Tap handles - and a cutting question

Ryan Mooney

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Working on a pub tap handle design. The final ones will have the lettering blacked in (probably laser cut, no I'm not getting a laser :rolleyes: yet), for testing I have been just quickly cutting out the letters with a V chisel to get a feel for how they fill the space.

I'm using those dreadful brass insert jobbies in the bottom for attaching to the tap (sigh, what the customer wants..), it fits with the design anyway I guess.
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Below is the cut plan. Basically taking a 1"x2"x8" and cutting three bevels on it, one off of either side and then shaving the front back so it tapers away from you.

I've been currently cutting the square blank, adding the insert (more wood == less likely to crack). Then I cut the two side tapers on the bandsaw and clean them up with a hand plane and finally cut the front-back taper and hand plane it smooth.

This clearly isn't the most efficient method of cutting this shape out..

So I'll throw it out to the rest of y'all - how would you cut these out? No idea to crazy.
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I think a band saw is probably best. I don't like that on a SCMS - the pieces are just too thin and long. Same with table saw. I would feel good on the band saw.

On CNC, I would need a jig of some sort and it would be a little cumbersome. Still it would need to be sanded.

I would walk up to the band saw with that.

NOW - the text would be CNC. I could get that real easy and it would be real nice. Could even add some
embelishment there.

I think the brass inserts are a great idea. I might want to epoxy those in place.
 
Not a huge fan of the brass inserts. I prefer the tap handle hangers with a ferrule. It just seems to give things a more 'finished' look if you ask me.

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What I would do to cut the tapers would be to have a jig on a sliding crosscut jig. Use a hold down and it should make pretty quick work without a lot of clean up.
 
Maybe a combination if the ideas above, cut the edge tapers on a taper jig, and the face taper on the BS. Probably cut the edge tapers first (?). It would be interesting to hear how you go about it.
 
Couldn't you do multiples on a CNC? Set it up so that the outline and taper get cut shy of half way through the board, then flip, index and repeat leaving an eighth of an inch of the outline holding the piece in the center of the wood to saw off on the bandsaw? Seems like you could do many at a time.
 
Couldn't you do multiples on a CNC? Set it up so that the outline and taper get cut shy of half way through the board, then flip, index and repeat leaving an eighth of an inch of the outline holding the piece in the center of the wood to saw off on the bandsaw? Seems like you could do many at a time.

Yes, do it on your cnc Ryan! :D :lurk: (waiting on the new toy thread now)
 
I should note I'm not alone in the design decision land here... so... the lathe is out, partially its not practical for me to make enough of them identical enough (aka insufficient turning skills) and partially its a requirement to be able to prominently display the logo and the beer style in a clean and reproducible way which either needs a much wider handle top or the longer flat front face like these provide. I'm also trying to make the design simple enough that they can quickly outsource it to someone else RSN which imposed a certain "simplicity" limitation :D

Ted, Darren, you will not lead me into temptation :rofl:

At this point I'm thinking of a fixed design single purpose variant of Glenns table saw taper jig (one for the side tapers and one for the front taper - actually just one jig with two fixtures) will probably yield the quickest return for the least effort as the number of units has unfortunately increased somewhat into the 30ish range. I think I can use just one jig for the side tapers and align it on the center points (I can use the tap bolt hole in the bottom as a positive reference point into a tapered stud for that end the same as Glenns centering pin which gets me one side anyway..).

The bandsaw isn't leaving quite as clean of a cut as I'd like on the rip cuts, its close but still taking a bit more cleanup than I'm entirely happy with having to do time wise. Its likely be if I went with a sturdier jig setup instead of just manually sliding them along a tapered board they'd be a bit better but I'm hoping the table saw will get me even less cleanup (the main risk there is that some of the maple I'm using is prone to burning in spots if you look at it cross eyed so in that regard the bandsaw may actually be better). I wasn't jigging up very heavily to start with until I'd reached some consensus with the other party on the design.

I'll have to see how comfortable it looks doing the face taper on the ts with a jig.. that may move back to the bs just because, although I think if I put the insert in first I can use that as part of this jigs alignment/holding mechanism as well which should make it fairly robust..

The advantage of a fixed jig is if I need to do more I can just pull it down from storage (actually I'll probably make them store it, they have more room than me .. heh) and I don't have to worry about getting the setup aligned right again, its just drop and go. I'm telling them that they need to work with someone with more capacity.. but planning on the situation where they don't...

Personally I'm with Brent on the inserts both from an aesthetic and reliability standpoint, but as noted above... customer says what the customer says... I'm mitigating the reliability problem somewhat by leaving a fair bit of wood around the base - the base is 1 1/8" square (ideally.. I'm slipping to 1"x1.128" due to stock thickness limitations on some of them) which leaves about 0.25" on all sides. Not as robust as the hanger bolt and ferrule, but hopefully good enough. This set is modeled very loosely on another local breweries handles (theirs are imho clunkier looking) that has been successfully used for 5+ years and I've kept the base dimensions fairly close to theirs so.. :crossed:

The carving actually goes pretty fast, I can do one every ~5 minutes or so for the simple lettering we're doing here.

I have an additional problem of trying to paint the letters black gloss without bleed into the surrounding wood (and considering my lack of fine painting skills.. likely sanding back the over paint.. sigh) so I'm playing with various things to seal the wood to avoid bleed into the surrounding wood now. Currently its looking like enamel paint over water borne poly of some sort is the likely winner, but I'm certainly open to ideas and suggestions on this to (here's where a laser engraver would be REAL handy).
 
the lathe is out, partially its not practical for me to make enough of them identical enough (aka insufficient turning skills) and partially its a requirement to be able to prominently display the logo and the beer style in a clean and reproducible way which either needs a much wider handle top or the longer flat front face like these provide

Will agree that exact multiple replications of something on a lathe is difficult. At least for me. That is what duplicating lathes are made for and I don't have one. However, perzact/exactness is not required the lathe can be a great way to go. Just my tuppence. When I made the handles for my son I 'discovered' stick on chalkboard at Hobby Lobby. I made one board for three 'boards' for him. But an alternative I considered was to use small magnets at the top of the handle and make the chalk boards separately. That way they can be taken off and revised for new brews and put back on easily.
 
I wonder if you put some adhesive backed stencil material on the handle, then carved, then painted, similar to how a CNC sign might be made?
 
I wonder if you put some adhesive backed stencil material on the handle, then carved, then painted, similar to how a CNC sign might be made?

I've been carving through a paper template, stuck down with 3M 45 spray adhesive (which nicely peals off once done). Definitely not quite good enough to just freehand the shape.. yet.. That's not the problem, the problem is bleed from the paint into the sides of the carving especially where it goes across end grain. The maple especially shows any hint of bleed pretty vividly. We'll see tonight how the various samples I sealed yesterday paint up..

We're looking at just using clear print-on labels for the beer types... or some other sort of peal off sticker... In this case where its going out to a bunch of outside bars having something that the brewery can control is somewhat important otherwise you know it'll get messed up along the way.

I actually also made the chalk boards for the brewering out of chalk board paint, which has (a week in...) been working really well. We wanted to have a traditional green chalkboard color and the commercial paint wasn't quite it so I just mixed my own. We'll see how well it holds up over time.
 
My current tap handles are pretty simple (and ugly). Just cherry with the undesirable :D threaded inserts. I painted them with chalkboard paint. Unfortunately, my handwriting is horrible, and I find the chalk just comes off too easy.

This is what I'm planning on making...

I'm going to use the cnc to cut out the shape, and to have a little pocket on it to hold a printed card with the beer info. On the front will be a thin piece of clear poly carbonate to keep the card in place.

I should probably put some kind of logo on the bottom part though. Hmmm... Have to think about that.

And I will be using the hangar bolt/ferrule on these :rofl:

taphandle.jpg
 

I would try to formalize the design around the label insert a little more. Especially at the top although imho the squareness clashes with the curves/angles and the bottom corners of it are to close to the edges. Right now it feels a bit like you've cut off the top without accounting for the insert, sort of like it was designed square and then the top was unceremoniously lopped off (and as much as I'd like to do that to some co-workers, I have deeper sympathies with the tap handles...).

I think you could get away with a thinner overlap on the join between the polycarb and the background as well.. You could actually make that a zero visible overlap by dovetailing the polycarb in place .. hmm yeah that would look a lot better. The CNC should be able to whip that dovetail in place no problem right? :D

Not shown but presumably implied is some transition between the squarer profile of the handle and the round ferrule?


The first pass I made at these handles I had a compound angle on the sides creating a square section at the top that then angled down to the bottom starting about 2" down. That felt a bit heavy so I lopped off the top corners. At that point I had achieved a classic "looks exactly like a coffin" look... not good! :rofl: After that I simplified it back to what you see here.
 
I would try to formalize the design around the label insert a little more. Especially at the top although imho the squareness clashes with the curves/angles and the bottom corners of it are to close to the edges. Right now it feels a bit like you've cut off the top without accounting for the insert, sort of like it was designed square and then the top was unceremoniously lopped off (and as much as I'd like to do that to some co-workers, I have deeper sympathies with the tap handles...).
Not sure I'm following on the 'formalize'?

I do need to do something. Not sure I like the rectangle in the curves look, but was kind of doing that for ease of making little printed cards to fit in the slot.

2 options I guess.

Make the handle more square, or make the slot more curved.

I'll play around with it.


I think you could get away with a thinner overlap on the join between the polycarb and the background as well.. You could actually make that a zero visible overlap by dovetailing the polycarb in place .. hmm yeah that would look a lot better. The CNC should be able to whip that dovetail in place no problem right? :D

Definitely going for a thinner overlap, but dovetailing would prove to be a challenge.

Not shown but presumably implied is some transition between the squarer profile of the handle and the round ferrule?

I was thinking I would just shave that down to round by hand as part of the finishing process.
 
How about this?

I'm going to close off the top and add a little channel in the back. So I'll cut the card to size and have a plexi cover that is a 'press fit' into the channel. When it's time to change, I can pop out the card and the plexi and replace it with a new one.

I'll use the plexi as a template for creating and cutting out the cards.

taphandle.jpg
 
I like that a lot better. The open top was bothering me :D

You may want to try putting some representation of the rounding on there, I think in order to get a smooth transition you'll be getting close to impinging on the Compound part but I'm not sure... its somewhat past my mental visualization capabilities.

You may also want to put a bit of a roundover on the rest of the handle, probably 1/8" or so would do to ease the edges and that also gives you a natural curve to ease into the bottom from.
 
Ok, So consider these to be prototypes. Probably the kind of prototypes I'll use for a while...

But still a lot better than what was there before...
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