Custom beer tap handles

[TimS124]

My wife's side of the family keeps the cost of Christmas reasonable by drawing one name each from amongst the adults. Beats the heck out of buying (and especially shipping) the dozen-ish gifts we'd otherwise be doing for various in-laws!

This year, I drew one of my brother-in-laws' name. He's a tough one because he pretty much has everything he needs and almost no hobbies. He's done a bit of home-brewing...and a couple years ago, he modified the fridge in his garage to house a couple mini-kegs, each with their own tap sticking out of the fridge door.

So, I whipped up a couple of custom tap handles to replace the generic plastic ones that came with his tap kit. It's a fairly simple shape in a nice piece of Philippine Mahogany (which was cheaper than Cherry or Maple at a local supplier and looked much nicer as well). I cut them on a small CNC router (ShopBot Desktop).

They're finished with a few coats of dewaxed shellac (it's all I had time to let dry before having to ship it cross-country).

The taps screw on via a 3/8"=16 threaded insert which is fairly easy to track down (though the ones I found at a local big-box store were really cheap...ended up getting much better quality ones from Woodcraft).

 

[thewishman]

That looks like the perfect gift. The engraving puts them over the top.

 

[TimS124]

Thanks! Last year, a buddy made a "Ken's Brewery" sign for him and I started out trying to imitate that...but just didn't have the room and didn't have the same fonts handy. So, I dropped the first one to just "Ken's" and a nice fancy font...but the word "Also" on the second tap looked terrible in that font. So I changed the font on the second one to something completely different which produced a bit of a cool effect (and using the second font for the one that only says, "Ken's" was too dull). Fortunately, his sense of humor is almost as warped as mine so the difference works just fine. Definitely not a "normal" design choice. :biggrin:

The lettering ended up getting 4 or 5 coats of Testors paint with a very tiny brush and a big magnifying glass. Next one of these I do will have to be done more efficiently! But, I'm pretty pleased with the results!