Crafts of the Cooperage #1 – The Shaping of Staves

Fresh from the stave mill, the oak stave wood consists of four-sided, straight-grained pieces with clean edges. Upon arrival at the cooperage—after a minimum of 20 months of open-air seasoning—they are shaped and transformed into staves that form the barrel’s shell. Four successive steps are required to produce a stave ready for use.

The stages of shortening, shaping (dolage), jointing, and hollowing were once performed by hand in cooperages throughout France and Navarre. These are essential steps enabling the cooper to then “raise” the barrel. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie states: “Shaping (doler) is the hardest and most difficult task of the cooper. […] In large workshops, the shaper is held in high regard. […] To work his stave wood, the cooper needs a plane, a compass plane (colombe), a shaving horse, a drawknife (coutre), a mallet (mailloche), and a spokeshave (plane) […] Once these tools are ready and the stave wood is in place, he can begin to work.”

• Shortening consists in cutting all the stave wood pieces to the same length, depending on the type and capacity of the barrel to be made*.
• For shaping (dolage), the cooper places the future stave on a wooden frame called the “guillotine.” Using a flat drawknife, the cooper carves the curved (concave) side of the stave.
• Jointing and “fléchage” come immediately afterward. Fléchage gives the stave its conical shape while respecting the jointing angle. The jointing operation itself consists in smoothing and regularizing the edges of the staves using a compass plane (colombe).
• Hollowing consists in carving out the inner (convex) side of the stave to reduce its thickness, which facilitates the bending process. For this step, the cooper uses a curved drawknife and works on the guillotine.

Today, all these steps are automated thanks to machines that carry out the four operations in a single pass. The raw stave wood enters the machine and emerges as finished staves just a few seconds later. While the machine has, in part, replaced humans in some of the more demanding tasks of cooperage, the eye and the hand—sight and touch—remain the cooper’s greatest allies when it comes to selecting stave wood and sorting the staves.

*The offcuts produced during the shortening stage are used by coopers to fuel the braziers used for toasting and pre-toasting the barrels.

Photos © Christophe Deschanel