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| Finished Beer Tap Handle |
That is a carved wooden handle for a Beer Tap!
When I first received the commission to carve my first
Beer Tap Handle ever, I did a little “research” into Beer Tap
handles on the Internet. To my surprise, I discovered that there are many people -- “home-brewers” for the most part, I’m
guessing -- who are making, or having made for them, beer tap handles
that are as distinctively personal as the fermented results of their hard work
and patience. I’ve found a little bit of
everything from fancy turned spindles to replicas of handles you’d expect to
see in a 200 year old Irish pub to dragon’s heads to images of drunks and
monks!
This commission came about as sort of a “chance
encounter”…with the emphasis on the “sort of" part. At the dinner following my Son and brand-new
Daughter-in-law’s wedding a few weeks ago I ended up sitting next to…now, give
me a minute to get this right…my wife’s...cousin’s... daughter’s...husband. You
know, one of those really “straight-line” family connections.
“A” (his name, for our purposes here) and I had met a
number of times before. Since he knew I
was into carving our conversation started out with a question from him regarding
(kitchen) knife-sharpening techniques.
One thing led to another and within a few minutes he had his Smart Phone
out and was looking at pictures of carvings on my blog.
A couple of days later he e-mailed me to ask if I would
be interested in a commission to carve a Beer Tap Handle for him. As I intimated above, prior to this time, I
didn’t know that people even did that sort of thing. But we e-mailed back and forth and he soon
came up with a pretty respectable picture of what he was looking for that he had
cleverly cobbled up with bits and pieces from a number of Google Image
pictures. Ain’t Photoshop great!
It took a couple of days for the ideas to gel in my head
but eventually I plunged in. (I
think/hope) I was able to capture his concept of an “open design” with Barley
“Sprigs”/”Stems”/”Stocks” (?) and Hops “Blossums”/”Buds” (?).
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| Roughout with Drilled Holes to begin Carving |
I thought that a nice full head of
foam sliding down over the edge of the glass was a really cool idea. He wanted a design that was as “open” as
possible, i.e., with a lot of “negative space”, so the latent Engineer within
me was very happy about the additional source of rear support it provided for
the Barley. After all, there may be
times when the handle will be pulled “very enthusiastically” and we wouldn’t
want it to snap. :-)
The handle threads onto the end of the tap onto a
standard 3/8-16 threaded stud. At his
suggestion, I found a suitable “T” nut at Home Depot and installed it into the
base of the cutout. The handle has to be
as light as possible – you don’t want it to accidentally flop forward and spill
any “goodies” on the floor -- and can really only be about ¾” thick in order to
clear the front of the refrigerator door and still have room behind it for your
fingers. However, the flange of a 3/8-16
thread “T” nut was slightly over 1” in diameter, so I ground it down until it was
sort of oval in shape. I countersunk it
a bit and to use some “five-minute” epoxy to make sure it stayed put!
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| "T" Nut in the Bottom End |
The carving went pretty well. I found, via Google Images, some very good
photos of both plants. The kernels and
petals on “real” hops and barley plants are very irregular and random. To my surprise, making them irregular was
much more difficult than would have been to keep them in a nice, regular
pattern, particularly, on the nearly round hops. While I think they came out OK, I wasn’t as
pleased as I might have been with the petals where they start to wrap around to
the sides. In addition, right in the
middle of the piece…precisely where the barley and hops come together… there
was either a “bad spot” in the wood or I was asking the Basswood to do
something that it just wasn't willing to do.
As a result, the hops are slightly smaller than they started out to be
(the result of “uncarving” and then
“recarving” them) and are now present only on the front side, because I
just could not get them to “lay” down correctly all the way around to the
back. The outline of the glass got in
the way, as well…so I’ll blame it on that.:-).
Beyond that there is not too much else to tell you. I like the piece and look forward to doing
some other handles to keep the suds flowing.
One for the Bench
The voices in my head may
not be real, but they sometimes have some really good ideas!
‘Til Next time…Keep Makin’
Chips!
