As I have mentioned before I picked up about 4 pallets of French & American Oak fonds from a local keg factory that closed down awhile back. The fonds are from 300L hogs head wine barrels so they are about 70cm across and all brand new cooperage seasoned wood.
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The aim all along has been to turn them into Badmotivator style barrels to age spirits in. I've finally had a chance to look at knocking one up as a trial so thought people might like to see the process.
First, I was feeling lazy & since I'll be making a few of these I thought I'd try to make the process as quick & easy as possible so I designed up a quick design in AutoCAD & converted it to gcode to cut out the circles on my CNC router. Once that was sorted I did a quick test cut on a few bits of MDF before testing on the oak for the first time.
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A couple of bits to change on the gcode before cutting out the next head (need to cut deeper & make the diameter a bit smaller for less sanding) but it's useable.
I'm lucky with the fonds being coopered already ready to use in barrels it meant I can skip a heap of steps that would usually be needed. I don't have to plane any of the pieces or join then as they have already been done & have grooves to join together the pieces which should seal wothout further work.
So onto sanding the head down to size. I double checked the angle on the edge of the Bain Marie inserts before I started sanding to check how close the edges were to 90 degrees to the top edge. Best I could measure was the edge being out of 90 by 1mm after about 150mm so because of this I am not worrying about sanding a slight bevel on it as I wouldn't be able to do it accurately enough to make it worth while.
So I made up a jig to be able to sand the circles on my disk sander. It allows me to move the enter of the circle closer or surther away from the disk to reasonably accurately make the circle the correct size. The head started out at 220mm when it came off the router & ended up being about 207mm when finished sanding.
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Almost there, just a little adjustment to the sander needed.
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That's better, that should fit perfectly!
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So that's where I'm up to so far. Tomorrows job is to drill the tap hole & the bung hole. Being that this is a test piece I'm not sure if I will toast or char this head, I still need to work out what I am going to use for that process & how I will control it so it is accurate & repeatable. I also have to work out what I'm going to make the bung out of. Badmotivator ones use a pine bung but I don't like the idea of that so I may end up buying some oak bowel for the bungs (which is quite expensive) or try to turn the offcuts into bungs.
Cheers guys
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