Tap handles - and a cutting question

Well back at it.

The thing that seemed to work best for sealing the wood that I tried was minwax polycrylic. I tried a few other water based poly's and one oil based. The polycrylic also sanded back of the top nicely letting me over finish with anything else I wanted nicely. Worked well enough I threw a couple of pieces of oak into the mix (running out of other scraps), might take two coats on that.

Not a Glenn worthy jig but it got the job done. May have to revisit this idea for a more complete setup one of these days.

This is my second setup on the jig to cut the wider face off.
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My first pass had the thin edge trailing which is a BAD idea with these short little pieces. Even with my fancy zero clearance insert the cut off wedge fell straight down and into the gap between the zci and the blade. Made a bit of a racket and stalled the saw (3hp!!) until I quickly hit the epo. With the fat edge trailing no real problems.

You'll note the second hold down being used as a back stop. That was the reason I had originally had it setup the other direction, so the registering "pin" (aka bolt) was backing the cut.

Cutting the sides off was about the same and largely uneventful.
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Nothing to complicated on the jig but a few things may be of interest. I didn't have any t track so I just cut slots and relieved the bottom for the register blocks to slide back/forth in (so ours easy to adjust the in/out amount). Obviously that wouldn't work for a jig where you needed a lot of movement, but for something like this where you're only working with a couple of inches it's dandy. The hold downs are just bandsawn 2x2's with a slot cut in the middle for the bolt to go through. I did paint the ends of the hold downs with a little plasti-dip, and once you cranked them down there was no way to budge the piece under them at all. The bottom of the jig has a strip of wood screwed onto it that matches the slot in the sliding table and the whole thing was locked down with the eccentric clamp to the table. This keeps me nicely off to the side and out of the line of fire in case things go sideways.

Now just need to do a mess of carving.
 

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About 1/3 of that batch in use. They actually look pretty OK if you don't look too closely at them ;) At last they're across the bar most places. They're starting to show up around town as well :thumb:

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Well, late as usual. I guess I would have suggested the lathe also with an offset turning so they had a flat side like a hammer handle. Then send to someone with a cnc laser and have them laser a deep groove for the lettering in the handle and then using that same lettering from a contrasting wood or other medium cut out the same lettering so it could be epoxied into the groove. I do like what you came up with and glad to hear all are happy, so like Darren said, "well done sir!!".
 
Thanks all, it was an interesting project.

Jonathan,

There were a few factors against the lathe as per usual its always a set of trade offs :D

First was I needed to bang out ~30~ asap that all look pretty much the same. I don't have quite enough confidence in my turning skills to pull that off (I'm sure I could get them turned.. but not the same) and also even not considering that it would have been a fair bit slower that ~4 cuts per on the table saw[1] which starts eating into the budget which is fairly limited (I'm mostly doing this as a favor for friends.. so trying to be gentle even though its in trade :D).

Second is that one of my primary goals was to make them easily reproducible in at least general appearance by pretty much anyone in the trade. I don't expect (or even want) to be able to fulfill their ongoing requirements which will be in the 100's of handles so having a simple but distinctive pattern that can be sourced to other vendors quickly seemed advantageous. Out of the first batch of 30 less than 10 are unspoken for after a week... and they haven't ramped up distribution yet... So more complex shapes were mostly out.

I believe that future runs will likely have the letters simply laser branded on (unless they become really wed to the carved and painted look for some reason). I considered doing that but the only guy in town with a laser setup is retiring and not taking any new customers (opportunity? maybe - another fellow I know who was using him for laser lettering on a different product has been talking about getting his own setup, of course he talks about a lot of things so who knows). Shipping to Portland again starts eating into the overhead pretty quickly, if I had my own CNC it would of course be a different ball of wax. Based on the expected price point [1] I don't see inlay being doable due to the time overhead of assembly and cleanup plus the CNC time cost, although maybe its a lot easier/cheaper than I'm thinking (CNC folks feel free to educate me otherwise).

Having said that your half round back idea is intriguing as a one-off project. I think in order for it to work with the V shaped handle I'd have to think of the backside as section of a cone and build a jig to hold the wider end substantially off-center. Hmm...


[1] As a aside note of possible interest; based on my admittedly limited market research the going rate for things like this is in the $20-30 range for ~mostly square~ or stock shaped ones (by stock shape I mean turned in bulk in china or similar). I haven't been able to find solid pricing on lettering but I can't see it adding more than maybe $5-10 per unit with something around a $100+- setup charge. Custom turned ones tend to be in the $40-60 depending on the complexity. That's retail price and there is generally a 10-20% discount that kicks in in the 25-50 unit range.
 
I understand your flat design as opposed to lathe turned. But, to permanently engrave on the handle could be a turn-off to potential buyers. There is a huge variety of beers available for home brewers to experiment with. Hobby stores, like Hobby Lobby, carry peel-off/stick-on chalk board labels. A flat area on the handle that corresponds with one of the many shapes available would be much handier. As the brew changes, the label can be changed. And it would be much less work and expense for you. I made a separate placard holder with three labels for my son, another option.
 
I understand your flat design as opposed to lathe turned. But, to permanently engrave on the handle could be a turn-off to potential buyers. There is a huge variety of beers available for home brewers to experiment with. Hobby stores, like Hobby Lobby, carry peel-off/stick-on chalk board labels. A flat area on the handle that corresponds with one of the many shapes available would be much handier. As the brew changes, the label can be changed. And it would be much less work and expense for you. I made a separate placard holder with three labels for my son, another option.

In this case the handles are for a specific brewery so the logo isn't changing and having it permanent is a feature not a bug :D.

The space under the logo on these is for where the beer style sticker will go. Definitely for homebrew or one-offs setups your solution makes a lot more sense.
 
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