Bottle Cap Table Top

[rsteel02]

Quartney, you are absolutely correct, but whether or not you need to glue down the bottle caps depends on what you want to do.  For my bar, I wanted to grout between the caps to add a black background for contrast.  I glued the caps down to prevent them from moving around as I applied the grout.

No matter how you want to make your bar top, it's a good idea to make a prototype or two to get familiar with how the epoxy works and to work all the kinks out of the process.  For example, I found that if I stirred the epoxy too long, it accumulated so many tiny bubbles that it wound up looking cloudy as seen in this picture.



I used cheap wooden trays from the craft supply store.  You can see some of them here:

http://s616.photobucket.com/albums/tt244/rsteel02/caps%20to%20trade/bar%20top%20prototypes/

[quartney]

definitely don't stir longer than 3 minutes.  You could have painted the background black, too ...

[Chunk]

I haven't seen any recent posts on here.. but what the heck I finished my project. This bar is 9 feet long and 3 feet deep at one point. I really need to count them all. Painted bottom black first. Glued them all down (glue gun - yes it was no fun). did 3 pours of the envirotex lite that i was able to pick up at menards (took 3 gallons).
Totally worth it. loved by all. did a lot of ebay digging to get as many unique caps as possible. No matter where you sit at the bar, you won't see the same cap twice! HUA. I really need to count how many caps it took.

Great.. The site won't let me post the pics here. I am too new. Ridiculous. Well, sorry folks but instead of giving you the pics here, you'll have to follow links. I hope it take you to the gallery.

http://www.craftster.org/pictures/showphoto.php?photo=340403&ppuser=211809
http://www.craftster.org/pictures/showphoto.php?photo=340401&ppuser=211809
http://www.craftster.org/pictures/showphoto.php?photo=340402&ppuser=211809
http://www.craftster.org/pictures/showphoto.php?photo=340399&ppuser=211809
http://www.craftster.org/pictures/showphoto.php?photo=340400&ppuser=211809

[Spifftastic]

That looks amazing as a bar top...my husband would LOVE this!

[thetmaxx]

I will be constructing an 8'x2' bar top soon using bamboo as the sides, running epoxy right up to the sides of the bamboo. Will post pictures once I get going. Should be very unique.

[jimmynumberz]

Thanks so much for posting your detailed plans.  I built a phillies and eagles bar based on your instructions.  Will post photos as soon as I reach 10 posts.  Here is a link to a website I made with my experience building the bar:
http://www.mirasphillybottlecapbar.webs.com/

Ok guys and gals, so I just tackled a bottle cap table project without ANY knowledge of what I was doing.  I just kind of had an idea in my head, that I wanted to make a beer pong table out of the about 3000 bottle caps I had collected in my three years at college.  So I took the caps, came up with a design, and it turned out AMAZING.  Anyway I figured I could pass on the knowledge I found to those trying to tackle the same project.  So here goes:

1st Step:
Figure out what you wanna make (this is assuming you have enough caps to do so).  In my case I wanted to make a beer pong table out of the caps, and I had a ballpark figure for the measurements in my head. I wanted the table to be about 8 feet long and about 3 feet wide.  But you have to remember that you need to build the structure to the size of the bottler caps in order for them to fit in the space nicely.  So I measured a bunch of bottle caps to get their average width and came up with most of them to be about 1 and 1/16th of an inch.  So next I took my measurement of 8 feet, and turned it into inches, 96 and divided it by the cap measurement of 1 1/16 " and came up with 90.35 caps stacked side by side to make that length.  Obviously you don't want .35 of a cap on the end so you can either round up or down to the next whole cap for your measurement.  I rounded down to 90 caps and then re multiplied that 90 caps times their width of 1 1/16" and came up with 95 5/8" total length.  By the same process on the width I took 3 feet, turned it into 26 inches, divided that by 1 1/16", coming up with 33.88 caps.  I round up here to 34 caps wide, and multiplied by 1 1/16th to get a width of 36 1/8" wide.  Now obviously not EVERY cap is exactly 1 1/16th wide at the bottom, so I added about a extra 1/4" to each measurement to make sure they all fit, if you wanna try to be exact here go ahead, but if you some up too small you simply won't fit a cap and could be a whole inch off.  Now to figure out how many caps you need just take your length 90, times your width, 34 to get a total of 3060 caps needed for my table.

Step 2
Now that you have the table dimensions set, all you need to do it build a table.  I made a simple 2x6 frame in the dimensions I needed then measured just about 1/2" down from the top of the frame to where the top of my recessed table top would start.  In order to make the recess I used 1x2 furring strips screwed into the frame all at a depth of 1/2" from the top of the frame.  This creates a lip on which you can set your plywood table bottom to achieve the right recess depth for the caps to sit in.  Here is how I figured out at what height the strips had to be attached.  Each cap was about 1/8" tall, and I wanted to make sure my epoxy covered the caps well, so I added another 1/8" to that for a total of 1/4".  Now the plywood I used was 1/4" thick plywood so you had to take that thickness into account to, so i cam up with a height of 1/2" from the rim to attach the strips.  After attaching the strips at the same depth all the way around, I cut my plywood panel and then set it on top of the lip and screwed it down.  After the table top is assembled you need to use caulk to go around the inside edge of the recessed top, as well as the seams where the 2x6 frame meets to insure the epoxy has no where to leak out when you pour it.  After this is down, paint the entire frame and top, I chose black so the caps would stand out more, and start to lay out your design.

Step 3
I chose to spray paint some of my caps to make the middle design stand out better so you could easily read the words "Penn State" but depending on what you wanna do, you don't have to follow the same design.  Following some of the advice of this thread, after I laid out my pattern and was 100% sure it was what I wanted, I began to glue down the caps.  I used a couple cans of 3M Spray Adhesive that you can get a Lowe's or Home Depot and layered it on thick, then filling in my space, stuck the caps to the plywood.  Almost all of my caps stuck, any that didn't stick I went back with some super glue and fixed them before pouring. 

[jimmynumberz]

I built this bar based mostly on the post by mattchu09, which was very helpful.  I am a Penn State fan, but I didn't want to copy his design, so I decided to go with my 2 favorite teams - The Phillies and Eagles.  If you are interested in seeing a detailed narrative of how I constructed my bar, please see the little website I set up: http://www.mirasphillybottlecapbar.webs.com/.  Feel free to send me any questions.

[urban_albino]

I haven't seen any recent posts on here.. but what the heck I finished my project. This bar is 9 feet long and 3 feet deep at one point. I really need to count them all. Painted bottom black first. Glued them all down (glue gun - yes it was no fun). did 3 pours of the envirotex lite that i was able to pick up at menards (took 3 gallons).
Totally worth it. loved by all. did a lot of ebay digging to get as many unique caps as possible. No matter where you sit at the bar, you won't see the same cap twice! HUA. I really need to count how many caps it took.

Amazing!!! That is truly awesome!  That is a pretty cool space you have - I'll bet its a lot of fun to hang out down there. =)