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
Ted, Darren, you will not lead me into temptation
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..
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).