DIY Wood and Fiberglass Jockey Box

This is a custom jockey box we built. The wood is Tiger Maple and then we used rigid foam insulation (2 layers thick to insulate walls. We covered with fiberglass and resin to seal for water. We carved our logo on both the front and back side, painted the carved area and then used stain to add the color. A lot of sanding and a few coats of poly later we had this . It has four taps now but has the spacing to add 4 more for a total of 8. I will probably add the additional tap handles before next summer.

Very well done!

Wow. Very well done. Whats the weight of it?

Very nice and I noticed this is your first post. welcome to the club

Nice job with the fiberglass, I've done a couple projects with it and it isn't easy to make it look that good!. What is the metal box all the lines are running into/out of? I assume it is a chiller/heat exchanger of some sort, but I haven't seen one that looks like that.

The block is a plate chiller. It has 4 X 12' coils in it that will allow it to cool 4 beers. While not as effective as a long stainless steel coil they will coil a room temp beer to serving temperature pretty easily. When in use you fill the cooler full of ice and it chills the block. The first time we used it we had very little ice melting.

The fiberglass was a pain in the butt. I have done a lot of woodworking and fiberglass was a whole new game. It was my first time doing it and most of the time on the project was working on that.

The block alone weighs quite a bit. The whole thing has got to be over 50lbs (guessing). It takes two people to move, mostly because of size.

Great Work!

We added 4 more taps to the box this summer for a total of 8

That thing is SWEET! Did you hand carve the logos and the tap handles? I'd be interested to hear more about the process.

AWESOME!!! That thing is just plain beautiful

Adding a whole new level of CRAFTsmanship to CRAFT brewing! Kudos!

Nice!

How can I make tap handles like this ?

Yeah that is unbelievable! Also interested in how you did the tap handles.

The tap handles are fairly straight forward. They are just really nice blocks of wood cut to proper dimensions. You can buy different screws or bolts to make them accept a standard faucet. We then carve them using a dremel tool and paint the letters with acrylic paint. A little poly and sanding and you are done. We added our logo using a rubber stamp we had made. You have to do this after a few coats of poly so that wood is not permeable.


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wow, so beautiful, did you make it?:fro:

My brother and I made it. Has gotten a lot of use.


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Have any pics of the beer-in ports?

Let me look around. I probably only have a few of us serving from it.


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What is the silver item at the bottom connecting the hoses? Most Jockey Boxes I've seen use coils. I like how this one is compact. Did it get the beer cool enough?

saltygrain said:

What is the silver item at the bottom connecting the hoses? Most Jockey Boxes I've seen use coils. I like how this one is compact. Did it get the beer cool enough?

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It looks like a 4 pass cold plate. You can get them from 1 pass to 8 (or more?). Once you go past 2 taps, the stainless steel tubing starts getting expensive and space consuming. The aluminum cold plate has stainless steel lines running through it (approx. 12'-18' per pass).

I built a 3 tap jockey box around a 6 pass cold plate. I'm doubling up the passes so that each beer goes through the plate twice before it's dispensed. The party I'm building it for is next week so I'm anxious to see how well it performs, but from all my research is should be just as good as coils.

Yes they are cold plates. As pointe out space ad cost became an issue with wanting to serve 8 beers. It works well keeping beer coming out cold. Normally I pre chill kegs as a precaution but even out in heat for hours the beer still comes out nice and cold.


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I built a 4tap jockey box for my wedding. I put two 4 product cold plates in and doubled them up so that the beer went through both plates for each tap. It worked great. Kegs were around 70-75° and the beer came out the perfect temperature. I ran 5/16 id line into the plates and 3/16 id line from the last cold plate into the faucet. Served at 10psi. I am going to build a 4 tap box like this one with the same guts from the igloo cooler I just made. I like the wood look alot more!