Simple Stave Assembly

I'm working on a project that calls for what's called Stave Assembly. What that's all about, you can see right here, individual components called staves, all glued together to make this barrel shape such that the liner will fit right in there. You can get these liners from woodworking specialty stores. If you wanna make one of these for yourself, what it is when it's all done as a wine bottle cooler, what I wanna talk about is a really easy way to glue these staves together. It can be tempting to take all eight of them, get glue on them, try to wrap them in a band clamp. Couple of problems with that one is that when you're working with that many pieces, it's just playing difficult to work with that many pieces. The other thing you can run into is that we should have cut each of these at a perfect 22 and a half degrees. If you're off by just a tiny bit on each cut, when we try to put these into a circle, it ain't gonna happen because your angles are off. So instead, we wanna do this in small steps. I've got one done already. You can kind of see where this is going, we're gonna do a half at a time. Now a couple of things are coming out of this one is that we wanna use the right technique. We also wanna make sure you use the right adhesive because this is a wine bottle cooler what's gonna happen is we're gonna expose this project to water and ice and maybe a little bit of wine. So we want to make sure that it's gonna stay together. I chose for that to go with a water proof, not a water resistant glue, just to make sure there's no chance at all, that those seams are gonna open up over time. So I've got four more staves to go. The other half of my project, and the way to do this is to use this pretty high highfalutin clamping technique called masking tape. So a strap a masking tape across this end. Same thing here. And what I'm doing is I'm holding the long point to long point and making sure that those stay nice and closed. Carefully flip that over, and then to assemble this, we'll get glue in each scene, close it up like that bridge across the top, really easy way to put this together. So we're ready for glue. Once this is closed, we need another piece of masking tape on hand to bridge across the valley. And you can just see from the squeeze out, how they put pressure on that with this piece of tape, it's doing a great job of pulling those seams closed. I'm gonna do one more check here just to make sure everything is okay. And that's looking at the outside, I wanna make sure we're still closed up out here. And I could see that when I did this, put a little bit of pressure there, they closed a little bit more, I wanna make sure we don't have any gaps. So I'm gonna add one more piece of tape, keeping that down pressure on it while I do it. Same thing on this end, that takes care of that glow. Now here's where this is gonna go once the glue is dry, take the tape off using a little bit of spray adhesive, put some sandpaper down on a piece of scrap plywood and then sand this half on that plywood with the sandpaper on it. Same thing to this half, what you're doing is guaranteeing that these edges are perfectly in playing with each other. Your test is to take this half, put it up against this half. And these two seams should close when they do your sanding is done, you're ready to do your final glue up. You can again use the right glue masking tape, hold everything closed until the glue dries. You'll be ready to move on with your stave project. So this is a great gluing technique, right technique, right adhesive. You're gonna have a project that lasts a really long time and makes a great wine cooler.