Any anons tried their hand at barrel making before? Tools seem easy enough to come by in antique shops and eBay and it seems like it could be a profitable hobby/side gig if you got good enough seeing as it's a dead trade in most places and there's still some demand for barrels from vineyards, breweries and distilleries as well as home and garden decor.
You could also make & sell banded wooden buckets and flagons for renfair homosexuals. How would you source timber and spools of steel/iron banding to bind it together?
I visited the speyside cooperidge in scotland once.
And who works with staves, eh then? Witches, that's who. Preventing water from running downhill is standing in defiance of God's will. Servants of Satan, the whole lot of them says I.
>a profitable hobby/side gig
Maybe, but probably not.
Looking at that pic makes me wonder how precisely tapered the boards have to be in order to not leak. How would you plane or cut the perfect shape.
>How would you plane or cut the perfect shape.
A coopers axe to cut the staves to a roughly uniform shape and 2 drawknives to plane them; one flat one for the tapered ends and a curved one for the interior of the stave.
There are tons of videos on this subject. You plane them with an ultra long plane that sits stationary iron up, which you slide the edge of the stave along to joint. The hoops also force them together with great force, and any liquid you store will also swell the wood.
>how precisely tapered the boards have to be in order to not leak
not that precise if you spit on tradition and botch it.
The swelling of wood and being able to dent it makes it possible to fabricate a gasket into the board itself, they did that for century's on ships.
Distillery nerd here. Barrel making is pretty profitable if you can make a lot of them. Craft distilleries making bourbon and other whiskies have to use a barrel once. Can't skip and can't reuse it. A lot of the inaccuracies in bevels and tapers of the staves is corrected at the charring stage. Them shots are forced into shape by the steel bands, then when they're heated the wood moves a bit (think steam bending) Then when you add liquid the staves swell. Lots of barrels leak for a day or 2 after filling. It's accepted in the industry. Getting good white oak is the challenge.
Actually scottish whisky reuses american bourbon barrels and a type of french barrel, possibly brandy.
Yea but American bourbon by law uses virgin barrels. For my tastes and wallet the cheap Scots make more sense.
It was/is difficult enough to establish a profession that persevered through history enough to earn a family name.
Living history museums sometimes hire people to build barrels.