Kegerator Part 3: The Tower

Before we could lay any tile (or mount the tower) we had to lay some plywood on top of the unit as the mortar wouldn’t stick as well to metal as it would glue. We found some relatively inexpensive wood at Lowe’s and had it cut to size. In retrospect, I wish we would have chosen a little thicker wood as the one we bought was bowed a bit even after we laid it flat for about 36 hours. I doubt anyone else would notice, but Elise and I can still see a little bit of the bow even after the tile had been laid. 

We then bought some heavy duty glue and glued the wood to the top. Overnight, we laid the tile, boxes, buckets of sanitizer, and pretty much anything heavy we could find on top of the plywood to make sure we got a good seal from the glue before we did anything else.

After 24 hours, it was time to mount the tower. The tower came with 4 screws, but I knew they wouldn’t be long enough to reach clear through the lid, so we bought some 2.5” screws with matching nuts and washers. Our original plan was to have the screws be long enough to mount the washers/nuts on the inside of the lid in the freezer, but once we got down there, it was harder to get everything to line up than we thought. It took some trial and error (and widening of a couple of holes) to get the screws going  where we thought we wanted them to go, but overall we had a hard time getting everything to be flush at the bottom of the screws. We also realized that the inside was plastic and pretty flexible making it less than ideal to mount to. Instead, we just decided to screw the washers/nuts all the way up to just underneath the surface of the lid. This was the thickest and sturdiest point, so it turned out to be much better anchor point than our original plan; not to mention much easier as once the screw was threw the lid, it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t perfectly straight.

We bought a 2.5” hole saw (drill bit) to make a hole through the plywood and lid to run the beer lines through. The tower itself is 3” in diameter with the base at 4.5” wide. We wanted to make the hole for the lines a little smaller than the tower itself just to allow some more contact between the tower and the lid as we weren’t sure how steady it was going to be. It turned out that the 2.5” hole was the perfect fit and a piece of 2” wide by 2” high PVC piping made a nice port for the lines to go through and keep the insulation in the lid where it belonged.

It took about 30-45 minutes to get all of the holes drilled and the tower mounted but once it was up, it was looking good. It felt sturdy enough, but we were hesitant at first to completely open the lid and let the tower “hang,” but the screws and nuts held true. Next we needed to tape off the base prior to tiling and take some measurements to determine where our cuts would be needed to fit the tiling around the tower.