I had all sorts of fancy collar plans for my keezer, but they were holding me back, so I decided to make a simple 2x6 collar.
It's not easy finding a 2x6 that doesn't look like Truckasaurus chewed on it, but I found two that were barely acceptable, and I cut them to length yesterday and ripped the edges off so I would have clean ones. I bought my first Kreg jig to put them together.
Originally, I planned to get oak, which comes in 3/4" actual thickness here. I was going to make a frame big enough to slide over the keezer, and I was going to attach strips inside it to rest on the keezer upper surface. Then I was going to put some kind of foam behind it.
I realized it was going to be a pain to try to do a good job of that with my limited woodworking skills, and I also concluded that collar insulation is not really needed, and that's when I went with 2x6's.
Last night, I had an idea, and I wondered if other people had tried it. Making a 2x6 frame is fairly easy, but unless you are unusually blessed, you won't be able to find pretty 2x6's, and you will have to live with the dings and knots. You can always use a planer and jointer to try to fix the imperfections, but they don't like knots and you might make your collar thinner than you want. Making an all-hardwood frame would be difficult.
My idea is to make the 2x6 frame, get it the way I want it, and then GLUE hardwood to the outside of it. It will cover the joint between wood and keezer, there will be no fasteners to make it look bad, and it will be a whole lot easier than playing around with squares and gluing mitered joints. I would still miter the joints, but after that, I could just slap the oak onto the pine and clamp it in place instead of coming up with a complicated rig to clamp oak all by itself.
A glue joint should be stronger than screws, so I think this ought to work.
It's not easy finding a 2x6 that doesn't look like Truckasaurus chewed on it, but I found two that were barely acceptable, and I cut them to length yesterday and ripped the edges off so I would have clean ones. I bought my first Kreg jig to put them together.
Originally, I planned to get oak, which comes in 3/4" actual thickness here. I was going to make a frame big enough to slide over the keezer, and I was going to attach strips inside it to rest on the keezer upper surface. Then I was going to put some kind of foam behind it.
I realized it was going to be a pain to try to do a good job of that with my limited woodworking skills, and I also concluded that collar insulation is not really needed, and that's when I went with 2x6's.
Last night, I had an idea, and I wondered if other people had tried it. Making a 2x6 frame is fairly easy, but unless you are unusually blessed, you won't be able to find pretty 2x6's, and you will have to live with the dings and knots. You can always use a planer and jointer to try to fix the imperfections, but they don't like knots and you might make your collar thinner than you want. Making an all-hardwood frame would be difficult.
My idea is to make the 2x6 frame, get it the way I want it, and then GLUE hardwood to the outside of it. It will cover the joint between wood and keezer, there will be no fasteners to make it look bad, and it will be a whole lot easier than playing around with squares and gluing mitered joints. I would still miter the joints, but after that, I could just slap the oak onto the pine and clamp it in place instead of coming up with a complicated rig to clamp oak all by itself.
A glue joint should be stronger than screws, so I think this ought to work.
