What wood is better for barrels. Types of wooden barrels. Oak barrel repair

A wooden barrel is the best container for storing wine and various pickles, because wood is an environmentally friendly material that preserves the taste and usefulness of products. This indispensable item in the household can be purchased ready-made, but if you have free time and desire, then using our tips, making a barrel with your own hands will not be difficult.

Masters involved in the manufacture of barrels are called coopers, and the process of creating containers is called cooperage. This is a kind of art that originated in ancient Greece, but, oddly enough, the technology has changed little since then, and wooden packaging is still popular, especially among winemakers. Today we invite you to get acquainted with the basics and some of the subtleties of this craft.

Choice of wood

The first responsible task is to choose the right type of wood for the manufacture of containers. Consider the main varieties used, as well as their pros and cons.

First on our list is oak. It is rightfully considered the most suitable, so to speak, classical material used in cooperage. Its wood is strong, flexible and saturated with special tannins that act as an antiseptic. It is noteworthy that under the influence of moisture, oak barrels only become stronger over the years, so their service life is quite long. Another feature of oak is a pleasant aroma with hints of vanilla, which it gives to the substances stored in the barrel.

Oak is the best material for barrels

Spruce and pine can also be used to make barrels. These are soft woods that are easy to cut and process, but their strength indicators are average. The main disadvantage of such wood is the characteristic resinous smell, due to which it is not often used to create food containers.

Of the conifers, cedar is also popular in cooperage, although it is more widely used in those parts where its plantations are extensive. According to its characteristics, it is similar to pine and spruce, but there is practically no foreign smell from cedar barrels. Containers made of this material are suitable for storing food; it is believed that it is especially good to store dairy products in them.

Another material from which you can make a barrel is linden wood. It belongs to the fibrous varieties of wood and, due to its structure, lends itself well to cutting, chiselling and processing. The material is durable, practically does not dry out and has no smell, so barrels made from it have won recognition as one of the best for transporting and storing honey, caviar, pickles and other delicacies.

A budget but durable option is aspen. This tree is durable, resistant to moisture and has antiseptic properties. Aspen barrels are ideal for storing various pickles. A feature of aspen is a tendency to strong swelling, but in cooperage this is rather an advantage, since it allows you to achieve a very tight closure of the rivets.

Making staves

The next thing to do after you have decided on the type of wood is the manufacture of barrel parts. You should start with rivets. They are tapered at the edges or rectangular boards that can be chipped or sawn. The former are more durable, since the structure of the fibers is not destroyed when splitting a solid wood.

Barrel parameters according to their volume

In order not to be mistaken with the number of staves, you must immediately determine the size of the barrel. After that, you will need to make a life-size pattern for the riveting and the bottom. Then a simple calculation should be carried out. The required amount can be determined using the formula: 2 * Pi * R / W, in which "Pi" is a constant value; R is the radius of the bottom of a barrel with smooth sides or the middle of a container with convex sides; W - riveting width.

Making a barrel with your own hands from chipped staves is a laborious process and requires certain skills. The main task is to split the workpiece into even fragments and at the same time get as little waste as possible.

The split can be carried out in the radial and tangential directions. In the first case, the split plane passes through the core of the deck (this method requires less effort), and in the second it does not touch it. When working with hardwood, the second method is not recommended, as it complicates and slows down the process.

The scheme of splitting the deck into rivets

Raw material is most easily processed, it is optimal if the tree for making the barrel is freshly cut. However, not everyone has the opportunity to purchase such wood, and as an alternative, you can look for suitable blanks among the firewood that is on sale for furnaces. In urban conditions, sawn poplars can become a material. These trees often lie in the yards for a long time after they have been cut down, waiting for their removal to the landfill. In the absence of other options, you can use the boards. When choosing them, pay attention to the fact that the annual rings go along the plane of the board and are not sawn.

The shape of the rivets depending on the type of barrel

Having pricked a sufficient number of rivets, they are left to dry. In the summer, you can lay out the material under a canopy and leave to ventilate, this process will take about 3 months. If there is no possibility or desire to wait, use another method. For artificial drying, paper is glued to the ends of the blanks with carpentry glue and the riveting is placed for a day in the oven of a well-heated Russian stove. After this procedure, the material will be suitable for further processing.

Making a hoop

Another important component of the barrel, which allows you to collect all the rivets into a single whole - hoops. According to the material of manufacture, they can be metal and wood. Iron has more strength, but it also has a drawback - a tendency to rust, which over time significantly worsens the appearance of the product. Therefore, metal hoops are used only if increased strength is required.

Usually a modern wooden barrel, purchased or made with your own hands, has 4 hoops. Those that are closer to the center are called farts, and the extreme ones are called mornings, if the barrel has a significant volume, there can also be additional cervical ones between them.

Hoops with tie-lock

The thickness and width of the hoops are directly related to the volume of the container. If its volume does not exceed 25 liters, then they have a thickness of 1.6 mm and a width of about 3 cm, for a 50-liter width it increases to 3.6 cm, and for a 100-liter to 4-4.5 cm. If the barrel holds 120 liters or more, then the hoops for it should have a thickness of 1.8 mm and a width of 5 cm.

Even if you use wooden rims for the barrel, you will also need the ability to make them out of metal, since the assembly cannot do without the so-called working metal hoops. To assemble a barrel of these hoops, you will need four. In terms of structure and characteristics, they are identical to permanent ones, and are made as follows:

Strips of the desired size are cut from sheet steel. As a cutting tool, you can use locksmith or chair scissors.
Holes are made at both ends of each strip with a punch and fastened with rivets.
To make the hoop easier to put on, one of its edges is forged.

In working hoops, instead of rivets, the use of bolts is allowed, and if the capacity of the barrel is small, then steel rims can be replaced with wire ones. The diameter of the wire in this case should be 4-5 mm. For those who do not want to mess around for a long time, making hoops on their own, ready-made designs with a tie-lock are on sale.

Barrel assembly

Considering how to make a barrel with our own hands, we came to the next stage - assembling the skeleton of the container. It consists of rivets tied with hoops (at first temporary).

The assembly of the barrel begins with a smaller hoop. Inside it is inserted at regular intervals and fixed with clamps 3 support rivets. Further, other rivets are added between the two supporting ones until the entire space is filled. Then the hoop is upset using a hammer and a wooden block with a flat end so that all the fragments close together more tightly. After that, a larger hoop is put on the rivets and also upset.

Assembly of the skeleton

Before putting on the rims on the bottom of the barrel, it is recommended to immerse the material in boiling water for half an hour. To carry out further work, you will need 1-2 assistants. After steaming, the barrel is placed on a flat surface, the remaining free end of the rivets is wrapped with a rope, the ends of which are tied to some firmly fixed object.

Further, a crowbar is inserted between the stretched parts of the rope and scrolled so that they are intertwined with each other. At this time, your assistants should keep the barrel in place. When it is possible to achieve the desired bend and seal of the rivets, the remaining hoops are put on and fixed. The finished structure should be trimmed and hardened by treating with a burner or blowtorch.

Manufacturing and installation of bottoms

Bottom manufacturing

As a bottom for a barrel, it is better to use a single piece of wood or wide and durable planks (it is desirable that the number of joints between them is minimal). Selected boards should be planed so that they can be overlapped and then stapled together. From the resulting workpiece, cut out 2 circles of the required diameter and sharpen their edges until small bevels form.

To fix the bottom, you will first need to loosen the tension of the hoops at the bottom of the barrel, slightly pulling them up. Then the bottom is placed inside and the hoops are upset in place. If the top of the barrel is not removable, then the procedure is repeated for the second side, not forgetting to pre-drill the filling hole. After making sure that the bottom is tightly connected to the frame, the working hoops are replaced with permanent ones, and the container is ready.

Soak

Now you know how to make a barrel yourself, but there is one more important nuance - putting your product into operation. Before use, the barrel needs to be processed, otherwise the products stored in it may acquire an unpleasant aftertaste or even deteriorate.

To begin with, the container must be thoroughly rinsed to get rid of sawdust, small debris and excess tannins. Rinsing is continued until foreign odors disappear and the water becomes clear.

Before use, the barrel must be prepared

Next, the barrel is steamed to disinfect it and improve the sealing of the staves. To do this, the container is filled with boiling water by about a third and scrolled so that the water "walks" over the entire surface of the walls from the inside. Then the water is left inside until it cools, drained and the process is repeated again.

After steaming, the barrel should be soaked. Usually this procedure takes about a month, and every two days the water in the tank needs to be updated. In the first days of soaking, there may be leaks in the product, this is a variant of the norm, but the flowing water needs to be replenished.

Before laying the products, the container must be doused with boiling water from the inside. This will protect the wood from absorbing odors and allow it to be used for different foods without mixing its flavors.

A container treated with boiling water before laying food will last longer

Summing up, we can say that a do-it-yourself barrel is an excellent solution for storing homemade pickles, as well as for wines and other alcoholic beverages. By making such a container yourself, you will not only save money, but you can also be completely sure of the quality of the product, and, consequently, of observing the proper conditions for storing your products.

What can be compared, for example, with a cucumber or a tomato pickled in an oak tub. And in a linden barrel, honey, apple juice are perfectly stored, you can cook kvass in it. Finally, an oak tub with a lemon or laurel tree even today will not spoil the interior of even a city apartment. Just do not find these simple products either in the store or on the market. But you can make such a barrel yourself, and although this task is not an easy one, an amateur master is quite capable of coping with it.

Step 1. Choosing wood

Before creating a barrel with your own hands, you need to choose wood. Oak and pine are unsuitable for storing honey - honey darkens in an oak barrel, and smells of resin in a pine barrel. Here we need linden, aspen, plane tree. Poplar, willow, alder will also come down. But for salting, pickling or urinating, there is nothing better than oak - such a barrel will serve for more than a decade. For other needs, you can use blackberry, beech, spruce, fir, pine, cedar, larch and even birch.

Step 2. Chock split

First, the chock - it should be 5-6 cm longer than the future riveting - is split in half, gently tapping the log on the butt of the ax. Each half is then again pricked into two parts, and so on, depending on the thickness of the chock (Fig. 1), in order to ultimately obtain blanks 5-10 cm wide (15 cm for sweet clover) and 2.5-3 cm thick. It is only necessary to try so that the split goes radially - this will save the riveting in the future from cracking.

Step 3. Drying the workpiece and processing

The chopped blanks are dried in a room with natural ventilation for at least a month. You can use a dryer to speed up the process. The dried workpiece is processed with a plow or sherhebel and a planer. First, the outer surface of the riveting is planed. At the same time, to check the curvature of the surface, a template should be prepared in advance (Fig. 2), cutting it out of a thin plank according to the finished product. Next, the side surfaces are planed, also checking their curvature according to the template.

Riveting is kadushechnaya - in which one end is wider than the other, and barrel riveting - with an extension in the middle. The size of these extensions determines the taper of the tub and the convexity of the central part of the barrel. It is enough if the ratio between the widest and narrowest part of the riveting is 1.7-1.8 (Fig. 3).

The processing of the side surface is completed with a jointer. It is more convenient to do this by moving the workpiece along the jointer (Fig. 4).

Step 4. Processing the riveting from the inside

At the next stage, we process the inner (in relation to the finished barrel) surface of the riveting, cutting off excess wood with a planer or even an ax (Fig. 5). After that, the tubular riveting can be considered finished, and for the barrel riveting, the middle still needs to be thinned to 12-15 mm (Fig. 6). Let it not bother you that rivets can have different widths - we take everything possible from each workpiece.

Step 5: Making Hoops

Barrel hoops are made of wood or steel. Wooden ones are not so strong, and a hundred times more hassle, so it is better to use steel ones. Hot-rolled steel tape with a thickness of 1.6-2.0 mm and a width of 30-50 mm is used for hoops.

Having measured the barrel at the place where the hoop was stretched, we add to this size the double width of the strip. With hammer blows, we bend the workpiece into a ring, punch or drill holes and put rivets made of soft steel wire with a diameter of 4-5 mm (Fig. 7). One inner edge of the hoop must be flared with blows of the pointed end of the hammer on a massive steel stand (Fig. 8).

According to the location on the product, the hoops are divided into farts - the central hoop on the barrel, the morning - extreme and cervical - intermediate.

Step 6. Assembly of the product

To one jack-of-all-trades, the grandmother brought a crumbling tub with a request to collect it. Tom had never had to do this before, but he did not refuse the old woman. He came up with the following: he threw a rope on the floor and laid out one to the other rivets on it. Then he crushed them with pillows and pulled the ends of the rope together. Gradually removing the pillows, he brought the extreme rivets together and secured them with a hoop.

Coopers make it easier.

The product is assembled on any flat surface. First, two rivets are attached to the hoop opposite each other with special brackets bent from hooped iron (Fig. 9). Then, attaching rivets to one of them, we get to the other, which will tighten the assembled half of the barrel. Continue assembly until the rivets fill the entire perimeter of the hoop.

Lightly tapping the hoop with a hammer, we upset it and check whether the edges of the riveting are tightly aligned. To achieve contact of the rivets over the entire side surface, you need to add a rivet or pull out an extra one and after that put a permanent hoop. By the way, if changing the number of staves does not give the desired effect, you just need to narrow one of the staves or replace the narrow one with a wider one.

Having trimmed the ends of the skeleton with light blows of the hammer, we put on the middle hoop and push it all the way with the help of a hammer (Fig. 10).

Step 7. Trimming the skeleton and the final screed

Having exposed the skeleton on a flat surface, we describe with a pencil using a bar (Fig. 11) the cut line. Having planted the morning hoop, we cut the skeleton 2-3 mm from it and clean the ends of the rivets with a planer. We do the same with the other end of the skeleton.

In the manufacture of a barrel, after fitting an onion, neck and morning hoop on one side, the other side must first be pulled off. Coopers have a special device for this - a yoke. A home master can use a cable, rope, chain or wire for the same purpose. You can tie a loop and twist it with a gag or pull the ends of the cable with a lever (Fig. 12).

There is no need to do any steaming or boiling of the skeleton, as some experts recommend, before tightening. Occasionally, however, it happens that the riveting does not bend along the entire length, but in one place and therefore gives a crack. However, in such cases, the cooper will prefer to simply make a new riveting.

Step 8. Stripping the skeleton from the inside

The assembled skeleton is cleaned from the inside with a plow or sherhebel, and the ends of the skeleton with a planer - a humpback (Fig. 13).
Now in the core you need to make a morning groove (Fig. 14). The cutter of the tool can be made from hooped iron, and even better, from a saw blade. The depth and width of the groove must be 3 mm (Fig. 15).

Step 9. Making the bottom shield

First, a bottom shield is assembled from a sweet clover with a planed outer side and jointed side surfaces (Fig. 16). The sweet clover is fastened with nails, as shown in the figure, for which nests are pre-drilled 15-20 mm deep. The radius of the future bottom is found as the side of a regular hexagon inscribed in the circle of the morning groove on the skeleton of the barrel. However, you need to cut the bottom with a margin, deviating from the intended circle by 1 - 1.5 mm. After cleaning with a sherhebel, chamfers are cut from the edge of the bottom (Fig. 17) so that the thickness of the wood is 3 mm three millimeters from the edge - this is necessary for the tight connection of the bottom with the frame in the morning groove (Fig. 18).

Step 10 Trying on the Bottom Shield

We make the first fitting - loosening the hoop, insert the bottom, inserting one side of it into the groove, and then with light blows of the hammer and the rest. If the bottom is tight, you still need to loosen the hoop, and if it is too loose, tighten it.

After stuffing the hoop, make sure there are no gaps. The perfect result the first time is rarely achieved. Even if the cracks are not visible to the eye, they can be found by pouring a little water into the barrel. If it flows between the rivets, then the bottom is too big and you need to trim it slightly. Worse, if water flows through the bottom or through the morning groove. Then you have to disassemble the skeleton and narrow one of the rivets.

Step 11 Installing the Second Bottom

Before installing the second bottom, a filling hole with a diameter of 30-32 mm should be drilled in it. The cork is made as shown in Fig. 19, its height must not be less than the thickness of the bottom, however, the cork must not protrude beyond the cutting plane of the core.

Step 12: Painting

First of all, it depends on the operating conditions. But it is important to remember that you should not paint jellied containers with oil paint: it clogs the pores, which contributes to the decay of wood. It is desirable to paint the hoops - they will not rust. For decorative purposes, a barrel, a flower tub can be treated with mordants.

The brown color of the oak is given by slaked lime mixed with a 25% ammonia solution. A black solution of iron sulphate or an infusion for 5-6 days of iron filings in vinegar.

A decoction of the rhizomes of the fragrant woodruff (Asperula odo-rata) turns linden and aspen red. Red-brown color gives a decoction of onion peel, brown - a decoction of walnut nibs. These dyes are brighter than chemical ones and more stable.

It must be remembered that wood is better preserved with a constant humidity regime. Therefore, dry products must always be kept dry, and bulk products filled with liquid. Both of them cannot be placed directly on the ground. It is better to substitute a brick or plank under the barrel than to subsequently get rid of the rot by cutting the chimes.

But no matter how long the barrel serves, all this time it will be a pleasant reminder to the owner of the difficulties overcome in comprehending the secrets of the ancient cooper's craft.

Isn't it a curious evidence of the technology of storing beer in barrels?

The extent to which the cooper trade was closely connected with the life of the people can also be judged by proverbs and sayings. So, they said about the insufficient satisfaction of the spiritual needs of a person: “A person is not a barrel, you can’t pour it, but you can’t plug it with a nail.” Or about a dying person: “A person is not a barrel, you can’t assemble it by frets, you can’t tie it with hoops.” At the same time, wanting to emphasize the spiritual poverty of someone’s human nature, emptiness, worthlessness, they said: “I ring a lot in an empty barrel”; "Fat off, barrel barrel"; “Damn the barrels” (an ugly drinking bout began).

In our time, the cooper trade, once flourishing, in the individual workshop few people are engaged, although the demand for cooper's dishes is considerable. Yes, this is understandable. Barrel products, diverse in shape and size, in purpose and application, and even in artistic performance, finds the widest use. It is used for pickling and salting, for winemaking and brewing, for storing all kinds of food and non-food products.

Here is an excerpt from an old book on cooperage that testifies to the spread of this business in our country at the beginning of the 20th century: “Cooperage is one of the largest branches of handicraft industry in Russia. It is difficult to find such a corner in the provinces, which have forests, where the peasants were not engaged in dressing this or that wooden utensil. Bocharstvo has been carried on since time immemorial and passes from generation to generation: from grandfather to father and from father to son, delivering a hefty income, which is a great help to the peasant in his household.
So, the reader has already guessed that it is worth doing cooper production if there is a forest. But before we talk about raw materials, let's dwell on some general concepts.

Barrel and its components

Of all cooperage products, there was, is and remains the most common barrel, which most often happens with a convex skeleton. To create a wooden barrel, riveting boards, or frets, are used. Of these, in turn, form three sets. For the manufacture of the first main set, intended for the side wall, or the skeleton of the barrel, curved long and narrow planks-riveting are used. The other two sets are bottoms, or bottoms, of a flat shape, mostly rounded. In order for the bottoms to be kept in frets, a fold is chosen at both ends at the latter, called the chime groove, or simply the chime. It includes transverse boards that make up the bottom. The side planks themselves (riveting, frets) are planed along the side faces so evenly that they fit very tightly to each other. This snug fit is helped by the hoops tightening them - iron or wood.

Barrel, according to V.I. Dahl (from “barrelled”, “barrelled”, “side”), is a knitted hooped wooden vessel consisting of frets, or staves, two dons embedded in chimes, and hoops (Fig. 1) . It is clear that this wooden vessel got its name because of the sides protruding to the sides. By the way, this design feature of a barrel with a convex core (as opposed to a straight one) gives it special strength. In large barrels, if necessary, a hole is drilled, a tap (screw) is inserted into the latter or plugged with a so-called nail (plug).

Open barrel wares (tubs, buckets, tubs, vats, etc.) have one bottom. Their lateral frames are straight walls located at an acute, right or obtuse angle with respect to the bottom plane.

Dimensions and volume of barrels

The dimensions of the length of the staves and the bottoms of the barrels range from 60 to 180 cm. For staves 180 cm long, take a ridge of the appropriate length (with an increase of 4-5 cm), with a diameter of 40-50 cm. 24 staves 14-16 cm wide should come out of such a ridge and 4 cm thick.

For staves 150 cm long, a ridge is taken, having a diameter of 36-40 cm. The number of staves from such a ridge is 24, the width of each is 10 cm, the thickness is 4 cm.

For rivets with a length of 120 cm and 90 cm, a ridge with a diameter of 28-36 cm is suitable. The width of the rivets is 8 cm, the thickness is 3 cm.
For staves 60 cm long, a ridge is taken with a diameter of 18-26 cm. The width of the resulting rivets will be 6-8 cm, and the thickness will be 1.5-2 cm.

The ridge is marked as shown in Fig. 2, oh. Then every sixth part is divided into four. Rivets of the required sizes are already being made from them, making sure that the sapwood and heartwood are chipped off. In the event that the ridge is larger than what we need to make the appropriate size of rivets, it can be marked in another way - two-row or three-row (Fig. 2.6 ").

For sawing the ridge into rivets, the following schemes can be proposed (Fig. 3,4,5,6).

For the bottoms of 180-cm barrels, there is a ridge with a diameter of 56-60 cm, a length of 94 cm. The width of the boards is 30 cm, the thickness is 3-4 cm.

To make a 40-bucket oak barrel, you need staves 90-120 cm long, 8-14 cm wide, 2-3 cm thick.

For ordinary tubs, rivets are prepared 60-90 cm long, 8-12 cm wide. 4 cm thick.

For small barrels and buckets, staves are made 60-90 cm long, 10 cm wide and 2-3 cm thick.

The most popular barrels are those with a height of 50 and 70 cm. For a more economical consumption of materials, it makes sense to make barrels in pairs. One 50 cm high, the other 70 cm high. In this case, the waste of a larger barrel can serve as blanks for a small one.

Due to the ovoid shape, calculating the volume of the barrel is difficult. However, in practice, coopers have found a way to quickly and fairly accurately calculate this volume. So, to calculate the volume of a barrel, it is necessary to measure its height from one chime to another, as well as diameters in two places: in the central part and at the bottom. It is better to make measurements in decimeters (recall, 1 dm = = 10 cm), since 1 dm3 is equal to 1 liter. Then each measured diameter is squared.

Further, the larger of the obtained numbers is doubled and added to the smaller one. The result is multiplied by the height of the barrel, and then multiplied again by 3.14. The product obtained from multiplication is divided by 12 and the volume of the barrel in liters is obtained. To find out how many buckets are contained in a barrel, its volume in liters is divided by 12 (the usual volume of "one bucket in liters").

For example, let's calculate the volume of a barrel, which has a height of 70 cm (7 dm), a large diameter of 60 cm (6 dm), a small diameter (bottom diameter) of 50 cm (5 dm). Let's do the calculations:

1) 5x5 = 25 dm2;
2) 6x6 = 36 dm2;
3) 36 x2 = 72 dm2;
4) 72 + 25 = 97 dm2;
5) 97 dm2 x7 dm = 679 dm3;
6) 679 dm3x3, 14 = = 2132 dm3;
7) 2132 dm3: 12 = 148 dm3 = = 148 l;
8) 148 liters: 12 = 15 buckets.

In literal terms, the formula for calculating the volume of a barrel will look like this:

(d2 + 2D2) h - p
where: V - barrel capacity in liters;
d - barrel bottom diameter;
D - diameter of the central part of the barrel;
h - barrel height;
l is a constant value of 3.14.

What shape and how many rivets do you need?

To facilitate the search for answers to the questions posed, the cooper draws the circles of the center and bottom of the future barrel on a sheet of cardboard or paper (Fig. 7). And you can draw on a scale of 1:1. Then the calculations are simplified. Or you can draw with a corresponding reduction in 2, 4, 5 times, etc. And then in the calculations it is necessary to take into account this decrease.

So, we know that in our example, the large diameter is 60 cm. The bottom diameter is 50 cm. We draw the corresponding diameters in the drawing. If we know only the diameter of the bottom, then without much difficulty (by adding 1/5 of the bottom diameter) we can get the diameter of the central part of the barrel (ventral). And vice versa. If we know the large diameter, then we can calculate (subtracting 1/6 of the large diameter) the bottom diameter.

There are two ways to set the number of rivets. Or, knowing the width in the center of one given riveting, we build the required amount of a given value on the drawing along a large circle. Or we divide this circle by a certain number of times (in our case, by 16) and thus find out the width of the widest part of the riveting. Knowing the radius of the large circle (30 cm), using the well-known formula (2tcr), we find the length of this circle: 2x30x3.14 = 188.4 cm.

Now we divide this length by the number of rivets (16). We get 11.7 cm. Rounding this number, we get 12 cm. This will be the width of the central part of the riveting. If on the drawing we draw the corresponding number of radial lines (in our case 16), then here on the drawing we can measure the width of the end of the riveting. It will be approximately 10 cm. That is, the width of the end of the riveting will be less than the width of its central part by 1/6 of the last size.

In our drawing, we can also set the curvature (bulge) of the rivets and the amount of bevel of the side faces. We can increase or decrease the number of rivets. Accordingly, the dimensions of each individual riveting will also change. Note that with a given barrel height of 70 cm from chime to chime, the actual length of the riveting should be approximately 84 cm (taking into account bending and trimming).

The thickness of the riveting in the example taken will be 2 cm (60-50 = 10 cm; 10:5 = 2 cm). Thicker than V is the total volume of a cylindrical product; d - bottom diameter; i is a constant equal to 3.14.

The internal volume of conical cooperage products is calculated using the truncated cone formula:

V = l h (D2 + d2 + Dd).

The letter designations in this formula are the same.
Making staves or frets
Let's talk about making rivets operationally.

1. Cutting staves. For making staves, different types of trees are used. Depending on the purpose of the barrels, the appropriate tree is also chosen. For example, oak barrels are considered the best. They are mainly intended for storing alcohol, cognac, beer, wine, etc. For the manufacture of staves for barrels used in winemaking, white oak is usually used.

By the way, the use of oak barrels in winemaking is very often a necessary technological condition for obtaining the appropriate drink. So, for example, rum (strength 45%) is obtained from aged rum alcohol, which occurs as a result of fermentation and distillation of sugar cane juice. Exposure of rum in oak barrels is an indispensable condition for technology.
If they are going to store water in a barrel, then staves for it are made from pine, aspen or spruce. To store milk and dairy products, juniper and linden go to the barrels.

Certain requirements are imposed on the original wood. It should be dry and without defects: without peeling, wormholes, sprouts, curly, overgrown knots, without so-called shells. There is nothing to say about a rotten and broken tree. It is clear that this is not suitable for making barrels.

For the manufacture of rivets, it is best to take wood, chopped along the core layers. Rivets from such boards are the most durable in bending. Usually they are carved with a special cooper's axe. But they make riveting and sawn ones. If the displaced staves are intended for barrels, in which various liquids are then going to be stored, then the sawn staves are used for barrels for bulk materials - sand, flour, etc.

It is best to prick rivets from a tree that has just been cut down. And the most suitable time for harvesting is October and November. Trees are felled to the ground with a saw or an axe. And then they cut it into rivets (Fig. 10). That is, at first the tree is cleared of branches, then it is sawn into ridges in such a way that, according to Alina, they exceed the future riveting by 2-3 cm or even more. Further, the ridges are pricked along the core rays into parts. Sometimes pricked and annual rings. Then the riveting is already convex-concave (Fig. 11). But it is easier to prick along the core rays. It is convenient to prick with a splitting ax, in which the butt is thick, and the wedge is sharp and wide.

Figure 10 shows how this work is done and in what sequence. Depending on the thickness, the ridge is first pricked into halves, then into quarters, into eighths. If possible, they call for sixteenths, etc. From the resulting minimum part of the ridge, sapwood and the core are chipped off - that is, the loosest layers of wood along with the bark using a wedge-shaped curved knife (see Fig. 11). Now the resulting middle part is pricked along the annual rings in two or three. The newly received parts are called gnatin-nik. In width, they try to get 1 cm more than the width of the future riveting (Fig. 12). And now the gnathinnik is cut into rivets. It is clear that the thickness of the workpiece must also exceed the thickness of the future riveting: after all, damp wood, drying out, will be reduced by 12-20%. The cooper knows from experience what size he should make blanks, depending on the species and moisture content of the forest.

We have already seen schemes for single-row, two-row and three-row knockout of ridges. Note that most of the waste is obtained with a single-row knockout. This is clearly seen in Fig. 13 when compared with Fig. 2b, c.

Dry wood is more difficult to prick. Sawing riveting, of course, from dry wood is easier. The rivets are cut in such a way that they are wider in the middle than at the ends (more precisely, they are then cut off). But at the ends their thickness is somewhat greater than in the middle part. The thickening at the ends is necessary for cutting then the chime, that is, the groove under the bottom or bottom. For the correct and faster cutting of rivets, a template is used. As the latter, a ready-made riveting can serve. You can also make a plywood template in the form of a finished riveting.

2. Drying staves. Before finally finishing the rivets, they are dried. Rivets are folded in two crosswise. Natural drying can take up to a year. Therefore, usually the cooper makes himself a supply of staves for this time. Rivets can also be dried in a special dryer - a closed room with heating and air circulation.

If the cooper makes barrels, as they say, for his own needs, then there is no need for a special dryer. Indeed, for the manufacture of one or two barrels, staves can be dried at home over the stove or without it, if the house is not rural and not country. When drying, make sure that the rivets do not crack, especially at the ends. To do this, the latter are smeared with clay or paint, or even sealed with paper. In time, drying can last from one day (for example, on a hot stove) to several days (in a warm room).

3. Processing of rivets. After drying, the boards of both staves and bottoms are processed, that is, they are given exactly the shape that is necessary for the manufacture of barrels.

Usually the rivets are made 2-3 cm longer than necessary, so after drying they are shortened at both ends with a bow saw. If the barrel is made with a concave bottom, then the rivets are not shortened, but cut down, leveled in the saddle, when the barrel is assembled, tied with hoops and a place for the bottom has already been outlined.
Dried and shortened rivets are processed inside and out. Each cooper handles them in his own way. As a result of processing, the rivets must be very precisely fitted to each other.

At the beginning of processing, the riveting is cut off from the outside with a special cooper's ax (it is ground on one side). The cooper works on a block of wood (Fig. 15), holding the riveting with his left hand and squeezing with his right. You can cut not only with an ax, but also with one of the plows or mowers on the cooper's bench (Fig. 16, 17). The movements of the cooper during this work must be unhurried, very prudent, so as not to spoil the riveting with an excessive flake or notch. As a rule, the cooper uses mowers (Fig. 18), gentry (Fig. 19) and plows (Fig. 20) for the subsequent finishing of riveting. The riveting trimmed outside and inside is compared with the template. When the hewing is completed, they begin to plan the riveting. For this purpose, they first take a planer with a convex sole and with an arc-shaped blade. They cut off the rivets, and then slightly smooth the latter with a straight planer, removing small chips. The final finishing and processing of staves is carried out when they are already assembled in a barrel. On fig. 21c shows a stave of the shape required for the manufacture of convex barrels. The form may be as shown in Fig. 21.6 ", This riveting in the middle is much wider than at the edges. The riveting is beveled to the edges very carefully. This work can be done by eye, but it is better, all the time checking with the template, noting irregularities with a pencil. In doing this work, you need not only accuracy, but also greater accuracy.If it is not there, then when assembling the sides of the rivets may not converge, and then there will be no hassle in fitting.

About internal processing riveting let's say a little more. In this work, first of all, the thickness of the riveting is planned over the entire surface, especially diligently in the necks, that is, at the ends. The thickness is noted using a template - a scriber (Fig. 22). The scriber is applied in the middle of the riveting so that the tip a falls on the very edge of the riveting. Then the template is led along the entire length of the riveting. The tip b will mark the thickness of the neck. It is clear that in the manufacture of barrels of different sizes, the thickness of the staves will also be different. And consequently, the cooper should have several scribers. A riveting with a marked thickness is strengthened in the machine and all excess wood is cut off with an ax or a plow.

The last operation for processing rivets is their jointing. As we have already said, the outlines of the future barrel are directly related to the shape of the riveting. If the side lines of the riveting are straight, then the barrel will turn out to be straight. The most durable and comfortable barrel shape is convex. For her, riveting is made the way it is shown in Fig. 21. That is, her middle is wide, the ends are narrowed. The most common ratio of the middle and ends of the riveting, as we have already noted, is as follows: at the end, the riveting should be 1/6 part narrower or less than the middle. For example, if in the middle the width of the riveting is 12 cm, then at the ends it will be 10 cm. The ratio may be different. Note that the greater the difference between the width in the middle and at the end of the riveting, the steeper the barrel will be in the sides.

The marked ribs of the riveting are planed and jointed with a planer and jointer, fixing it in the ladilla (Fig. 23). And you can perform this operation on a large barrel planer (Fig. 24). When jointing, the ribs are not jointed closely, but a small gap is made. That is, the ribs of the staves are slightly beveled inward. When tightening the barrel with hoops, the existing gap will disappear: the rivets will tightly press against each other.

Bottoms

These parts of the barrel are made from boards that are slightly thicker than staves. The boards are first planed with a planer, and then they are jointed tightly to each other. Depending on the width of the boards and the size of the barrel, the bottom can be knocked together from four, five, six, etc. boards (Fig. 25). It is more convenient to cut planks for the bottom from one board. Since the bottom of the barrel has a round shape, then the composite boards are selected so long that later, when the bottom is rounded, there is less waste (Fig. 26). The bottom boards are planed, as a rule, from the outside. From the inside, either they do not plan at all, or plan only slightly.

hoops

They are made either of iron or wood. Iron bars are made of strip iron, the width of which depends on the size barrels. Most often, the width is 3-4 cm. The ends of the strip iron are superimposed on each other and riveted. Iron hoops are advisable to use for large barrels. For wooden hoops, maple, oak, elm, beech, ash wood is used. Used for wooden hoops and some other durable and flexible tree - juniper, bird cherry, spruce, etc. For hoops, a young tree is chosen, which is pruned every 10-12 years - it is the most flexible. When harvesting wood for hoops, the following tools are used: an ax, a knife, a plow, a pulper, chipping wedges, or columns. It is good to harvest wooden hoops in late autumn or early winter. The bark is not removed from young trees or twigs. Depending on the thickness, each rod is split lengthwise into two halves, into three or four parts.

To split into two plates, it is convenient to use a knife. In other cases, a split wedge made of hard wood is used (Fig. 27). An incision is made in the rod with a knife into three or four parts. Insert the corresponding split wedge into the incision and pull the rod over it. The latter is split into the number of parts we need. Most often, hoops are made from halves of a rod, which are bent around stakes driven into the ground along the ring (Fig. 28). The ends of the hoops lead to stakes. Having fixed the hoops in this way, they are allowed to dry. But it is more convenient to use a special cone-shaped blank for bending the hoops (Fig. 29). The upper part of this blank corresponds to small hoops, the lower part - to large ones. Sometimes blanks are steamed before being bent into hoops. For the convenience of bending, auxiliary tools are used - a pulper or a special bracket driven into a wall or into a wooden bar (Fig. 30).

Rivet assembly

After the rivets, bottoms, hoops are prepared, proceed to the assembly of the barrel. First of all, of course, riveting is collected. But, before collecting them, the rivets must, in the words of the coopers, be drawn to each other, that is, adjusted, pressed. They are drawn using a conventional compass, thickness gauge or caliper. Find the middle at the ends of each riveting and mark it. Next, they find the middle along the length of the riveting and, placing the tip of the fixed leg of the compass here, draw an arc at the ends of the riveting with the other end. Having done this operation with all the rivets, the neck line is thus found. It is on it that the chimes will then fall for inserting the bottoms.

After drawing, proceed to the assembly of rivets. First, they take the head or end hoop (the one with which the rivets are pulled together at the ends) and attach a sleeve riveting to it. This is the name of the riveting in which the barrel sleeve will be located, if it is planned. The sleeve or regular first rivet is attached to the hoop with a clamp or a clip similar to a clothespin (Fig. 31).

Let's make a reservation, in the cooper's workshops they begin to collect the skeleton of the barrel with the help of a special working hoop. It is a metal ring made of round or strip iron 10-15 mm thick. The diameter of the working hoop is usually slightly larger than the diameter of the permanent one - after all, it is then removed, replacing it with the latter. Depending on the size of the barrel, cooperage workshops have several working hoops that duplicate the permanent ones (head, they are also neck or end, middle, or abdominal). They also use a safety hoop, which, in essence, is the same worker (Fig. 32).

So, let's continue talking about assembling rivets into a frame. Directly opposite the first riveting, they put the widest or main riveting, and between them on the sides at the same distance, one more. Rivets are also fixed with clamps or clamps. Such an arrangement of rivets will help to firmly hold the head hoop, as it were, on four legs. Next, the rest of the rivets are placed in their places. Then the clamps are removed and the head hoop is somewhat upset downwards, at the same time one or two neck hoops and one middle hoop (it is also called abdominal, or fart) are pulled onto the skeleton. It is possible to do this initial work of collecting staves into the skeleton in a different way. That is, by placing two rivets opposite each other, they put a hoop and install other rivets one by one, attaching them with clamps. Of course it's hard to cook riveting, which would fit together, as they say, without a hitch.

It happens that the last riveting is wider than necessary. Then one or two adjacent rivets are reduced in width. Or one wide one is replaced with two narrow rivets. In the event that the diameters of the edges of the barrel do not match, that is, one edge is wider or narrower than the other, two or three or several rivets are moved with their ends in the opposite direction. Thus, equality of diameters is achieved at the upper and lower base of the barrel. When all the rivets are placed, the neck and middle hoops are put on, the frame is turned over and the rivets are pulled together with a gate (Fig. 34) or a rope (Fig. 35). However, the rivets must be tightened carefully so as not to break any of them. It is best to pull together pre-steamed rivets. There are several ways to heat and steam the latter. In large cooper workshops, a specially designed mangal stove with a fire hood is used (Fig. 36). The principle of its operation is clear from the figure. For smaller workshops, we can recommend an iron barbecue grill (Fig. 37). The rivets are unpacked with the help of an iron round furnace with an extension pipe.

A hollow (as coopers call a half-assembled skeleton) is put on this stove. It is heated, and the rivets on the inside are pre-moistened with water. When heated, the rivets are steamed. After that, they become more pliable to bend, less brittle. If the diameter of the barrel is smaller than our round stove, then the hollow is put on the chimney, after removing one knee from it, and then (after placing the hollow), putting it in place. Now the chimney, passing through the hollow of the barrel, will do the work we need for steaming. The hollow itself is placed on bases, covered from above and below with iron lids. Each of the covers is cut out of sheet iron in the form of two semicircles with similar semicircular cutouts for passing a chimney. Again, the hollow is plentifully sprayed with water before the steaming, and even during it. Water from the heat of the chimney is heated, turning into steam. Well, the latter does its steaming job. How much to steam the rivets - each cooper decides empirically. This operation usually takes 1-2 hours. Rivets that are too steamed become too soft to bend. Under-steamed rivets burst when bent.

The duration of steaming also depends on how much the rivets need to be bent. If we are making a small barrel with a small bend of the staves, then it is not necessary to resort to the help of an iron round furnace. You can also use an iron tagan-chik-brazier. Firewood is lit in the barbecue. When hot smoldering coals are formed, it is placed in the middle of the hollow and the rivets are steamed. Of course, this work is done in some non-residential premises, where there is a free exchange with the outside air. Steamed rivets are pulled together. They do this, as already noted, with the help of puffs and collars or with the help of an ordinary stick and rope (twist). A rope loop is thrown over the neck part of the skeleton and gradually tightened. If the existing staves are thick (as a rule, in large barrels), then not one, but two, or even three puffs are used. Tighten gradually. First, the middle part is pulled together, then the cervical. It is useful to twist the hollow of the barrel first in one direction, then in the other, turning like the steering wheel of a car. This helps to make the rivet screed uniform. Sometimes one or the other riveting sticks out from the general row. It is set with a wooden hammer - a mallet. When the ends of the staves converge tightly enough, hoops begin to catch up on the hollow of the barrel. First large (abdominal), then cervical and head. These hoops are considered working. Permanent hoops are driven onto the barrel after inserting the bottoms.

After the rivets are pulled together on one side of the hollow, it is turned over and the rivets on the other end are tightened. The resulting object with tightened rivets is already rightfully called the skeleton of a barrel, or a bottomless barrel. This frame with working hoops is dried for several days or one to two weeks (depending on the drying conditions: near the stove or in the open air). Then it is hardened from the inside, that is, it is fired. To do this, chips are kindled in the core. Then the frame is rolled, making sure that the wood does not char, but only slightly warms up, acquiring a golden hue. That's what the old masters did. But it is easier to subject the skeleton to singeing with a blowtorch, observing, of course, the rules of fire safety. Firing or hardening is carried out in order for the staves in the frame to become significantly stable in shape. In industrial conditions, hardening is carried out on a manga oven. Small barrels may not be fired. It is enough to dry them at a high temperature, for example, in a Russian oven.

The skeletons of a conical shape (with straight walls) are not hardened at all, since their rivets do not have a bend along the length. After hardening a bottomless barrel, its hoops are upset, since during the firing the wood softened, part of its moisture evaporated, that is, the staves dried out somewhat. The hoops are upset with a hammer and a heel (Fig. 38, 39, 40). During this operation, the rivets are pressed tightly against each other with their ribs, leaving no gaps or gaps. All irregularities are simply crushed. Then they start trimming the protruding ends of the rivets with a bow saw, placing the frame in the saddle (Fig. 41) or on the bench (Fig. 42).

How this alignment is done can be seen from the last figure. We only note that the trimming is carried out so that the surface of the cut is tilted somewhat inside the core. Next, chamfers are removed using a cooper's knife, a plow or a barrel planer. Removal of chamfers or slices is carried out at half the thickness of the ends. Thus, any chipping of the ends of the rivets, their splitting on the inside of the core, is prevented. The ends of the latter, after chamfering, generally acquire a neat and beautiful appearance. Here we are once again convinced that beauty and usefulness are inseparable, they are very closely interconnected.

Outside, we do not touch the edges of the ends yet. We leave their finishing for later, when we complete the manufacture of the barrel. Before cutting out the chimes and inserting the bottoms, the skeleton of the barrel is planed inside and out. The fact is that after firing and upsetting the hoops, the edges of neighboring rivets often form protrusions (coopers call them sagging). These sags need to be smoothed out with plows. For external planing, a concave plow, scraper or planer is used, for internal - a convex one.

When planing outside, the hoops are temporarily removed one by one. First from one end of the skeleton, then from the other. Especially carefully align the cervical surface of the skeleton from the inside. Only in this case it is possible to choose the morning groove even both in circumference and in depth. And consequently, the insertion of the bottoms will be dense and durable. Sometimes this stripping of the neck part at a distance of 10-15 cm from the edge of the skeleton is limited.

After finishing the stripping, they begin to excavate the morning groove. This operation is performed on a Tuesday morning (Fig. 43). And if the cooper's product is small and cleanliness and correctness of the notch are not required, then the morning groove is chosen with a comb (Fig. 44). In both cases, 3-5 cm recede from the edge.

The morning groove is chosen only on one side if a barrel is prepared that opens from the other end. If it is planned to make a deaf, two-bottom (closed) barrel, then the morning groove is chosen at both ends of the core. To perform this operation, the skeleton of the barrel is placed in the saddle or on a workbench. When dredging the morning groove, the coopers use a simple rule. The depth of the groove should not be more than half the thickness of the ends of the rivets, and the width of the chime should not exceed the thickness of the bottom boards. On the contrary, the width is made somewhat narrower than the thickness of the bottom by about 3-5 mm. So only it will be possible to achieve a tight fit of the bottom in the barrel and prevent possible leakage.

Now let's start making the bottoms. Although this has already been discussed above, we recall that the bottoms are made of riveted planks, different in width, but the same in thickness, tightly fitted and jointed to each other. The thickness of the bottoms usually exceeds the thickness of the side rivets. Depending on the size of the cooper's product, the bottoms can consist of 4-6 planks rallied into one shield. Before joining the boards into a single shield, each of them is carefully planed with a plow, scraper, planer.

Also carefully, and maybe even more carefully, the side faces are footed. After that, the boards are clamped in the slot (Fig. 32). You can pre-rally them with spikes. On the shield formed from the boards, clamped in the slot, a circle of the future bottom is outlined (Fig. 26). Attention - its diameter should exceed the diameter of the barrel in the chime by twice the depth of the chime groove.

Now the extra parts of the boards are sawn off with a bow saw according to the markings made. You can pre-disassemble the shield. And you can make filing it right in the shemil. The outer side of the bottom is again carefully cut off. On the inside, at the bottom, the edges are squeezed. The compass outlines the border of this sloping chamfer. Its width is usually 4-7 cm.

It is necessary to remove this chamfer because the thickness of the bottom boards is greater than the thickness of the carbon monoxide groove. With the chamfer removed, the bottom will go into the chime and, as it goes in, the density of its contact with the carbon monoxide groove will increase. Sometimes the chamfer is also removed from the outside of the bottom. But this chamfer is made small. In its width, it should be less than the depth of the morning groove. Then, after inserting the bottom into the barrel, the chamfer will completely hide.

Boards composing bottom, each has its own name. In the bottom, consisting of 4 boards, the middle two are called the main ones, and the side ones are called cuts. In the bottom of the 6 boards, the two middle ones are also called the main ones, the next two are the side ones, and the extreme ones are still cuts. The prepared bottom is inserted into the chime. It is difficult to insert the whole bottom. More often it is inserted with disassembled planks. First, one or two hoops are removed from the end of the skeleton of the barrel.

The rivets will come apart. Insert the bottom, starting with the extreme (side) planks. The last middle plank is the hardest to insert. Insert it in approximately the following sequence. First, one end is inserted into the morning groove. On the other edge, one or two rivets are bent so that it can be handy to bring the second end of the plank into the chime. When doing this work, they use an auxiliary tool: cap pliers (Fig. 32), tightness (Fig. 45). The rivets will separate somewhat when the bottom is inserted.

They are driven into place with a wooden mallet. Having inserted the bottom at one end of the barrel, they are inserted in the same way at the other. The second bottom is more difficult to insert, since it can no longer be supported from below.

Not one plank at a time, but the whole bottom is inserted in the following order. First, one end edge is inserted into the chime. Next, the staves are widely bred and the whole bottom is inserted into the chime. Before insertion, chimes are often smeared with putty with a spatula (a mixture of red lead or chalk and boiled linseed oil - drying oil). For a tighter fit of the bottom, the so-called barrel grass is also used: rush, reed, etc. This barrel grass is placed in the morning groove with the help of a caulk (Fig. 38). After both bottoms are inserted into the chimes, the rivets are once again tweaked with a wooden hammer, and then they are tightly pulled together with puffs. They complete the work by putting hoops on the ends of the barrel again.

Sometimes, for greater strength, the bottom of the barrel is reinforced with an adjustable plate (Fig. 46) - a heel. It is a plank 15 cm wide and 3-4 cm thick. Its length corresponds to the diameter of the bottom. The heel is fixed across the bottom boards with pins. The latter are driven into the ends of the rivets next to the morning groove. The dowels are made long enough so that the fastening of the heel is reliable. The shape of the dowels does not have to be round. It can be faceted, for example quadrangular. It is even better if it is such, since when the barrel dries, the round pins sometimes fall out, and the faceted ones linger. The number of pins on each side of the heel varies from 4 to 6.

The last final operation for the manufacture of barrels is the stuffing of permanent hoops. Their number is different. Up to 18 wooden hoops or 6-8 iron hoops are stuffed onto a large barrel. For a medium-sized barrel, the usual number of wooden hoops is 14-16 pieces. Their gradation is as follows: 8 cervical (4 hoops from each edge), 6 abdominal (3 hoops in half a barrel). Less often, 10 wooden hoops are placed (6 neck, 4 abdominal; and neck and abdominal hoops are equally distributed on both halves of the barrel). We note right away that a barrel with 10 wooden hoops is less strong than with 14.

Wooden hoops are made from hoop whips. These whips encircle the barrel in the place where the hoop is supposed to be placed. Make appropriate marks on the whip and on the barrel. On the whip, mark the places of notches for knitting the lock (Fig. 47). An allowance of 10-12 cm is left on the lock at both ends of the hoop. The ends themselves are cut obliquely in the form of pointed tongues. Where we had notches, cuts are made half the width of the hoop whip. At one end of the hoop, an incision is made from above, at the other - from below. On the inside of the hoop, in the direction from the cuts to the middle, notches are made 4-5 cm long, gradually fading away. Now knit a lock. Namely: the ends of the hoop are hooked to each other by the protrusions of the cuts, placed in the corresponding recesses. That is, the ends wind up and hide on the inside of the hoop. Often, the hoop at the place where the lock is knitted is braided with willow twigs for strength.

From the barrel, as the reader has already understood, the working hoops are removed, replacing them with permanent ones. This must be done sequentially: first, the abdominal hoops are replaced in one half of the barrel, then the neck hoops are all in the same half, and only then the same is done with the second half of the barrel. The last neck hoops are especially difficult to pull on the skeleton of the barrel. The hoop is brought to the riveting, first from one edge.

Then from the other, while helping yourself with tightness and puffs. They work like this by force. The end of his handle is pressed against the side of the barrel, and the other end of the same handle is pressed by hand. The hoop at this time is slightly stretched by gripping the tightness and, embracing the ends of the rivets, pulls them together. The rivets are gradually inserted one after the other deeper into the hoop.

Sometimes put on a semicircle of the hoop, slip off the staves. To prevent this from happening, the worn half of the hoop is fixed to the edges of the core with small nails. They should be driven in no more than half the thickness of the ends of the rivets. After the wooden hoop is pulled over the barrel, it must be laid down on the intended place.

At the same time, they use a wooden hammer and a heel (Fig. 48). The heel is placed with a deepening of the sole on the edge of the hoop. With hammer blows on the head of the heel, the hoop is brought into place. The latter should be stuffed on the barrel without any distortions, to failure, tightly covering its circumference.

Making iron hoops similar to making wood. The width and thickness of the iron hoops depend on the size of the barrel. Usually take strip iron 3-4 cm wide. Here they also begin work with the measurement of the barrel. Strip iron is cut off with allowances from both ends of the hoop to an overlay of 10-12 cm. The corners of the ends of the hoop are also cut off with scissors or a chisel. These ends are then either welded or riveted. Welding can be done the way coopers did in the old days without a welding machine.

In the forge, the ends of the hoop were red-hot. And then, without letting it cool, on the anvil, holding with tongs and hitting with a blacksmith's hammer, the ends were welded. But more often than not, the ends are riveted. They are superimposed on each other and drilled or punched at least two holes, retreating from the edge along the length of the hoop 2 and 6 cm.

Iron hoops are mounted in the same way as wooden hoops. Only at the same time they already use iron and a hammer and a heel. To prevent rust, iron hoops are painted with black oil paint. The view of the finished wooden product with black stripes of hoops is a feast for the eyes.

After fitting the permanent hoops, the barrel is finally finished. They pass with a plow or grinder along the bottoms and sides of the barrel. They cut off the ends of the barrel grass near the chimes, clean the putty that has come out of them. Chamfers are corrected with a scraper. If planned, a spigot hole is drilled in the barrel. The walls of the hole are made either vertical or at an angle.

According to the journal: SAM

What can be compared, for example, with a cucumber or a tomato pickled in an oak tub. And in a linden barrel, honey, apple juice are perfectly stored, you can cook kvass in it. Finally, an oak tub with a lemon or laurel tree even today will not spoil the interior of even a city apartment. Just do not find these simple products either in the store or on the market. But you can make a barrel yourself with your own hands, and although this task is not an easy one, an amateur master is quite capable of coping with it.

Rivets

First of all, you need to choose wood. Oak and pine are unsuitable for storing honey - honey darkens in an oak barrel, and smells of resin in a pine barrel. Here we need linden, aspen, plane tree. Poplar, willow, alder will also come down. But for salting, pickling or urinating, there is nothing better than oak - such a barrel will serve for more than a decade. For other needs, you can use blackberry, beech, spruce, fir, pine, cedar, larch and even birch.

Usually, the lower part of the trunk of old trees goes to riveting, it is called “riveter”. But a lover of tinkering will choose blanks from ordinary firewood, and adapt a thin trunk to the job. It is best to make riveting from raw wood. First, the chock - it should be 5-6 cm longer than the future riveting - is split in half, gently tapping the log on the butt of the ax. Each half is then again pricked into two parts, and so on, depending on the thickness of the chock (Fig. 1), in order to ultimately obtain blanks 5-10 cm wide (15 cm for sweet clover) and 2.5-3 cm thick. just try to split it radially - this will save the riveting in the future from cracking.

The riveting is kadushechnaya - in which one end is wider than the other, and barrel riveting - with an extension in the middle. The size of these extensions determines the taper of the tub and the convexity of the central part of the barrel. It is enough if the ratio between the widest and narrowest part of the riveting is 1.7-1.8 (Fig. 3).

The processing of the side surface is completed with a jointer. It is more convenient to do this by moving the workpiece along the jointer (Fig. 4). At the next stage, we process the inner (in relation to the finished barrel) surface of the riveting, cutting off excess wood with a planer or even an ax (Fig. 5). After that, the barrel riveting can be considered finished, while the barrel riveting still needs to be thinned in the middle to 12-15 mm (Fig. 6). Let it not bother you that rivets can have different widths - we take everything possible from each workpiece.

hoops

According to the location on the product, the hoops are divided into farts - the central hoop on the barrel, the morning - extreme and cervical - intermediate.

Assembly

Coopers make it easier...

Lightly tapping the hoop with a hammer, we upset it and check whether the edges of the riveting are tightly aligned. To achieve contact of the rivets over the entire side surface, you need to add a rivet or pull out an extra one and after that put a permanent hoop. By the way, if changing the number of rivets does not give the desired effect, you just need to narrow one of the rivets or replace the narrow one with a wider one.

Having trimmed the ends of the skeleton with light blows of the hammer, we put on the middle hoop and push it all the way with the help of a hammer (Fig. 10).

Dona

The assembled skeleton is cleaned from the inside with a plow or sherhebel, and the ends of the skeleton with a humpback planer (Fig. 13).

Now in the skeleton you need to make a groove (Fig. 14). The cutter of the tool can be made from hooped iron, and even better, from a saw blade. The depth and width of the groove must be 3 mm (Fig. 15).

First, a bottom shield is assembled from a sweet clover with a planed outer side and jointed side surfaces (Fig. 16). The sweet clover is fastened with nails, as shown in the figure, for which nests are pre-drilled 15-20 mm deep. The radius of the future bottom is found as the side of a regular hexagon inscribed in the circle of the morning groove on the skeleton of the barrel. However, you need to cut the bottom with a margin, deviating from the intended circle by 1-1.5 mm. After cleaning with a sherhebel, chamfers are cut from the edge of the bottom (Fig. 17) so that the thickness of the wood is 3 mm three millimeters from the edge - this is necessary for the tight connection of the bottom with the frame in the morning groove (Fig. 18).

After stuffing the hoop, make sure there are no gaps. The perfect result the first time is rarely achieved. Even if the cracks are not visible to the eye, they can be found by pouring a little water into the barrel. If it flows between the rivets, then the bottom is too big and it needs to be slightly pared. Worse, if water flows through the bottom or through the morning groove. Then you have to disassemble the skeleton and narrow one of the rivets.

Before installing the second bottom, a filling hole with a diameter of 30-32 mm should be drilled in it. The cork is made as shown in Fig. 19, its height should not be less than the thickness of the bottom, however, the cork should not protrude beyond the cut plane of the core.

How many barrels to serve

The brown color of the oak is given by slaked lime mixed with a 25% ammonia solution. Black - a solution of iron sulfate or an infusion for 5-6 days of iron filings in vinegar.

It must be remembered that wood is better preserved with a constant humidity regime. Therefore, dry products must always be kept dry, and bulk products filled with liquid. Both cannot be placed directly on the ground. It is better to substitute a brick or plank under the barrel than to subsequently get rid of the rot by cutting the chimes.

An oak barrel is a great thing for a person. In it you can salt vegetables, make wine, moonshine, cognac. At worst, just sit until it hits, like some, a great idea. No wonder in the old days the manufacture of barrels was the lot of real masters. We continue to tell you about the development of which you can do in the country. Next up is cooperage.

Unlike many endangered professions, such as saddler, lamplighter or carriage maker, coopers are quite in demand in the 21st century. The production of tubs, barrels and decorative bar elements is now on stream. Beer and wine containers are manufactured industrially - spacious workshops, computer quality control, wholesale deliveries. The cost, depending on the volume, ranges from several hundred to tens of thousands of rubles.

But, of course, the craving of a Russian person for things made with his own hands cannot be defeated by anything. Therefore, if you decide to make the barrel of your dreams on your own, we can only advise you! Follow the recommendations below - and any Diogenes will thank you!
So where does the barrel start?

Tree selection

Of course, first you need an oak tree. Moreover, not the first one that came across, but more or less adult, with a trunk diameter of 40-60 cm. Some specimens can be rejected even at the inspection stage. So, the characteristic tuberosity on the trunk testifies to the defeat of the giant by tobacco rot.

We also “weed out” twisted and knotty trees. In cooperage, only “tulka” is used - the first 4 meters of the trunk, the rest can be safely turned into fuel for the barbecue. Yes, if you can’t cut down the tree you like, you can always buy a similar one at the nearest sawmill.

Making staves

Now for some theory. The barrel consists of wooden parts, staves, tightly fitted to each other and tied with metal hoops. And the final quality of the entire product directly depends on how accurately the manufacturing technology of these elements was observed.

First of all, decide on the dimensions of the future barrel. Its height will affect the length of the riveting itself (it should be 2.5–3 cm longer).

Have you chosen a size? Cut on it the previously prepared oak round timber. It is good when the farm has a hydraulic cleaver. Well, if not, the oak log is split into sectors using the old-fashioned method, using wedges. The result should be 8 radially chipped ingots.

Now we cut the core and soft "white" fabric on a circular saw. From the resulting blanks, we plan out even boards of the same thickness on the thickness gauge.

Ready? And now ... put all this beauty in piles somewhere under a canopy. And leave it for at least a few months. And better for a year - a good oak barrel is not made in an hour☺. During this time, the sun and wind, without creating unnecessary stresses on the wood, will remove excess moisture from it. For now, you can work on grapes (for the Moscow region, by the way, there are excellent varieties, we will definitely tell you about them somehow). When the blanks are dry, you can continue. Using an electric jigsaw, give the boards the correct cigar-shaped shape, where the thickening will be only 0.8–1 cm wider than the ends.

The inner edge of the blanks is crimped in the middle by a curved plow. Less than a millimeter is enough, and when necessary, the rivets will bend in the right place. We give the outer face the shape of an arc, the curvature of which is determined by a special pattern. Its radius depends on the radius of the produced barrel. The tool is easy to make yourself. The result should be a product the same as in the figure.

On average, a barrel will need from 25 to 30 staves.

Making a hoop

When the rivets are prepared, you can do the hoops. You will need a narrow strip of 2-3 mm iron, slightly longer than the circumference of the core.

Twist it into a ring and fix it at the ends with rivets. The hoop is almost ready. Slightly flare the inside with a hammer - and you can put it on the skeleton. For a small barrel, you will need two pairs of hoops. Not less! What if some ring will not withstand the fermentation of your beer?

While working with iron, make a couple more metal staples. They will then serve as "clothespins".

Barrel assembly

Rivets are prepared, hoops are ready. It's time to collect it all in a pot-bellied barrel. Take the finished ring and, in arbitrary places, fasten the ends of two or three rivets in it with clothespins. The design will resemble a stool. In this position, fill the entire perimeter of the hoop with rivets. When the last plank is in place, tap the metal belt with a hammer to fit the pieces tighter.

But before putting on the second hoop, the tree will have to be heated and steamed. It is done like this. We take out our semi-finished product to fresh air and install it with the “socket” up. A small metal urn filled with wood chips is placed inside. We kindle a fire in it. While the fire is burning, moisten the wood liberally with water. This will keep it from burning and add flexibility to the boards. After half an hour of such a “bath”, throw a noose on the end free from the hoop and pull it off quietly with a winch. In this place, haste is unacceptable. The path to the finish line can take from 40 minutes to 3-4 hours, but any broken rivet will immediately return you to the start of the race.

As soon as the wooden fan closes, immediately stuff the hoop. Just do not forget the old Cooper's law: "The same place is not knocked twice with a hammer." In simple words, when upsetting the hoop, apply only one blow to each place. In no case do not hit there two or three times - you will split the tree.
When the metal belts are in place, the skeleton of the barrel ends up. The internal cavity is leveled with a special scraper and polished with sandpaper.

And now another trial by fire. In order for the tree to get used to its new shape, it must be burned. The scheme is the same - wood chips burn in an urn. Stir the fire constantly, otherwise the barrel will catch fire. There are no recipes here. If you set fire to the boards, the wine will take on the smell of burning. You finish the firing ahead of time, and the staves will break the hoop.

Manufacturing and installation of bottoms

At a distance of up to 2.5 cm from the ends of the core, select the so-called morning groove. The bottom will then be inserted into it. Previously, such an operation was trusted only to a special cutter, the morning man (another endangered profession!). Today it is much easier to use a cutter. At the same time, remove the chamfers from the ends of the barrel. Useful when shrinking bottoms.

To make them, you will again need rivets, only a little larger. They are connected into shields with steel nails without caps. By actually measuring the length of the morning groove, you can easily determine the radius of the bottom. Outline it on the shield and cut it out with a jigsaw. Sharpen the ends of the round.
The connection of the bottom with the skeleton looks like this.

To put the bottom in its place, the skeleton will have to be unforged on one side. Rivets by this time should already hold their shape. Insert the circle into the morning groove, put it in place with a mallet - and again pull the product with a hoop. If everything is done correctly, the bottom will not leak. Before repeating the operation with another bottom, cut a drain hole in it. Diameter - 32 mm. When everything is ready, we grind the barrel, giving it a marketable appearance, and prepare for soaking.

Soak

In principle, the barrel is already ready. On this one could calm down, but the tree is still too saturated with tannins and tannins. Therefore, you have to soak them, otherwise the contents of the barrel will deteriorate.

Fill the container one third with hot (80°C) water. Rotate the barrel for half an hour so that the moisture moves around the entire perimeter. Then drain the liquid, replace it with a cold one. It should stand in the container for a day, after which it must be replaced again. And so - for two weeks. Someone soaks the barrel with ready-made wine, someone with moonshine. Everyone has their own style. But it's worth starting with the water.

Now the barrel is really ready for wine. Or beer. Or moonshine with cucumbers - what do you choose? ..