Making a small keg.
One weekend a while back I got the idea to try to make a small keg for drinks or other liquid storage. This would be a straight sided, “white cooper” container. I am learning white coopering which covers many straight sided containers such as buckets, piggens, tubs, churns, etc. Making the curved staved barrels is a whole different skill set, which I do not have.
Making something with two ends in it turned out to be trickier than I thought. To fit the end into a bucket you leave the top band in place and loosen or remove the bottom band. This loosens the staves so that the bottom will slip into the crozed groove near the bottom. Doing this from above allows the bottom disc to spread the staves enough to snap into the groove (hopefully). Once the bottom is in place and fits correctly, the bottom band is replaced. But with a vessel with two bottoms I had to insert the second end from the outside, which was as simple, but I finally got it in place.
For the handle I fired up my forge and made a simple iron handle held in place with eye screws. The whole thing was then painted with red milk paint.
After taking this photo I added a small wooden tap in one end.
Coopering Tools class at Tillers International.
Last weekend I attended the Coopering Tools class at Tillers International in Scotts Michigan. It was my second class at Tillers and was a very good experience. The goal of the class is to make a croze, inshave, curved draw knife, a set of bands and some gauges. It was a large order for a two-day class.
This class covered a lot of ground in a hurry. The purpose of the class was not to make us expert tool makers. The goal was to have tools to make buckets. Most of the class would be staying two more days after this class to make a piggen using their new tools. I had taken the piggen class before and would not be staying.
The class was taught by Chuck Andrews and Peter Cooper (yep, that’s really his last name), assisted by the staff and volunteers at Tillers. Chuck and Peter also teach buckets, butter churns and barrel making at Tillers.
The first morning we started out with an informal meet and greet information session at the guest house. The house has been undergoing a spruce up and is really looking good. Generally, day one was woodworking and day two was metal working. The class started out making the croze. The croze is used to cut the groove in the bottom of the staves to hold the bottom. It is a critical tool to good coopering and it hard to find a good usable antique version. Chuck brought some nice cherry to work with, along with tool steel blanks for the cutters. The woodworking part of the croze was pretty straight forward. Making the saw tooth cutter was another matter. I really struggled with getting the angled teeth filed correctly with hand files. I came home with an extra blank in case the one from class will not cut. I think most everyone else in the class ended up with good cutters.
Along with the croze we cut out some gauges that are used to check the angles and curve of different sized staves. Some students also worked on making a set of dividers that are also used for checking the stave angles. I had already made these items at home and skipped over this section.
Late in the day we moved over to the blacksmith shop to get a jump on the metalworking. We were provided with annealed tool steel blanks that were already cut out in the rough shape of the inshave and the hollowing knife (curved drawknife), but were still flat. We used a variety of bench grinders and sanders to get the cutting edge roughed into shape, along with cleaning up the other rough edges. A few of us stayed late to get this step done before morning.
The next morning we jumped back into grinding the edges and getting ready to start forging. This is where it started getting intense. There were 10 of us, 20 tools to make and one gas forge. Once things got really going there were several in-progress tools in the forge at once and two jigs in constant use. People teamed up to get the red-hot metal into the jigs and hammered into shape. It was amazing how quick you had to get the blank into the form, clamps in place and the next bend made before it was too cold and had to be put back into the forge. At this point in the class sweat was flying, stress levels went up and some moderate swearing was heard. But there was also a lot of laughing, so all was well.
Fortunately there were some people in the class with blacksmithing experience. They were able to help Chuck and Peter keep things moving along at a good clip.
After forging the blanks into shape for the inshave and hollowing knife we had a crash course in normalizing, hardening, oil quenching and tempering the cutting edge. As Chuck told us, each of these steps can be studied for years, but he was great at giving us the bare essentials to get the projects finished and I think with a lot of help and encouragement we all came out with decent results. Wooden handles were drilled and fitted to the two tools and expoxied in place. Unfortunately one student’s hollowing knife cracked and broke in the final stages of the class. It was a terrible moment. I think the Tillers folks were working something out to make sure she had a tool to take home anyway.
By this time I needed to get on the road back to old West Virginia, so I held off on any of the final grinding and polishing until I got home. The other students were still banging and grinding away as I left.
Tillers is a great organization with an important mission. By taking classes at Tillers one both learns a useful traditional skill, and helps finance the work going on through Tillers International. I have thoroughly enjoyed the two classes that I have attended and hope to take several more in the future. I really encourage anyone who wants to learn about traditional coopering with hand tools to take classes at coopers. They are working very hard to learn, teach and spread the use of these and several other techniques and trades.
Makeing a quench tub for my forge.
My most recent coopering project was a quench tub for my forge. Like the other coopering projects I have posted before, this tub is made from western red cedar with a pine bottom. The process for cutting the staves is the same as for a smaller bucket, there are just a lot more of them to keep track of. And when the bands fall off during raising, the pile of staves on the floor is larger. I split out the staves for the tub and after some fitting and adjusting had the basic shape raised with temporary bands.
It is important at this stage to write numbers on the ends of the staves. That way you know what order to put them back in if you have to take a stave out for trimming, or if the whole thing falls apart into a pile on the bench again. This situation looks like this:
I did not get any photos of cutting the croze or fitting the bottom this time. This next photo shows the tub during the final shaping of the outsides of the staves and fitting the final bands to the tub and trimming the rim.
I am still learning to get all of the joints tight and there are a few in this tub that are a little wonky. I am going to a class at Tillers International soon to make some coooper’s tools that I hope will help me make better looking projects in the future. When the tub was finished and tested, it held water pretty good, only minor seepage. The tub found a home in my shop as a quench tub for my forge.
I tried to make another Piggen.
Now that I have finished up the washtub and a couple buckets, I wanted to see what else I could make from the pile of odds and ends in the cedar pile. What is left is pretty scrappy and I ended up throwing about half of it in the woodpile for firewood. The rest made the piggen described here and will hopefully be enough for a small straight sided cask and a small tub.
The piggen I ended up with is about 8″ in diameter and 6 1/2″ tall without the handle. The sides raised up pretty good this time. But I ran into problems with the crozing. I think I am cutting the groove too wide. Most of the bottoms I have made so far seem to be a little loose in the groove. You can see it in this image:
Before I start the next project I will change the design of my croze to cut a narrower groove and also try not to get the edges of the bottom tapered to thin. This piggen looks ok from the outside but is definitely only a dry measure. It might hold syrup on a really cold day.
I also ran into a problem cutting the tops of the staves flat so the top is a bit wonky. This project was a struggle. The thing fought me all the way and the end result shows the conflict I think. But I’m still a beginner so I look at it as progress. After we take this piggen to a few events and it gets broken in maybe it will not look so forlorn. Good thing I am not trying to sell this one.
I am looking forward to spring when I can start using cattail flagging to better seal the bottoms of my coopered buckets, piggens and tubs.
Also, I just received permission from the publisher to start using a few images from Kenneth Kilby’s book The Cooper and His Trade. I am excited to be able to add information and images from this great source to my blog. More about that soon.
Let’s make a coopered washtub.
The other day I finished up the cedar coopered buckets that I had been working on. They actually hold water after a short soak in the sink. I have read that using dried cattail pith is the preferred leak sealer for coopers. But finding good cattail to use is a bit difficult around here at the end of January. I will need to gather a crop of it in the spring to store away for future coopering. It seems that the cattail pith will absorb water and swell in the gap until the wood staves have time to swell and seal tight.
So anyway. We have been talking about needing a new washtub to use in our colonial camp setup this year. I decided to try to make a wooden tub similar in size to the navy tubs mentioned in Kenneth Kilby’s book “The Cooper and His Trade.” My goal was to hit something near 20″ in diameter at the top and 19″ in diameter at the bottom, with a height of 8″. The book lists the bottom at 18″, but it turns out that a taper of much more than an inch or so is difficult for a beginner to achieve. I found this out in the process of making two buckets with a 2″ difference in top and bottom diameters.
The biggest difference I noticed between making this larger container and a 12″ bucket was that the temporary bands did not hold the staves in a perfectly rigid fashion. The staves were pulled into a slightly oval-shaped when raised up and tightened with the hoops. This led to a bit of a problem with the bottom. I ended up putting a thin layer of colored caulking in the croze to help seal up the bottom since it did not fit the slightly out of round slot just right. This is where the cattails will come in handy in the future.
Here are a couple of shots of the staves being fitted to the temporary bands.
After a lot of fitting and shaving staves I ended up with a tub that will hold water without soaking. Granted, that would not be true if I had not cheated a little on the bottom. But it is a definite improvement over my previous stave fitting attempts.
I still need to make handles for the wash tub. A better design would have left two opposing staves taller to have hand holes cut into them. The problem was that I was running out of good cedar and did not have anything long enough to make the handles with. The plan is to forge some side handles to make carrying the tub easier at events.
My arms are sore from all this coopering work. I think I am going to switch over to some tinware projects for a while so I can heal up.
Building a new shaving horse.
I have been wanting to build a new version of the antique shaving horse that I have for a long time. I acquired this bench about 10 years ago along with several other barrel making tools. We think the set came from a cooper’s shop in WV from the early days of the oil industry.
This shaving horse is long, nearly 6 ft, and oak, so it is heavy. It has seen a lot of use and is still completely functional. I have been using if off and on, but have always felt that I should make a replacement for use in my shop. It seems a shame to put more wear and tear on such an unusual bench.
There are a few features that I would like to point out that make this bench nice to use. The dumbhead, which is the block at the top of the moving arm, has two different sized notches. On the right is a higher notch that is nice for working wide staves on edge. On the left is a lower notch that is the right width for finishing up staves. The flat area in the center is like that standard dumbhead and is good for working the front and backs of staves and for shaping heads and bottoms.
The long shelf in front of the dumbhead seems to be an idea that did not stick around. I have not seen a shelf this long on other benches. I assume that since this one is from a barrel shop that the long shelf made it easier to support long staves and I can tell you from experience that being able to support bucket staves for the full length is a nice feature. The three holes in the end of the shelf are still a mystery.
Another good use for the shelf is for holding buckets in place while you shape the outsides with a spoke shave. I have found that if I put a bucket over the shelf and push up under it with my knees that the bucket stays nice and secure, leaving your hands free to manage the tool.
If you look at the bottom of the arm you can see the block of wood on the far end of the pedal. It has enough weight to release the dumbhead from the work when your foot is removed. I have not put this on my new version yet and the difference is remarkable.
The indentations on either side of the bench allow plenty of room to get your legs in close, which makes the shaving horse much more comfortable to work with that full width benches.
So after much procrastination I finally built a new bench based on the antique. For the most part I stuck to the original dimensions with the exception of the height. My bench is a couple of inches higher off the ground to make in more comfortable for me. Yellow pine 2x12s were used for most parts, with some scrap poplar and pine filling out the rest. Overall it came out pretty good. The exception being the mortices for the legs. I botched them up pretty good. Sometime I am going to have to rework the business end legs.
One other change I made was to put a leather pad on the center part of the dumbhead. The cedar that I am currently using to make buckets is very soft, and the dumbhead edge was making pretty big dings in the staves. Now with the pad I get a good grip without crushing the wood.
Initially I was going to make the entire bench with hand tools. There was a discussion a while back on the Bodger’s site about the need to use hand tools more. The point being made was why use power tools to make something so you can make things by hand. This person (I can’t remember the name right off), said we should do it all by hand for the experience. Anyway, having bought into this theory I started making the main bench by hand and did OK for a while. However, when it came time to rip both sides of the three-foot long shelf with my Diston rip saw, the spirit left me. This and the real desire to get the damn thing done so I could get back to making a bucket really sapped my dedication to the theory. Out came the band saw. I’ll try harder next time.
This was a good project. It took the best part of a weekend for me to get it all together and used up the best part of a couple of 8 ft 2×12 yellow pine boards. If you want to build one I would be glad to send you some dimensions and detail photos.
My attempts at coopering a bucket.
After attending the coopering class at Tillers International I became even more interested in learning to make useful coopered containers, such as buckets, tankards, piggens, wash tubs, etc. There are several types of coopering, but I am concentrating on White Coopering, which is the process of making straight sided water-tight containers. I am having enough trouble with straight sides and have no immediate plans for barrels with curved sides. That is a whole other set of skills.
I am working with western red cedar split rail fencing from the local construction supply store (i.e. Carter Lumber). It is a very nice wood to work with for these buckets. It is mostly straight-grained, soft and splits easier than TV wood (you know, that kind wood they always split on the TV frontier shows, no knots, nearly falls apart on its own..). The only drawback is that it is very soft and dings up really easy.
Working from the notes and experiences from class I split out the staves and tried to keep them near the right size. It is tough for a beginner because each stave has tapered compound angles on each side, that are shaped on a wooden jointer plane by eye and simple gauge. Here are the staves part way prepared.
I thought I had them reasonably close to the right size for a small naval bucket. Historically this bucket was 12″ in diameter at the top and 10″ in diameter at the bottom. But when I raised the sides of the bucket I had some pretty wicked gaps between staves and the diameter was too small. It seemed that I had made several of the staves too narrow. So I made more.
This picture is a good example of what you do not want to see when you look in you bucket after raising.
This thing will never hold water this way.
So after a number of redos and adjustments I finally got the staves to line up pretty good and raised it again with the temporary bands so that I could croze the groove in the bottom to hold the bottom in place.
From here it was a good bit of work the get the inside rounded and the bottom crozed, make the bottom and shave the edges to fit the groove and insert the bottom. I didn’t get any picture of this part. Once all that was done I could work on rounding the outside with a spokeshave on my shaving horse. At the end of the weekend I had made it this far with the bucket. It is far from perfect. But I am hopeful that Chuck was about right when he said after about ten buckets I would be able to make one that did not leak. So in about 6 more buckets I hope to have a tight bucket. We will see.
Beginning Blacksmithing
Tinsmithing Class
Coopering Class
Lost Art Press
