Coopering on a perfect summer weekend

Seven students and eight buckets at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. When we taught this class before we only made a couple of buckets in a one day course - on the new extended version everybody gets to make and keep a bucket.

From the slideshow (it's pretty long) you'll see the sequence of operations to make a bucket. We split old growth cedar and sawn sugar pine so that folks could get a real understanding of the differences working with different types of wood. Both types of bucket look great. 

We also added a section in making some of the special tools needed for Coopering - the angle gauge (pretty easy) and the croze (the tool for making the groove the bottom slots into) was more challenging.

This is still one of my favourite courses and I'm going to have to make a cooper's plane (that's the big inverted 5' long plane!).

Pictures by William Zerby and Tim Lawson