Friday, May 11, 2012

Portable Bar for NHC

The SRB guys thought it would be cool to have a decorative cabinet to surround the club jockey box for NHC in Seattle.  Being the sucker I am, I volunteered to take the lead on it and build one.  I had 3 basic goals for the design:  1.  It should look like a miniature bar from the outside, 2. It should be somewhat portable, and 3. It needed to support pouring of beer from the jockey box.  Sounds pretty simple, huh?

My design is a 3-sided frame & panel cabinet with hinges between the panels to allow the cabinet to be quickly broken down for transport and storage.  The front frame has 3 equally spaced panels and each side frame has a single panel.  The front and side panels are connected with a piano hinge in each inside corner.

To save some money, I cut the rail and stile pieces from 5/8" plywood and used 1/4" oak plywood for the panel inserts.  I used off the cap moulding to wrap the insides of the panels to add some detail and dress up the bar a bit.  All of the assembled panels were wrapped in 1" white ash to hide the plywood edges.  The top is also white ash which is segmented into 2 pieces to allow it also to be folded down to capture the sides.  The folded top will have a hook and loop latch installed to keep the sides from opening up during transport.
 
Here's a few photos of the assembled bar without finish applied.  I'm planning to apply a mahogany stain/polyurethane combination finish to give it an old tavern look.  I'll post a few photos of the finished bar when it's done. Cheers!

Front of the Portable Bar

 Back view of the bar with the jockey box installed

View of the folded bar ready for transport.