I made a bucket

[Christian Thompson]

I took a coopering class this weekend at the Somerset Historical Center in Somerset, PA. The class was a lot of fun and I am pretty happy with the result. My main goal was for it to actually hold water which it (mostly) does :).

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Anybody else done any coopering?

[Andrew Fleck]

Looks good. That looks a lot like my ice cream freezer bucket. How did you attach the bottom?

[Christian Thompson]

It sits in a dado (called a croze). It's kind of tricky getting it in there - you take the bottom hoop off, loosen the top hoop, and then splay the staves enough that you can squeeze the bottom in. Then the hoops go back on and get pounded tight.

[george wilson]

Is that cypress or juniper? If the steel bands are tight enough,that very soft wood will swell up and fit together tight enough to hold water (if the bottom is well fitted).

[Christian Thompson]

Supposedly it is white pine. The water level hasn't changed much overnight but the bottom chime is still pretty wet. I'm hoping it swells enough to be completely dry, but for a first attempt I'm pretty happy with holding water overnight...

EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, the bottom came from one of those Lowe's "whitewood" boards so I'm not sure what it is. The class organizers milled the stave blanks from a white pine log.

[Judson Green]

Cool bucket, looks like a fun project! Do you have any "in the shop/build photos"?

Some years ago I made two coppered doors for a kitchen island I built.

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[george wilson]

They use cypress and juniper for buckets at the cooper's shop in Williamsburg. Those woods are not very subject to rotting when wet. They are quite soft,and easily compress together when wet to make them water tight.

I guess the big objective in wet coopering is to make barrels of white oak that will hold beer under pressure. And,not much help from the wood swelling!!

[Christian Thompson]

Cool bucket, looks like a fun project! Do you have any "in the shop/build photos"?

Some years ago I made two coppered doors for a kitchen island I built.


It was definitely a fun project - although it is the first time I have spent more than a few hours in a row woodworking. I was feeling it yesterday! Unfortunately no build photos...

That kitchen island looks great! Doing something like those doors may be one of the few practical application of the stuff I learned :-).


They use cypress and juniper for buckets at the cooper's shop in Williamsburg. Those woods are not very subject to rotting when wet. They are quite soft,and easily compress together when wet to make them water tight.

I guess the big objective in wet coopering is to make barrels of white oak that will hold beer under pressure. And,not much help from the wood swelling!!

The area where I took the class has a big maple syrup tradition and traditionally used wooden buckets to collect the sugar water. Supposedly they used white pine for most of the buckets. I guess for maple syrup the bucket only stays wet for a few weeks a year so maybe the rot resistance wasn't as big an issue?

Making a barrel would definitely be the holy grail for me coopering-wise. My wife and I are working on starting a small winery which is why I got interested in coopering in the first place. Whiskey and wine are pretty much the only common modern uses for it. Using barrels for beer brewing seems to be making a comeback as well with some of the new craft breweries.

The instructor for the class spent a week down at Williamsburg a while ago working with the cooper. He made a small cask that week and supposedly it is quite a bit harder than making a bucket :).

[John Crawford]

Not quite on topic, but.... I enjoy this very short (11 min) documentary about Alex Stewart, a cooper from TN. You toolmakers might like it too, as he makes most of his own tools:

http://www.folkstreams.net/film,224

[Christian Thompson]

I like that video as well. That's pretty much the basic process that they had us use in the class (although with somewhat less pleasing results :-).

Here's another interesting one that shows a bit about preparing staves for a barrel: http://vimeo.com/64259224.

[Pat Barry]

One key to the ability of a wooden bucket (or barrel) to hold a liquid is that the wood stays wet. Once it dries out, leaks will re-develop. Of course, once the bucket gets filled the leaks will probably heal themselves again. Not sure how long that cycle can continue though - probably depends on the material.

[Ryan Mooney]

Nifty bucket, that definitely came out nice.


I guess the big objective in wet coopering is to make barrels of white oak that will hold beer under pressure. And,not much help from the wood swelling!!

Beer in barrels is generally not under a huge amount of pressure; if i recall correctly generally 1 atmospheres (14 psi) to maybe 2 atmospheres (30psi) although yes getting it to not leak is a trick :D
Some references to beer barrel construction here: http://www.craftbrewing.org.uk/index.php/caskconditioning
Historically it wasn't entirely uncommon to line the barrels with pitch or tar (although it definitely wasn't considered a good practice and period documents mention checking against that).

I know some of the coopering techniques used rushes between the staves, for instance when we toured the Rodenbach brewery they have 2,500 to 18,000 gallon oak tanks and a cooperage on site to service them (interestingly the tanks are tapered so the bottom is the wide part and the top is narrower to allow placing the huge bands from the top). We saw some of the tanks dissasembled and partially re-built with the rushes in place between the staves. I've found some similar references in historical brewing texts to similar techniques for barrel construction. For the larger tanks the staves are pegged (doweled if you will) every ~4' or so, I don't know of any smaller barrely where anyone did that though.

Also note that preferably the oak is split not cut to minimize the end grain contact (both from a leakage but perhaps more importantly for minimizing flavor transfer, the best bourbon barrels are still split but its common for most others to be cut nowdays).

[Christian Thompson]

One key to the ability of a wooden bucket (or barrel) to hold a liquid is that the wood stays wet. Once it dries out, leaks will re-develop. Of course, once the bucket gets filled the leaks will probably heal themselves again. Not sure how long that cycle can continue though - probably depends on the material.

Yes! They warned us if we leave the bucket laying around dry one day we'll find a pile of staves and hoops. It will apparently shrink enough that gravity will pull down the hoops and the whole thing will come apart.

In the wineries I have worked at we have spent a decent amount of time soaking old barrels to try to get them to seal up again. Some do and some don't so it's best to keep them wet. Barrels are really expensive!

[Christian Thompson]

Nifty bucket, that definitely came out nice.

Beer in barrels is generally not under a huge amount of pressure; if i recall correctly generally 1 atmospheres (14 psi) to maybe 2 atmospheres (30psi) although yes getting it to not leak is a trick :D
Some references to beer barrel construction here: http://www.craftbrewing.org.uk/index.php/caskconditioning
Historically it wasn't entirely uncommon to line the barrels with pitch or tar (although it definitely wasn't considered a good practice and period documents mention checking against that).

I know some of the coopering techniques used rushes between the staves, for instance when we toured the Rodenbach brewery they have 2,500 to 18,000 gallon oak tanks and a cooperage on site to service them (interestingly the tanks are tapered so the bottom is the wide part and the top is narrower to allow placing the huge bands from the top). We saw some of the tanks dissasembled and partially re-built with the rushes in place between the staves. I've found some similar references in historical brewing texts to similar techniques for barrel construction. For the larger tanks the staves are pegged (doweled if you will) every ~4' or so, I don't know of any smaller barrely where anyone did that though.

Also note that preferably the oak is split not cut to minimize the end grain contact (both from a leakage but perhaps more importantly for minimizing flavor transfer, the best bourbon barrels are still split but its common for most others to be cut nowdays).

Wow - 18,000 gallons. There are some old wineries around here that have similarly sized tanks made out of redwood. One of the museums has a room that when you look around you realize is inside one of those tanks. It amazes me that they were able to hold liquid and keep that many joints leak free. Although there is a story in a coopering book I read ("A Cooper and his Trade" - a good read for those interested in this stuff) about a beer tank rupturing resulting in a drunken party and several fatalities...

I've seen mention of using rushes as well. I think their main function was to swell and seal up the joints.

[Ryan Mooney]

Wow - 18,000 gallons. There are some old wineries around here that have similarly sized tanks made out of redwood. One of the museums has a room that when you look around you realize is inside one of those tanks. It amazes me that they were able to hold liquid and keep that many joints leak free. Although there is a story in a coopering book I read ("A Cooper and his Trade" - a good read for those interested in this stuff) about a beer tank rupturing resulting in a drunken party and several fatalities...

I've seen mention of using rushes as well. I think their main function was to swell and seal up the joints.

yeah the pressure at the bottom of those tanks has to be immense. Walking through packed rows of them was sort of awe inspiring.

http://www.brewery.org/brewery/library/Rodnbch.html - has some very minimal discussion of the maintenance (and ongoing work to stop leaks :D). Unfortunately the coopering room was closed off when we did the tour but it was quite large from what I could see sneaking a peak through the door.

The rushes were definitely intended to help seal the joints. They apparently also use cotton in some cases (and likely other things as well).

Here is one of the barrel rooms at Rodenbach (there were multiple not sure how many and most had 4 or more rows like this).

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Me next to one of the barrels for scale - I'm 6'2"
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And the best picture I managed to take of one of the barrels open for re-coopering, unfortunately the lighting was really bad.
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[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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

287282

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.

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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.

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[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 :D)

[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