Tuesday 14 January 2014

Home Built Keg Chiller / Dispenser

With the many events and festivals we and through us the Kraken's Arms attend, the need has come about for a better way to serve our fine beverages. We looked at chiller plates and magic boxes, but in the end decided that a portable keg cooler designed to hold and dispense 3 kegs at once was where we wanted to go.

After a fruitless month of searching we decided to build one using 50mm thick cool room material, this has a layer of polystyrene foam between sheets of colour bond steel.

The first job was to mark out on the sheet all the required pieces and then cut them to size. We then needed to rebate the joints to allow the outer skin to be covered by the jointing alloy angle.

Next we put together the walls, using "blind " pot rivets to join the angle to the walls using plenty of silicon on each joint. The base was then added and a "U" channel used on the top lip to cover the exposed polystyrene.







The outer joints were also covered with angle and a piece of plywood was screwed to the base for better weight distribution. ( when full with 3
kegs and ice there would be an  approx. 80 - 100kg load ) Wheels were then fixed to the plywood for better mobility.










The lid also had the edges covered with the "U" channel and was attached with hinges. Lay flat D handles were bolted to each side, a piece of rubber was glued to the top edge to work with a foam strip on the lid as the seal and an elastic loop was fitted as a closure.

Finally the 3 taps were drilled and fitted. You will notice that the middle tap is set to one side, this is because the kegs fit in in a "V" formation rather than a straight line, this kept the unit slightly more compact and allowed us to make it out of one sheet of material.





Apologies for the photo quality.

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