Tap Handles
The Background#
Something I haven’t yet started writing much about is the fact that I’m a homebrewer. I’ve been brewing beer — mostly successfully — since 2007. Okay, tangent-time (I haven’t thought about this in a long time, but here we go).
I suppose the whole story starts on the road trip I took with my twin brother Steve after I graduated from college in 2006. After driving from Northern Illinois to Texas to see our family down in Houston, we drove all the way out to Oregon to visit with our Aunt and Uncle in Reedsport, OR. On the way, we dropped by our mutual friend Cameron’s place in Portland, and while we were there, we stopped by the one and only Powell’s World of Books. While we were there, someone mentioned the fact that they had a completely separate “technical” bookstore around the corner (which Wikipedia informs me closed in 2014).
Powell’s Technical Books, before it closed in 2014
As a recently-matriculated Computer Science graduate, I was eager to find out what the heck a Technical bookstore was, and greeting me on the top of a display right after we entered the building was a softcover copy of John Palmer’s How To Brew (looks like Mr. Palmer hasn’t updated his web presence in a while, but that site is the full text of the first edition of the book, which is what I bought in Portland back in 2006). I’m reasonably sure that’s the only thing I left with (side note: we bought tons of stuff at Powell’s around the corner, most notably Bruce Campbell’s memoir: If Chins Could Kill, with readings of which Steve and I entertained each other for the majority of our remaining time on the road), and I immediately became fascinated with the process Mr. Palmer described.
It took me maybe a year to actually get to the point of buying a small set of brewing equipment (every homebrewer remembers their first Ale Pail), and I’m honestly still a bit surprised that I managed to push through and brew a second time after how poorly my first batch turned out. But after Ev and I moved into our first house in Cortland, IL, I got back into it — and in typical Lorence fashion, quickly went pretty overboard.
The Kegerator#
Fast-forward however many years, and I’ve got a reasonably well-appointed microbrewery (call it a nanobrewery, I suppose) in my garage. And because I’ve long since given up on bottling all my beer, one of the most important bits of my current setup is the beer fridge (or “kegerator” if you’re as much of a fan of portmanteaus as I am. A portfanteau, if you will.
Holy crap, I can’t believe I found this picture. And what an apropos shirt Steve was wearing, too
The Kegerator itself is just a scratch-and-dent chest freezer upon which we (“we” in this case is me and my brother Steve, who helped me put this thing together back in 2018) placed a custom-made, insulated “collar”, through which we inserted 4 beer taps.
I clearly hadn’t yet developed my irrational hatred of exposed plywood endgrain here
This thing has worked incredibly well over the last several years. It’s definitely one of those things that proves to be just as amazing as you think it probably will be when you think about doing it. Having several varieties of fresh beer literally on tap, maybe a 15-second trip from wherever you are in the house… Yeah. It’s not exactly a good thing. But it’s great.
The Tap Handles#
Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun designing and creating small projects in my woodshop (I haven’t written up any of them yet, but hopefully I’ll share more here soon), and one thing I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time is a making a set of hardwood tap handles for my kegerator. Considering I (I know, “we”, I gave you credit already Steve, get off my case!) built this whole collar, I figure a couple tap handles shouldn’t be too hard, right?
To add to the interest in this particular project at this particular time, I recently (finally) opened, assembled, and read the instructions for my fun new MICRODIAL tapering jig, so the prospect of cranking out a few tastefully-tapered tap handles seemed like just the thing.
Hard to do action shots with only two hands
I’ve found myself using my Japanese-style pull-saw for cross-cutting more often than not lately. Without going too far into woodworking jargon hell, basically there are two different types of cuts when you’re trying to make something smaller out of a bigger piece of wood:
- Crosscut (across the grain)
- Ripping (with the grain)
Tablesaws, although they can be used for everything, are more typically set up for ripping. Perhaps more to the point: my tablesaw is typically set up for ripping, and if I only have to do one initial crosscut (say, like in this case, where I have one long board that I’m cutting a smaller chunk off of), I find it just as easy to use my handsaw to do that cut, rather than going through the effort of getting my crosscut sled out, and probably changing blades on my tablesaw.
This is probably also the time to mention that I’m one of a very (seemingly) small minority of power-tool woodworkers who doesn’t own a miter (or “chop”) saw — the preferred tool for this kind of thing in many shops.
At this point, I quickly split my piece into four smaller chunks of equal size on my tablesaw. The exact height and width on these guys was just eyeball’d — as I actually spend more time creating things, I’ve started to better realize the spots where spending the effort to get exact dimensions really matters, and when it’s just a waste of time. Or, in the immortal words of Scott Wadsworth, The Essential Craftsman, “If it looks good, it is good.”
As I mentioned earlier, this is the first time I got to use my new tapering jig, which after spending a bit of time reading the manual (another oddity in which I find myself indulging more often in my advancing years) was honestly a breeze to operate. Using the dial on the bottom, I was able to easily put a 4° angle into both sides of each of my little handles — a total of 8° total. I think they look really nice this way.
You can see in that shot that I also put a taper in the bottom half of the wide faces (the front and back of the final handles). I half think it was an attractive idea, and half think I was just looking for reasons to make more cuts on that tapering jig.
After I cut my final tapers, I cut small chamfers (basically: a very small 45-degree cut to dull the sharp edges) on all my edges, and sanded my handles down to 180-grit. Here’s what they looked like at that point:
Try to remember how these look right now. This is going to come back in a minute.
Now, to actually make these fun little tapered blocks of wood into tap handles, I needed to find a way to thread them onto those taps. Thankfully, that’s a standard thread (3/8" - 16 to be precise), and I was able to find some nice brass, self-tapping inserts to do the job. Unfortunately, they called for a 33/64" drill bit (I know! I can’t believe I didn’t have that, either!), which is 1/64" larger than 1/2". So I figured I’d just use my 1/2" bit and deal with the consequences (the consequences were: they were a bit tight to screw in).
A little creative clamping and we’re ready to drill.
The inserts really went in pretty easily, even with the slightly-too-small hole
When I was doing a test-fitting, however, I noticed that I had made some impressions on the wood from where I clamped them to my drill press’s table, to keep them secure while drilling the holes to hold the threaded inserts. Oh well: a quick pass with my smoothing plane and those would disappear.
The Surprise#
Quick aside. I think of my woodworking talents currently as sitting at the exact level of “just enough knowledge to be dangerous”. Not in the “he’s probably going to be bleeding when he comes out of the shop” way (although… sometimes yes), but in that I have enough grasp of the fundamentals to realize both that I have come a long way since I started, and to know that there is an absolute universe of additional practical knowledge out there.
I’m preambling with this because it was at this point that I had a real learning moment in the shop. I’ve previously heard that when you “sever” a wood fiber, it can leave the finished look of the wood with a more desirable character. I’ve (evidently) mostly worked with species of wood where this effect isn’t incredibly pronounced, but let me tell you — on mahogany, you can really see it. Check out what I found after I took a couple thin shavings off of one tap handle, to get rid of the clamping marks:
I already admitted that I end up bleeding with relative frequency. Don’t focus too hard on that part.
I was shocked at how incredible the difference was between the (very smooth, but in hindsight very dull) finish left by sanding, and the vibrant, 3-dimensional effect left by cutting the fibers with my smoothing plane. I quickly remedied the situation by planing down all remaining surfaces, and was left with four handles that looked like this:
These things look so damned good up close
Here’s a side-by-side shot so you can see exactly what the difference is:
And that’ll officially be the last time I sand mahogany.
Wood burning#
Now that I have my handles in their finished shape, and with the ability to thread onto my beer taps, I wanted to do one more thing to lend a little extra gravity to the presentation. After all: breweries don’t usually have blank handles for their beers, right?
Ev got me a wood-burning kit for Christmas, and it’s a ton of fun to use. I’m not a particularly incredible artist (I described myself recently as having honed my craft to the level of a bored freshman, doodling in their notebook during English class), but I’m not going to let that stop me from giving this a try.
So, after watching a couple of youtube videos (for all the shit youtube gets — deservedly — for facilitating the downfall of modern civilization, it’s incredibly helpful for learning new skills), I drew up my design, cut it out and taped it on over a sheet of carbon transfer paper that was included in my kit.
Then I traced over the design again using the same pencil I drew it with.
I was actually surprised how well the design transferred without too much pressure when I sketched over it.
Then I plugged in my sweet little wood burner and got to work a-tracin'. There are a few different tips included, which are used for different purposes. Lining, shading, etc. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was tattooing the wood — you can’t take back a line after you burn it in.
I already had a lot of respect for artists, and this experience isn’t doing anything to change my opinion on the matter.
After I finished burning my whole design, I finished it with a couple coats of spray lacquer, et voilà:
I should probably have mentioned a while ago, but one beer I always have on tap is my “4th Gear Cream Ale”. Hence the design.
As a happy coincidence, only a few days after I finished this little project, my latest batch of 4th Gear Cream Ale came out of the fermenter and went into my kegs. Unfortunately, now that I have a sweet custom tap handle for one of my brews, the other ones are probably going to be jealous without their own. And equally unfortunately, the fit and finish on the handles is really throwing the general “Greg’s First Woodworking Project” quality of the rest of the kegerator collar into stark contrast. But! Those are problems for another day. For now, I’m going to revel in a job well done (and some really interesting lessons learned).
To anyone who’s managed to make it all the way through here: thanks! I’m trying very hard not to let the impossible perfect be the enemy of the “actually publishing something to the blog”.
Here’s to actually having written something! 🍻
—Greg