What are wooden barrels made of? Barrel manufacturing technology. Cooperage traditions

There are not so many masters of cooperage today, but the tradition of pickling in tubs, or storing honey and wine in barrels, has remained in Russia to this day. It often happens that it is not possible, for one reason or another, to acquire a wooden container. Then you can make an oak barrel with your own hands. Although this is not the easiest task, however, if you set yourself a clear goal and follow all the features of the technology, you can make quite a decent wooden container for storing food and drinks. We will talk about how to make an oak barrel with our own hands below.

We make blanks

To make a container, you first need to select the material. If you want to store beekeeping products inside, pay attention to lime or aspen raw materials, plane trees. Not bad honey is stored in barrels made of poplar, alder wood, willow. An oak barrel is ideal for salting, fermenting or urinating.

If you figured out the raw materials, you should choose an old tree. Its lower part is best suited for rivets. During harvesting, be sure to make sure that the churak is a couple of centimeters larger than the size of the future barrel. This stock is needed for grinding the edges.

The wood must be raw. Initially, the churak splits into 2 parts. For this, an ax and a small log are used, which are gently tapped on the butt. Each half splits in two again. It is necessary to ensure that the separation takes place radially. With each subsequent half, they do the same - the number of blanks depends on the diameter of the oak barrel. It is easy to prepare raw materials with your own hands, the main thing is accuracy. Please note that blanks may have different widths, but this is not scary.

Rivets are dried indoors, where good natural ventilation is established. The term is at least 1 month, and ideally even about 1 year. After drying, it is processed with special tools. It could be:

plow;
sherhebel;
plane.

First, the outer side of the riveting is processed, be sure to check the degree of curvature according to a pre-prepared template. It can be cut from a thin board, attaching it to the finished product. After all the outer surfaces are processed, you can proceed to the side ones. They are also aligned according to the template, and after processing they are jointed. The inner surface of the riveting is processed with a planer.

Rings

To make hoops, you can use both steel and wood. The latter option is less durable, so it is better to immediately give preference to metal. For hoops, hot-rolled steel in the form of a strip is used. Its width is about 3-5 cm, and its thickness: 0.16-0.2 cm.

It is necessary to make a measurement at the place where the hoop will be stretched. After that, the width of the strip, doubled, is added to a certain value. With the help of a hammer, the workpiece is bent, acquiring the shape of a ring, and then holes are punched or drilled in it and rivets are placed. The material for them is mild steel wire, the diameter of which is 0.4-0.5 cm. One of the inner edges of the hoop must be flared with the pointed end of the hammer.

Assembly subtleties

Making oak barrels with your own hands requires patience. However, the result is worth the time and effort. So, to assemble a barrel for salting, you need a flat surface. To get a finished barrel you need:

The skeleton does not need to be boiled or steamed before tightening, although there are those who insist on this. There are times when the workpiece can crack. Then experienced coopers replace it with a new one.

Bottom

To make the bottom, first you need to cut a groove from the bottom at a distance of 4-5 cm from the edge of the end, its dimensions can be 0.4-0.5 mm. To do this, a special tool is used - the morning. On both sides of the groove with a chisel, you need to make a chamfer from 0.1 to 0.2 cm.

The bottom is made of a special shield. It is assembled using metal studs or nails. Having drawn a circle, you need to step back from it by 1-1.5 cm and cut out the future bottom. After that, it is cleaned with a sherhebel, and chamfers are cut along the edges. As a result, the thickness of the rivets there will be no more than 0.3 cm. This ensures complete tightness of the structure.

To make a fitting, loosen the bottom hoop and insert the bottom. It is inserted into the groove from one side, and from the second side it is adjusted with a hammer to the desired level with light taps. With a tight move, you can loosen the hoop a little more, if it goes too freely, it is better to tighten the hoop.

Next, the hoop is stuffed again, and the barrel is checked for leaks. To do this, pour some water into it. If there is a leak between the rivets, you need to slightly reduce the bottom. If water seeps through the bottom or groove, you will have to disassemble the frame and narrow one of the blanks.

Before installing the second bottom, make a hole in it, the diameter of which is not more than 3 cm and make a cork under it. The correct dimensions suggest that it will be slightly more than the thickness of the bottom and will not protrude beyond the skeleton. That's the whole sequence that you need to follow in order to make an oak barrel with your own hands.

Repair

Can an old barrel be repaired? Of course. If an alcoholic drink was stored in it for a long time, it is worth disassembling the structure and removing a layer about 2 mm thick from the tree. Further, the drink does not penetrate into the wood. After that, the rivets are processed and assembled again.

You can repair an oak barrel with your own hands, even if it leaks. To do this, you need to repeat the same manipulations as in the manufacture of containers - adjust the hoops.

This is what it is, cooperage business. You can make wooden products yourself, but this requires a lot of time and effort. But is it worth spending them, if today you can order via the Internet, on the website of the Russian Bondar company?

For the construction of a bathhouse, you can choose the traditional option - cut down a small one or build a steam room using frame technology. A bathhouse looks much more attractive and original - a barrel made with your own hands from specially prepared boards. Since many homeowners are interested in the method of assembling a house adjoining structure, we suggest considering the manufacturing procedure in this article.

Choice of design and dimensions

The building is similar to a barrel, not only externally, but also constructively. The building consists of the following elements:

end walls of a round shape, knocked together from tightly fitted boards - analogues of the bottom and lid of the barrel;
side walls assembled from longitudinally laid thick boards with special recesses (following the example of a log house);
external ties of steel strip or cable, reminiscent of barrel iron hoops;
stands for horizontal installation of the assembled body on the ground;
elements of internal arrangement - oven, shelves, partitions with doors (if necessary).

Steam room, washing room and dressing room in the form of a classic round barrel

Reference. There are also more complex designs, made in the form of a rectangle with rounded corners or an oval, shown below in the photo.

First of all, it is necessary to decide on the design and layout of the bath rooms - the future dimensions and basis of the structure depend on this. Consider an important point: the side walls are assembled from solid boards made specifically for the bath, so the length of the structure directly depends on the length of the lumber.

The design and internal layout of the barrel is developed depending on the type of bath chosen and other wishes of the homeowner as follows:

A beginner who decides to independently build a bath in the form of a barrel is not recommended to start with large structures equipped with several internal partitions. Make a one-room sauna 2 m long - if desired, it can be loaded onto a car trailer and taken to a place of rest near a reservoir.

Lumber harvesting

Bars and boards for a bath, made in the form of a barrel, must be sawn from hardwood - aspen, linden, and so on. Of conifers, it is allowed to use cedar and larch, which are resistant to temperature extremes and moisture. Pine and spruce, when heated strongly, release resin, whose drops can burn people in the steam room.

Advice. If the choice of wood is limited only to conifers, select boards without knots, which are sources of tarry secretions, for the lining of the upper part of the body.

To make a bath-type "barrel", purchase the following timber:

timber with a minimum section of 10 x 10 cm for supports;
a board 45-50 mm thick and 10 cm wide is used to assemble end and side walls;
a wooden door 0.7 x 1.8 m with a box (you can buy a ready-made one or make it yourself from a 50 x 50 mm timber and 2.5 cm thick boards);
lumber for the manufacture of shelves and a lattice pallet.

The number of boards on the end walls of the barrel is calculated as follows: the area of the circle is determined, the resulting value is divided by the width of the product and multiplied by a safety factor of 1.2. Do not forget to add the bars - power jumpers that connect the boards to each other in the process of panel assembly.

The timber of the side sheathing is calculated by the circumference divided by the width of the board. Use a safety factor as the wood must go through tongue and groove trimming on the woodworking machine.

Note. On sale it is not difficult to find ready-made kits for assembling baths - barrels of various sizes and layouts. But often the quality of these products does not match their cost.

What else is needed in the process of building a round bath:

metal ties - steel cables or strips;
fasteners - galvanized screws and nails;
compositions for external and internal processing of wood - antiseptics, varnishes;
materials for the manufacture of the roof - shingles, plywood, beams and roofing (common options are shingles or corrugated board);
bath stove of appropriate power, calculated according to the volume of the steam room;
chimney pipes - sandwich;
special lamps and switches for saunas, non-flammable cables.

If you intend to use the barrel year-round, it is worth making external insulation. A suitable heat-insulating material is mineral wool, polymers are not recommended.

Wood processing

Since the walls of the bathhouse are joined in a special way - like log cabins, all boards need to be machined with cutters on the machine, it is unrealistic to cut out semicircular grooves by hand. The developer needs to contact the woodworking workshop and provide sketches with the parameters of the blanks. The exact dimensions of the ridges, grooves and profile of the cutter are indicated in the drawing.

To facilitate further construction work, process the workpieces that have been trimmed in advance according to the instructions:

Advice. Cover the surfaces of the blanks that go outside and inside the barrel with various protective compounds. From the inside, apply a special product for baths and steam rooms.

After painting, stack the boards to dry in a stack, laying thin strips between the tiers. How to conduct preparatory work, look at the video:

End wall manufacturing

As mentioned above, a barrel - a bath is made by hand from two (at least) round edge elements connected by profiled sheathing boards. Therefore, construction begins with the assembly of the ends of the barrel using panel technology.

Lay 2 support beams on a flat area and begin to assemble the back blank wall in the following sequence:

Advice. It is not necessary to tie the blanks into a shield with two long jumpers. Put 4 crossbars shorter and closer to the edge - the product will look more aesthetically pleasing.

When assembling, the groove of each subsequent beam is put on the crest of the previous one, as builders of log houses do. This connection method prevents precipitation from entering the joint. Adjust the boards tightly, if necessary, use clamps and wedging.

The front wall is made in a similar way, only the door frame serves as the base. Twist it with self-tapping screws from the bars, after fixing it on the supports with clamps and aligning the diagonals with a tape measure. To draw a circle, nail a temporary board to the box, on which the center is located.

After sawing off the excess, sand the ends of both products and install the door. It does not hurt to additionally fix the extreme boards of the wall with long furniture screws screwed into adjacent shield bars. How the round walls of the barrel - baths are made, look at the video:

Sauna Assembly Instructions

The structure needs to be assembled locally - it is quite cumbersome to move. But first you need to make stands - legs located under the extreme walls and partitions. For manufacturing, make the most of the scraps of materials left after assembling the front and back walls. One of the design options is shown in the photo.

Installation of a bath barrel is carried out in the following order:

An important point. A variant of the traditional Russian bathhouse with a sink is installed at a slight slope towards the back wall. A hole is drilled at the bottom of the floor to drain water.

The finished body of the barrel should be protected from precipitation so that the upper part of the bath gets less wet. Here it is recommended to apply the budget method:

Stuff flexible wooden planks across the body with nails at intervals of 0.5-0.6 m.
Pin sheets of thin plywood to the top of the planks.
Cover the improvised base of the roof with shingles.

If it is necessary to make insulation, the shingle is nailed to the body in several layers - the gap between the plywood and the outer surface of the barrel will increase. Mineral wool covered with a diffusion membrane can be laid there. The procedure for assembling the bath is shown in detail in the next video:

Arrangement works

At the end of the installation, proceed to the internal arrangement of the barrel. In the bath, the following work remains to be done:

Make a ventilation hole in the back end, closed with a lid.
Install the oven using the metal stand. Protect the wall section behind the stove with fireproof materials - roofing steel or mineralite slabs.
Arrange a chimney from a sandwich pipe by making a hole in the ceiling. How to properly install chimney pipes, read.
Make shelves and a floor drain (lattice tray), attach the elements to the walls.
Lay the wiring, install a bath lamp and a switch.

Under the barrel - a Russian bath, it is advisable to dig a pit in advance to drain water through a hole in the floor. There is another way to drain - connect a flexible pipe to the drain, laid to the storm drain or other place.

Conclusion

If you decide to make your own bath - barrels, be patient and have plenty of free time. The author of the videos presented here spent about 1 month building from scratch. Add time to deal with unexpected delays and inexperience issues. There is a way to reduce the construction time - to order a ready-made kit to the masters, and to do only the installation yourself.

Structural engineer with over 8 years experience in construction.
Graduated from East Ukrainian National University. Vladimir Dal with a degree in Electronic Industry Equipment in 2011.

(Last Updated On: 09/19/2017)

How to make a wooden barrel with your own hands in modern society? Surely, today you will not have to gouge a product from a solid tree trunk, as it was before. The modern barrel is very different from its fellow predecessors. The most important step towards its manufacture was the appearance of metal hoops, which very tightly pulled conical dishes.

What wood is better to make a barrel

oak tree

It is excellently pricked and, when steamed, acquires extraordinary flexibility. It is this quality that is highly valued. But, most importantly, in oak wood there are preservative substances called tills, which protect the tree from rotting. Therefore, products in oak barrels can retain their properties for many decades.

Cedar

Also used in the manufacture of barrels. Its properties are soft, flexible and light. Previously, it was believed that the cedar itself contained substances that destroy microbes. Therefore, you can make a cedar barrel with your own hands, in which drinks will be stored for a very long time and not deteriorate.

Juniper

The inside of the trunk has a red-brown wood, and the sapwood is much lighter, yellowish in color. The wood of this tree is characterized by density, strength and heavy weight, moreover, it is very convenient in processing - it is well cut, does not crack.

Pine wood

It has average indicators - low hardness and medium strength, high elasticity, bends well. Due to the specific resinous smell, food products are not stored in pine barrels.

How to make a barrel at home

The question of how to make a wooden barrel with your own hands worries many artisans who would like to master new secrets of working with wood.

For the manufacture of cooperage products, rivets or frets are used. These are rectangular wooden boards obtained by sawing a butt or tree trunk into separate parts. Another way is to split decks or logs.

Sawn frets are very durable. Stubbed ones are harder to make. The most important thing is to be able to split the chock so that the rivets are clean and even, and there is little waste of wood chips left.

To make a wooden barrel with your own hands, you need to correctly split the wooden block in the direction of the radius, it is advisable to get into the core. If the ax hit a little to the left or to the right of the core, then the cleavage line is called tangential. In this direction, almost all tree species are pricked much harder.

For the manufacture of rivets, ordinary chopping blocks will also go. Of these, you need to choose only those where the layers are located along, and not across. The finished frets are dried and neatly folded.

How to make hoops for screed

Iron hoops have been used for a very long time. Initially, they pulled buckets, consisting of sixteen rivets. Moreover, for the fortress they were additionally pierced with nails.

Currently, hoops are cut from strong sheet steel, then blacksmiths decorate them with all sorts of stamped designs. Finished hoops are coated with bituminous varnish or drying oil. If the drying oil layer is dried with a blowtorch, a beautiful light brown color will be obtained.

How to assemble a conical barrel base

First, we will try to connect the prepared side rivets and temporarily pull them together with permanent hoops. To do this, attach two or three initial rivets to one of the hoops (it is better to take a small diameter). Gently holding each inserted board with your hand, fill the entire space with the missing rivets. Be especially careful when inserting the last rivet. It may turn out that there is not enough space left for her. Take it and cut it a little, evenly attaching it to the rest of the rivets. This work is usually done with two or three assistants.

Barrel assembly diagram:

With the help of a hammer and a wooden drift, you need to upset the hoop so that it sits tightly on the base of the barrel. A hoop of a larger diameter is also upset.

The last operation is the installation of the bottom. It is carefully placed in the groove, the barrel is turned over and a large hoop is fixed. If the connection turned out to be strong and reliable, then temporary hoops are changed to permanent ones.

Now you can imagine how to make a wooden barrel with your own hands, using only the material that everyone has on the farm.

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 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.

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

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 goes to the 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.

Assembly

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 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).

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.

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).

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's 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 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

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. Black - a solution of iron sulfate 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 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.

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