on the edges) for a cylinder or a coopered door is constant along the length and should be 360/(2xnumber of staves). for a bucket that splays towards the top, the staves are tall trapezoids, and the formula would still hold, meaning the angle is constant along the full length of the stave, is that the case? I have some cypress and I really liked the look of the bucket full of wine/beer. May try one this summer.

Pedro

Yes - I think you are right. If you think about having 4 staves, each one would have to have a 45 degree angle on each side. Those would combine to form four 90 degree angles = 360 degrees. And, yes, the edge angle is the same on the narrow end of the stave. So in the 4 stave example, the edge angles at the bottom of the staves would have to be 45 degrees as well.

The way we did it was to create a template. You draw a circle for the size of the top of the bucket you want. Then draw the radius from the center of the circle to the arc. We cut that out of a thin piece of wood to use as a template to check our staves. The top of the stave (the wide part) needs to fit into the template in order to end up with the right size of bucket. The advantage of this method is that the staves don't have to be the exact same width and you don't have to worry about the exact numbers. To get the taper, we just took a few half swipes on the plane to get the bottom of the stave about a 1/4" narrower than the top. Then a few more swipes down the length of the stave to get the consistent angle along the whole edge. It sounds a lot more confusing than it ends up being. I'm having a hard time describing it clearly, though.

Here's a drawing of the template that hopefully will be a little more clear. The left picture is the circle with the radius. The middle one is the template that you get by cutting out the section where the radius hits the circle. The right one shows how a stave (in blue) fits in the template to check it.

stave template.png

[Pedro Reyes]

Christian,

Thanks, your explanation makes sense to me, the shaping part. The template, well I am more of a visual guy and I could not see your attachment. My geeky engineer brain knew there would be a way to do this without numbers, I saw the video of the older gentleman, he used a V shaped gauge it seemed.

Pedro

[Christian Thompson]

Christian,

Thanks, your explanation makes sense to me, the shaping part. The template, well I am more of a visual guy and I could not see your attachment. My geeky engineer brain knew there would be a way to do this without numbers, I saw the video of the older gentleman, he used a V shaped gauge it seemed.

Pedro

They showed us the V gauge (not sure what the actual name for it is) as well. It is hinged at the bottom so each side just ends up being a ray from the center of a circle. Each side of the gauge has size markings for the length of the desired radius. So if you want a 12 inch diameter bucket, you'd put the stave in the gauge at the 6" mark. Then the stave edge angles have to match with the angles formed by the gauge. And this works no matter how wide the stave is.

[Ryan Mooney]

You can see a V gauge in use part way through the video here: http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/FilmPage.php?title=224 amazingly simple idea once you think of it (its that "once you think of it" bit that's the hard part )

[george wilson]

The coopers in Williamsburg only use rushes on the lids of their barrels,since they are not held tight by hoops. They use no gauges of any kind for the coopering,which is done solely by eye and long practice. As I have mentioned,they had to make 2 barrels a day each to get by at Whitbreads(sp?) in England.

[Nicole Wood]

I took a coopering class this past May at Tiller's International in Michigan and made a piggin. It was a great class with excellent instruction. We started with quartered red cedar logs and split them with hatchets, shaped the staves with drawknives , fit each stave on a large jointer plane and hooped them with temporary hoops while outside and inside profiles were shaped. Lots of fiddling around to get it right! We used croze's we made in the prior coopering tools class to cut the groove for the head. I learned tons about hand control in those two days ! Mine held water too after a good soaking I Also show pix of the tools I made a few days before..Awesome classes.

[Frederick Skelly]

I took a coopering class this past May at Tiller's International in Michigan and made a piggin. It was a great class with excellent instruction. We started with quartered red cedar logs and split them with hatchets, shaped the staves with drawknives , fit each stave on a large jointer plane and hooped them with temporary hoops while outside and inside profiles were shaped. Lots of fiddling around to get it right! We used croze's we made in the prior coopering tools class to cut the groove for the head. I learned tons about hand control in those two days ! Mine held water too after a good soaking I Also show pix of the I made a few days before..Awesome classes.

Thats pretty neat. You forged the tool blades too? Thats a couple very interesting classes. Good for you!

Fred

[Nicole Wood]

Hi Fred, the blades were not really forged..more like formed over jigs, just a little bit of hammering to tune their shape and then lots of time grinding and sharpening