DIY Fun: Turning an Old Fridge into a Kegerator

Hey, guess what? Sometimes you don’t have to use tools for tearing apart and rebuilding houses… sometimes you can use them for things that are way more fun, like drinking beer.

Here’s how not to do that:

Nail pullers do not make good impromptu bottle openers, FYI.

A better idea– because you know I risked an upper lip amputation by drinking that anyway, right?– would be to use your tools to take your standard, run of the mill refrigerator, and fit it with a tap for a keg.

I mean, why wouldn’t you want to do this?

Some friends asked if I would bring some tools over to help with this little DIY adventure this weekend, and I was like, “Beer and tools? Um yes. I’m there.” None of us had done a kegerator conversion before, but turns out it was pretty easy. This is how it went down…

They sell these faucets with a long shank specifically for this kind of thing, and all you really need to do is drill a hole through the fridge, and make a nice platform to hold the beer.

There’s all sorts of refridgerant lines that run through the sides and back of a fridge, which makes drilling through the door a lot easier. We removed the shelves in the door by taking out all of the bolts under the gasket on the door.

On this fridge, at least, we were able to remove the shelves and then bolt the gasket back into place without it. The door itself is made of about 1/8″ metal, and 3″ of foam insulation.

A 1″ hole saw on the Makita was the perfect size for the shank of the tap and went through the door with minimal effort.

The only trick was on the back side of the door, the foam wasn’t sturdy enough to hold the handle in place, so I cut a small piece of wood out, and then used a box cutter to carve out some of the insulation so that it would sit flush with the inside of the door.

After that, it was simply a matter of creating a sturdy platform for the keg and CO2 tanks to sit on. The bottom of the fridge sloped up to a little shelf in the back, so we just laid some 2×10 scrap (from building my desk, actually) across the shelf and cut a few “feet” to keep it level.

All hooked up…

And look at this pretty sight:

Works like a charm.

In return for my kegerator-conversion skills, I got a mason jar of some delicious homebrew…

And CUPCAKES made with BEER.

I’m sorry. What just happened? Did I die and go to heaven? Maybe. And was delicious.

But, I mean, if you want to do something less functional with your tools and beer, you could always try this…