A cooper's chest houses many of the tools Ken takes with him when he attends shows and gives demonstrations at schools and museums.
"It's a seagoing chest from the early 1800s," he says. "Every sailing ship had a cooper or two on board to make containers needed on the ship."
Ken prides himself on using his tools the old fashioned way.
Cooper's tools are almost entirely about cutting, shaving, shaping and smoothing wood. That means they have to be kept sharp. One of Ken's tool sharpeners is mounted on a treadle-drive lathe from a blacksmith shop in York County, Perm. It was made by Altland, and dates to between 1820 and 1840. Constructed from cast iron and heavy wooden beams (which Ken thinks are probably chestnut), the mechanism is driven by a heavy, leather belt.
"There's no such thing as a dull blade," he says. "They must all be sharp. I can't control something that's dull. Someone once said that if you drop a tool from the bench, never catch it. It will take your fingers off on the way down."
Ken also uses a treadle lathe for woodworking. Rope-driven, it was made from cast iron by Eagle in the 1880s. He made his own shaving horse based on models that go back more than 300 years. The shaving horse is used to hold wood strips in place as the cooper shapes them with a drawknife in the first steps of barrel construction.
"I made this horse from seven woods," he says. "There's maple, elm, oak, ash, walnut, pine and locust."
The cooper sits on the shaver bench, with the stave held in place by a pedal-operated jaw that leaves both hands free to manipulate the drawknife. This process establishes the exact curve and thickness of the stave in relation to the proposed barrel or other container. Standard measurements for barrel staves include a firkin, which is 21 inches, and a kilderkin, which is 25 inches. The most common wood used for barrel-making in the eastern U.S. is white oak.
Ken says that finding cooper's tools from the past is becoming harder as time goes by.