Beer Bottle Opener

I was buying some low profile bench dogs and something else I don’t recall from Rockler’s website and I needed to spend a little extra for free shipping so I ordered their bottle opener kit. I plan to give this to a good friend of mine who is really into all those indie beers that don’t come with the screw off top so I thought he’d like this.

Normally I have more pictures of the construction but I was going through my silent phase because of the cutting board video project.

It’s made from 3 peices of white oak, and 2 peices of walnut. I glued them together and turned the handle on my lathe. I really like how it turned out, I made a pretty major screw up when drilling the hole for the metal screw top. I had my 1/2’’ and 5/8’’ forsner bits in the wrong place and needless to say the hole I drilled was a too big.

I almost gave up and started over, but I thought I could fill the hole with some 2 part epoxy that I bought to make some clamping cauls. I filled the hole with epoxy and just set the screw based top inside the hole and let the epoxy fully set. After reading the intended instructions (using a drill press and a modified bolt to screw in the threaded rod) this was a whole lot easier and I think will be my attachment method of choice in the future if I make another one.

This is the first time I’ve successfully applied wax onto a project I’ve tried a few times on previous projects but it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. This was mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. After seeing Steve's video on how he rubbed out his lacquer finish I tried the same thing (0000 steel wool + paste wax) and it worked great even though I used wipe on poly for my finish. It’s the smoothest thing I’ve ever made. Steve if you read this thank you, the video was very helpful.

-jeremy

-- Easy to use end grain cutting board designer: http://www.1024studios.com/cuttingboard.html