Thomas Burrow

Tap Handle (2015)

My pledge brother Caleb Jones and I designed a beer tap handle to replace a stock one. The model was created mostly in Onshape (with some help from SolidWorks), then 3D printed with a Formlabs 1+. Pictures of final parts coming soon!

Assembly

LED strips and a microcontroller fit inside the hollow tap handle, held by a support part (yellow in the default picture). Small integrated "bubble" diffusers spread the light evenly through the handle.

The triangular surface pattern may look simple, but the model took several iterations to get right. Originally, the triangle pattern didn't scale with the diameter of the handle. As this diameter grew and tapered, the pattern started to interfere with adjacent patterns and created lots of unwanted features. The sketch was redone to scale the triangle width with the tap diameter, which looks a lot better. The triangle extrusion is merged with the base handle rotation with a combine (boolean) operation.

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