Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Homebrew Home Improvement Part 1

As mentioned before in an earlier blog entry I had a to do list. After checking off #1 of brewing more beer I decided to tackle #2, install a false bottom in my kegerator. Doing this would allow for me to store up to 4 kegs in the fridge and still leave room for bottle storage. Some of you may be asking, "Why install a new bottom, mine has a shelf?". This is a good question. If I had kept the stock shelf in the fridge it would have cracked under the weight of 4 loaded kegs.

Saturday proved to be a great day. The weather was perfect so I headed out to Lowe's to pick up a 2x4 and a sheet of plywood. Once all the supplies were picked up I set to installing the false bottom. The main issue with this design was the bottom of the fridge. If you ever remove the bottom shelf of a fridge you will notice that towards the rear, the bottom rises up at a 45 degree angle. This makes it very hard to make a flat surface for the kegs. The solution was to cut the plywood to fit the inside of the fridge and make legs out of the 2x4s. See picture below for sketch of project.
This sounded easy enough and for the most part it was. Plywood was easy to cut and place into fridge. The two sets of long legs worked fine and seemed to be the correct measurement. The issue came when installing the shorter set of legs. The first attempt resulted in one leg too short and the other one perfect. When I went to recut another leg the battery on the saw died. After waiting another 30 minutes there was enough juice to finish the cut and attach the leg. After sliding the base back in, the keg sat in the fridge nicely. Best part? Under the base there is enough room to store bottles.



With this task scratched off my list all I need is three new corny kegs and the equipment to hook them up and install them. But that is for part II, till then, Prost!

No comments:

Post a Comment