Beer Tap Handles

Darren Wright

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Springfield, Missouri
I did some beer tap handles on the printer the other night. The ends have thread printed in them, they screwed right onto the taps. They have a slot in the top to insert a business card sized card to swap out for the different beers.

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I'm planning to reprint these and swap the text color when it reaches those layers.
 
Looking good, definitely getting some use out of that 3d printer, but thinking your gonna go broke buying all that plastic...lol....boys and their toys...the only thing that changes when we become men, is better more expensive toys...lol...my shop is living proof of that...
 
Well i am sorry but i must be getting old. While i love tech and 3D printing, i have to say beer tap handle should be off limits for plastic

Beer is a natural product i feel it should have natural tap handles made of carved wood with natural character, not petro carbons. 😀

Nice job of the part printing though sorry i am so old school.
 
I'll bet 95% of the beer taps you see out in the wild are mass produced out of plastic in one way or another.

I printed mine out of the wooden filament. IT does give it a decent feel though.
 
Well i am sorry but i must be getting old. While i love tech and 3D printing, i have to say beer tap handle should be off limits for plastic

Beer is a natural product i feel it should have natural tap handles made of carved wood with natural character, not petro carbons. 

Nice job of the part printing though sorry i am so old school.

Well, Rob, there's this viewpoint from plasticseurope.org:
Plastics are derived from organic products. The materials used in the production of plastics are natural products such as cellulose, coal, natural gas, salt and, of course, crude oil.

And this link.

:)
 
Thanks for all the kind comments. They are just temporary as I haven't gotten around to turning any from wood yet.

Neat - so question - how hard would it be to print those around a metal insert?
It would be in the position they are printed in, laying flat, they would require a bunch of supports to print them upright

Correct me if I'm wrong Darren, but do those have threads already printed in?
Correct, threads are printed in them

"The ends have thread printed in them".. so yes... but I was thinking more in higher use or not-the-maker use cases I wouldn't be as trusting of plastic threads..
You may be surprised, though for heavier use I'd say try printing them in PETG vs PLA.

Well i am sorry but i must be getting old. While i love tech and 3D printing, i have to say beer tap handle should be off limits for plastic

Beer is a natural product i feel it should have natural tap handles made of carved wood with natural character, not petro carbons. 

Nice job of the part printing though sorry i am so old school.
I do agree with you, these are temporary (hopefully), just haven't gotten to doing any and saw these to print.

One could print the handle with an opening for a threaded insert that could be inserted after printing.
That would be a good idea.
 
You may be surprised, though for heavier use I'd say try printing them in PETG vs PLA.

I would be a bit surprised if any tap handle survived some of the ham handling I've seen ;) Certainly for reasonable home use even PLA is likely okily dokily but I have little faith in the reasonableness of usage in other situations.

It would seem that upright would also be hard because of the heating and cooling/contraction issues as well - at least with these small heated bed machines.

Now Leo just needs to show us how easy these would be to do on the big CNC :D
 
For heavy usage, I'd probaby print it with a metal support running up the center with a ferrule and a hanger bolt in the bottom.
 
For heavy usage, I'd probaby print it with a metal support running up the center with a ferrule and a hanger bolt in the bottom.

Aha! Is this a challenge? Design a handle with three levels. Print level 1 with a notch down the center, pause printing. Lay in the support, resume printing. Print a layer to enclose the support, pause. Change filament, print top layer with lettering.

Interesting project!
 
You could do that, but you could also just print it with a hole already in it to accept the tube, that you could epoxy in, and epoxy the hanger bolt into the support tube. I've done some testing with multi color prints and I've used the same technique I used for embedding magnets. Worked pretty well actually.
TNWP.jpg
 
You could do that, but you could also just print it with a hole already in it to accept the tube, that you could epoxy in, and epoxy the hanger bolt into the support tube. I've done some testing with multi color prints and I've used the same technique I used for embedding magnets. Worked pretty well actually.

I'm not sure I'd bother with an actual hanger bolt, just a regular bolt would work fine in this case as you don't actually need to screw it into the material...
 
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