Please wear safety glasses and protective gear when using power tools; please wear a mask when cutting or sanding.
Tools required
Well, I built my first one with a jigsaw, a router, and an electric drill – nothing else. But cutting all those pieces with just a jigsaw is not something I’d want to go through again. I found a sliding mitresaw made things a lot quicker and easier. Now I’ve got one, I don’t really understand how I went all this time without it…
A small tablesaw is useful for this job, too.
The router is used to make the slots to hold the beer (to stop it moving around) but if you’re not comfortable using a router (and they can be quite tricky) I will be suggesting an alternative.
Timber
The one in the main pictures is made with pine furnitureboard (or timberboard), which works quite well, and looks nice when varnished. Standard 18mm thickness will be best. You could use MDF, which doesn’t really varnish, but could be painted. You could also use Contiboard, though you’ve got the fun of ironing on the edges, which I personally hate doing.
You need two pieces of wood, approx 200cm long by 27cm wide (you’ll find that 27cm is a just a bit longer than the tallest beer you’re likely to put into it). Pine furnitureboard can be found in B&Q at 200cm by 30cm; I personally think that’s a bit wide, but it’s your choice. But you could easily get it trimmed to 27cm. I also found some pine shelving on Amazon which was 1180 x 280mm – four of those would be perfect. The photos in the instructions are using this.
The doors are made from plywood. A sheet 800mm by 400mm or similar will be plenty. For my original design, I used 9mm plywood, but for these instructions I’m using 5mm ply.
Miscellaneous
It’s designed to come to pieces for storage, so it’s fitted together using 6mm x 30mm dowels. It needs exactly 56 – but you’ll drop them, and break one or two, so make sure you’ve got extra!
The doors are hung on little 10mm straight hooks.
Finishing and decoration is up to you – but I’ll talk about that later on.
Now you’ve got your wood, you can move onto BAC – First Cuts