VIDEO
How to restore an old oak barrel?
A used oak barrel can be restored. From the inside, the oak rivet of the barrel is impregnated with the drink to a shallow depth - only 1-2 mm. If this inner layer is removed, the barrel will regain its properties. Of course, it will no longer work like new, but it will be possible to use it for aging for several more years.
We need tools: two hammers of 500g and 1kg, coarse sandpaper or a sander, a simple pencil, a piece of chalk, oak scraps, chips or sawdust, wheat flour and a flat and hard surface. In cooperage shops, a floor thick steel sheet is used, but a flat concrete floor is also suitable.
The barrel should be dry - for several weeks to stand without a drink in the air under a canopy from the sun.Make sure that the hoops do not fall, and the barrel does not fall apart, tap them periodically, but not hard, so as not to stretch the hoops. Strong padding will be needed at the end of the assembly. For a long time, the rivets in the barrel have fitted together so much that if the barrel falls apart during our repair, it will be very problematic to assemble it. Therefore, first of all, sign each bottom with a pencil as the top and bottom, put the marks on each bottom clearly opposite the filler hole, number all the rivets in order, mark each top and bottom.
Sign the hoops as top and bottom, and if there are more than four, then in order. Mark the bottom edges of the bunches with chalk for easy alignment later. Now you can carefully disassemble the barrel on one side. We don't have to knock out both bottoms. We can also clean the barrel on one side, removing only one bottom.
To do this, we put the barrel vertically and knock down the lower bunch and neck hoops - if there are six hoops in total, or only bunch hoops if there are four hoops. On the contrary, the upper head hoop should be more tight. Coopers use for this a heavy hammer and heel - such as a large chisel with a blunt nose. But you can do it quite well using a small hammer as a heel. The main thing is not to rush and do everything carefully.
Then turn the barrel over and knock the head hoop up.
ATTENTION! If the barrel is not sufficiently calcined, tension may remain in the rivets. In this case, the hoop may shoot and cause injury! Cover it with a thick blanket or jersey.
Pull the rivets apart and remove the bottom. It may be necessary to knock down the remaining bunch hoop slightly to loosen the elasticity of the rivets. Keep in mind that the bottom is made of several rivets, weakly fastened to each other with wooden dowels. The bottom must not be allowed to fall apart.
In the groove where the bottom is inserted - this is called a chime - the remains of barrel grass, also known as chakan, or dried reed leaves, can be found as a sealant. This is not very good and may affect the tightness of the barrel, but will have to be removed.
Slide and tack the headband into place, it may be necessary to replace the bunched headband from the beginning in order to compress the rivets. When upsetting the hoops, strike evenly, moving the heel around the entire circumference, avoiding skewing
Now the barrel needs to be cleaned from the inside, it is convenient to do this with a grinder, removing the sawdust with a vacuum cleaner. Our task is to remove the top layer soaked in drinks.
If it is planned to withstand strong drinks in an oak barrel, then it is advisable to burn the barrel. To do this, light a small fire of oak cubes and chips, wait until the fire is well lit and coals begin to form. Lay the barrel on its side. Using a metal scoop, place the coals in the middle of the barrel, add dry sawdust and roll gently while maintaining combustion. It is important not to damage the chimes with fire; to do this, moisten them with plenty of water and make sure that the coals are only in the middle of the barrel. Make a spray bottle out of a plastic bottle and keep it handy.
After the barrel has cooled, remove the remaining ash and brush the chime. The barrel can be collected. To ensure tightness, especially if barrel grass was used in the barrel, we will use the French method. Mix a couple of tablespoons of flour with water and knead the dough thicker than sour cream. Before inserting the bottom into place, coat the places where the chakan was, especially the chime, with dough. You can also spread the butt of the sweet clover.
With the bottom open up, loosen the top bunch hoop and remove the head. Insert the bottom using a flat wooden stick. Siege the bunch, fill the head. Thoroughly siege all the hoops, leave for a day to dry the dough. Rinse the oak barrel a couple of times with water and leave to swell.
✓ Our master coopers know the difference between a common pedunculate oak and a rock oak. That is why our products are made exclusively from dense hardwood oak. Only this Krasnodar rocky oak is suitable for aging drinks.
✓ If you want to get the right cognac, whiskey or fine wine - our solid oak barrels are for you.
✓ Our barrels are steamed and fired during the manufacturing process. Therefore, they - both steamed and roasted - are suitable for both wine and spirits.
✓ With that said, our barrels may not be the cheapest. But we try to make these the best barrels for the production of noble drinks.
✓ We love our work and are proud of our products, so warranty claims are extremely rare. But if this happens - we provide a replacement and a refund - for us this is not a problem.
Wooden containers, whether it be a barrel or a jug, impart a special aroma, delicate taste and rich color to homemade drinks. Trouble-free operation largely depends on proper care. Even under the most optimal conditions of use, over time, microcracks form on the surface, and cracks appear due to the divergence of elements. If you do not deal with their elimination in a timely manner, then damage will lead to irreversible consequences.
Processing oak barrels with different means
Our distant ancestors still possessed the secrets of restoring the integrity and tightness of the barrel. Previously, they made their own grout and putty based on the natural properties of plants. The most effective is beeswax. But when using it, there are also nuances, the tool copes only with the smallest cracks, something else should be used to seal the cracks. But it is recommended to polish and protect the new barrel from external influences with wax.
In search of the optimal product for processing oak barrels, the craftsmen came to lard. This remedy has been used along with ash, wax and table salt. At the same time, the appearance of cooperage products left much to be desired. And the process itself required a certain skill from a specialist. Such repairs took a long time and took a lot of effort. All of these ingredients were heated over low heat, after thorough mixing, a mixture was formed, which was used to repair the kegs. Given the complex composition, it took a long time to wait for the mixture to solidify, so it was impossible to start using the container right away.
Mastic for barrels: features of use
Today, such means for processing oak barrels are available to everyone. In the online store of the Alkopribor company you can buy special mastic for cooperage products. This product has a homogeneous consistency, so it can be applied flawlessly and without problems. It has a light shade ranging from white to cream. The mastic has no smell, which simplifies the process of processing oak barrels, making it more comfortable. Such repairs can now be carried out in any room, because barrel mastic is completely harmless to the body and safe.
The product contains: wax, calcium carbonate and paraffin. Environmental friendliness and high quality ingredients make it possible to use the mastic for the barrel inside and outside of the product. At the same time, it does not have any effect on the quality of drinks that are stored and infused in barrels.
The Alkopribor company offers barrel mastic, which is suitable not only for containers used in winemaking and home brewing.With it, you can grout barrels, salting tubs, bath ladles, all kinds of household items and kitchen utensils, including dishes.
The scope of our company covers not only production, but also restoration of wooden products ... Do not throw away the wooden barrel that has served you faithfully for many years. Bring her to us and we will return her to her previous condition!
Our company guarantees its customers fast and high-quality barrel repair , tubs, jugs, steamers, as well as other cooperage products. We carry out all types of work on the restoration of wood products, including: cleaning the inner surface, painting and replacing hoops, rivets; firing, renewal of the outer surface, coating of products with wax and oil.
Let's say you kept a wooden barrel without liquid for a long time, and it probably cracked up. But this does not mean at all that the time has come to part with her. For our specialists, such a thing is a real trifle! Through simple and short-term manipulations, we will bring it into working order, thereby saving not only your time, but also money.
Order the repair of wooden products at the best price!
Finally, an oak tub with a lemon or laurel tree will not spoil the interior of even a city apartment even today. Just do not find these simple products either in the store or on the market. But you can do it yourself, and although this task is not an easy one, the amateur master is quite capable of handling it. We will tell you more about the manufacture of these containers necessary in the household.
First of all, you need to choose wood. For storing honey, oak and pine are unsuitable - in an oak barrel, honey darkens, and in a pine barrel it smells of resin. Here you need linden, aspen, plane trees. Poplar, willow, alder will also come down. But for salting, pickling or soaking, there is nothing better than oak - such a barrel will serve for more than a decade. For other needs, you can use black poplar, beech, spruce, fir, pine, cedar, larch and even birch.
The following table will help you determine the size.
Note that here are the dimensions of the barrels in order to choose the size for the tub, the height and diameter of the head remains the same. The diameter in the bunch of the barrel (diameter in the center) for the tub goes into the diameter of the bottom.
When the size is chosen, you need to proceed to the blanks of the riveting, the main component of the barrel.
There is another way to determine the size. The ratio of the diameter to the height of the tub or barrel should be in the proportion, for example, 350: 490 mm (Fig. 1-6). By increasing or decreasing the height, the diameter of the container is changed. The number of rivets for a barrel or tub is calculated using the formula 2 * Pi * R / W, where R is the radius of the tub in the lower section (for a barrel - in the middle); “Pi” is a constant equal to 3.14; W - riveting width at the bottom of the tub (for a barrel - in the middle).
Usually, the lower part of the trunk of old trees goes for riveting, it is called the “riveter”. But a lover of tinkering and from ordinary firewood will choose blanks, and the thin trunk will adapt to the case. The best way to make rivets is 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 block, in order to ultimately obtain blanks 5-10 cm wide (for a sweet clover - 15 cm) and 2.5-3 cm thick. You just need to try to split went radially - this will protect the riveting from cracking in the future.
Punched workpieces are dried in a room with natural ventilation for at least a month. A dryer can be used to speed up the process.The dried workpiece is processed with a plow or scherhebel and a plane.
Take a plank with a width of 30 to 100 mm, draw a line along the outside, dividing the riveting in half in width (for a barrel - and in length). For the taper of the tub (barrel), it is necessary to maintain the taper of the riveting. It should be around 8 °. This means that with the riveting width at the bottom of the tub (for a barrel - in the middle) 100 mm, at the top it should be 8 mm narrower, i.e. 92 mm. And for the barrel at the top and bottom - 92 mm. Fix the set riveting width with points and connect 4 points with lines - for the tub and 6 points - for the barrel. These are the riveting guidelines that determine the taper. The plane of the segment of the radius on the template, its direction to the center, together with the already defined slope of the future skeleton of the barrel or tub, is the main requirement for the riveting to adhere to one another when cutting. Therefore, it is necessary to more often apply the template to the riveted rivets, checking the correctness of the planing.
They plan the riveting with a plane, adjusting each in thickness, and immediately determine which side will be the outside. To do this, the left and right sides of the rivets are filled in length. A scherhebel with an oval base and a piece of iron is planed according to a template (Fig. 5), the inner side is clean and a line is drawn with a pencil dividing the rivet in half along its length. Then the rivets are cut along the length with a hacksaw and the dividing line is brought out to the ends. With a half-jointer (jointer), the outer and sides of the riveting are completely cleaned, the correctness of the planing is checked with a template. It is made along the radius of the assembly hoop for the tub, and for the barrel - along the radius of the umbilical hoop made in advance. For a barrel with two bottoms, two pairs of hoops are harvested - 2 persistent and 2 umbilical. The umbilical hoop should pass freely through the stop band.
Especially carefully check the correctness of the sharpness of the sides of the riveting for the barrel. The template should fit snugly against the lateral and outer sides of the rivet, especially at the center line dividing the rivet in half along its length. When planing the sides, deviations from the line extended to the end and dividing the rivet in half must not be allowed.
Barrel hoops are made of wood or steel. Wooden ones are not so strong, and the hassle is a hundred times more, so it is better to use steel ones. Hot-rolled steel strip with a thickness of 1.6-2.0 mm and a width of 30-50 mm is used for the hoops.
Having measured the barrel at the point where the hoop is stretched, add to this size double the width of the strip. With hammer blows, we bend the workpiece into a ring, punch or drill holes and put rivets from soft steel wire with a diameter of 4-5 mm. One inner edge of the hoop must be expanded by hitting the pointed end of a hammer on a solid steel stand.
The assembly hoop is made midway between the top and bottom of the barrel and a slightly smaller diameter along the midline for the barrel. On a clean wooden base, place the assembly hoop vertically and put 5-6 rivets inside it with the outer side to the hoop. On the left, one of the rivets and the hoop are clamped with a clamp. Raise the hoop slightly and unfold the rest of the rivets. Clamp the hoop. The tight fit of the rivets along the entire length (for the tub) and up to the midline (for the barrel) is the result of careful cutting and fitting. We assemble the skeleton for the barrel in the same way, but here we remove the assembly hoop after inserting the umbilical hoop, then fill the persistent hoop. If it is packed tightly, it means that we planed correctly and correctly selected the last rivet in width.
The skeleton for the barrel from the middle or slightly above diverges fan-shaped to its bottom. Various methods and devices are used to tighten the loose end of the frame. The end of a steel stranded cable with a diameter of 6-8 mm is fixed to a fixed support. The second end is thrown onto a hot, steamed loose frame, put on the protrusion of a pillar from the ground, dug in for this purpose, or a raised part of the log and using the "stranglehold" method, with the help of a strong stake inserted into a loop at the end of the cable, "twist" the frame and put on umbilical, and then persistent hoops.
After assembly, the skeleton is checked for horizontal and vertical alignment, and all the hoops are finally upset. From the inside of the frame (barrels or tubs) the sag is cleaned, and at the ends the rivets are cut by 1/3 of the thickness (Fig. 6) and by 2-3 mm from the outside.The outer and inner sides of the frame are finally cleaned, the upper and lower ends are filled.
For this, several operations are performed.
1. Cutting the chime groove in the skeleton. Let's cut the chime groove. The spreading width of the teeth of a steel nail file is 4-5 mm. Therefore, the width of the chime groove to be cut should be 4-5 mm. The nail file protrudes from the submerged block of the chime by 4-5 mm. Therefore, the depth of the chime groove cannot be different. The thickness of the chime block is the limiter of the chime cutting distance from the top of the frame to the bottom of the plank on which the block is fixed, i.e. 40-50 mm. It is imperative to remove chamfers of 2-3 mm or a little more on both sides of the chime groove in order to prevent the riveting of the frame from chipping when inserting the bottoms and compressing them with hoops.
2. Assembly of bottom shields ... They are collected on wooden or metal (preferably stainless) studs-nails from 4-6 planks. The extreme ones are called shoals, the middle ones are called grasses. Planks that are wider are taken on the jambs. We do not yet know the chime diameter of the circle. We take a compass (Fig. 4) and spread its legs approximately by the radius of the assumed circle along the chime, insert the tip of the leg of the compass into the chime, divide the circle into 6 parts. Thus, we will determine the radius of the circle for the chimes for the bottom. We transfer the resulting radius to the bottom shield and draw a circle.
3. Sawing out the bottoms. With a bow saw or a circular hacksaw, cut out the required bottom. In this case, the cut should be on the inner side of the line drawn by the circle when the saw teeth are set 2-2.5 mm. This will reduce the diameter of the circle by 0.14 constant "Pi".
4. Processing of the bottoms. We put the bottom circle on the workbench, sharpen it cleanly on both sides, draw a line 3-4 mm thick on the end with a pencil in the middle. With a radius 25-30 mm smaller than the bottom, draw circles on its two sides. These are the chamfering boundaries. We remove the chamfers with a chisel or a plane and make sure that the chime groove and the chamfered bottom fit well. Leave the line at the end of the bottom intact.
5. Installing the bottoms. This is the final operation for making a barrel or tub. We turn over the frame of the tub with its wide part upwards and slightly knock down the lower hoop. We knock down the stubborn one at the barrel, and displace the umbilical hoop so that the bottom fits into the chime groove. A nylon thread tying the bottom crosswise will help to keep the bottom in a horizontal position when installed in the chimes. When the bottom is installed in the chimes, the thread is pulled, the hoops are put in place. Before installing the second bottom in the barrel of the barrel, two tongue-and-groove holes are drilled in it opposite each other and 4-5 cm from the inner side of the frame with a diameter of 20-25 mm, into which the tongue is placed so that no debris gets into the barrel. After installing the second bottom, the hoops are finally filled and make sure that the bottoms are crimped with rivets in the chimes, and the rivets do not have gaps between them. If the rivets were planed correctly and withstood the slope according to the template, the bottoms were carefully cut out, the product will be of high quality.
1. Before assembling the frame for a barrel or tub, the clean-cut riveting must be dried to 17-20% moisture content.
2. Soak oak, spruce, pine, aspen barrels and tubs for at least 10 days, changing the water after 2-3 days. At the same time, jambs and planks are soaked, with which the fermented products are pressed.
3. To reduce the formation of mold on the rivets, the tubs are wiped with a swab dipped in calcined vegetable oil during storage in the cellar. The doorposts, planks and the pressure stone are washed once a week with hot water.
First of all, it depends on the operating conditions. But it is important to remember that you should not paint the filling containers with oil paint: it clogs the pores, which contributes to rotting wood. It is desirable to paint the hoops - they will not rust. For decorative purposes, the barrel, flower tub can be treated with mordants.
Slaked lime mixed with 25% ammonia solution gives oak brown color.A black solution of ferrous sulfate or an infusion of iron filings in vinegar for 5-6 days.
A decoction of fragrant woodruff rhizomes (Asperula odo-rata) stains linden and aspen red. Red-brown color gives a decoction of onion peel, brown - decoction of walnut fertilizers. These dyes are both brighter than chemical ones and more stable.
It must also be remembered that wood is better preserved under a constant humidity regime. Therefore, dry goods should always be kept dry, and bulk goods filled with liquid. Both must not be placed directly on the ground. It is better to put a brick or a plank under the barrel than to get rid of the rot later by cutting the chimes.
Video (click to play).
But no matter how much the hand-made barrel may serve, all this time it will be a pleasant reminder to the owner of the difficulties overcome in comprehending the secrets of the ancient craft of the cooper.
