I’ve never actually seen wooden barrel hoops, but making them out of thin strips sounds like a recipe for failure - they have to be able to keep all the staves constrained.
Splitting wood along the grain doesn’t require a great deal of force, especially if it’s a straight grained piece like you’d get from a sapling.
In the post above yours I mentioned that some wooden barrel hoops were made from inch thick material. A 1/4 inch strip of green long grained wood would be very flexible and strong. Simple hoops like that were probably limited to small barrels. The heavier wooden hoops were also bound with twine impregnated with tar.
This stuff is pretty interesting, and if I’m not careful I’m going to end up with a set of cooper’s tools that I won’t be using.
Looking at a few examples of barrels with wooden hoops, it looks like this tool would indeed be used to split sapling or coppiced staves into three parts, then the inner (pointed) edge shaved flat - probably with a drawknife or spokeshave - that way, the outer surface of the hoop would be the newest growth layer - resilient and resistant to splitting.
If green timber was used, it may have been possible to form the hoops without any heat or steam. In some examples I found, it looked like multiple thin hoops were used instead of a few big ones - and they were whittled down at the ends and sort of knotted around the barrel staves like withies.
On the point about ruining mallets, I guess it’s possible that they were just considered a consumable item - especially if you’re working with wood anyway.
i have seen such wooden hoops on a wooden bucket. The joints I saw were made without fasteners. One end had a longish slot, and the other end had shoulders cut leaving an approximately spade shaped tongue on the end. By twisting the hoop out of plane, the tongue could be passed through the slot, but when around the barrel, the ends locked together. I have seen similar functiong fastenings on belt buckles and jewelry findings.
Not necessarily old. There is a current eBay listing for a page from a 1913 H. G. Lipscomb & Company catalog listing a “Cooper’s Three-Way Splitter” in cast-iron for $10/dozen.
That one actually closely resembles the OP’s find. Without some markings on the actual tool it may be difficult to determine the origin of any particular tool.
By 1913 those tools were probably being mass produced and wouldn’t have the value of something much older. But almost any pre WWII is a valued collectible. And in 1913, the last generation of coopers may have been at work. I saw one note that there were at least 50,000 coopers in the US in the late 1800’s. The number must have dropped rapidly from that point.
I want the bomb distributor.
Note to Homeland Security - just kidding 