If you're looking for a cool way to add some of your own personality to your bar, common area, or man cave, this idea will definitely do it. Today I'm going to show you how to easily create your own beer cap table top.

Materials

Beer Caps (it's pretty important to make sure you'll have enough before you start)

Tile Glue

Clear Coat epoxy/resin

A nice table top

Tools

Trowel for the tile glue

The Prep

The first step is finding a table top to use for this. You'll want something pretty solid that'll last. If you go for a rounded table, then it'll probably be best to use some siding to create a hexagon since circles don't come out all that well with the bottle caps. The next thing that you need to have is naturally, the bottle caps. Personally, I'm not even a beer drinker, so this is my biggest challenge, but whenever I throw a party, I just tell everyone to save their caps.

Luckily I was able to find an old side table at my parents in their shed. I'd recommend checking out good will stores or if it's still warm enough, yard sales. The one good thing about these is, they can have scratched up abused surfaces since you're going to redo them.

Check the layout

I would recommend laying all the caps out first to make sure they'll cover your table top, and you can get a feeling for how it'll look. If you have a square table, I'd stagger them in diagnols. Otherwise that gap between them will be extremely noticable.

Something else you might run into... I had a table with the flat top surface that didn't have an indent that was perfect for the caps... go figure right? Well this is pretty easy to solve. So to your locak hardware store and pick up some 1/4 round. The caps are approximately 1/4" high, so the height will fit them just perfect. As you can see in the pics below, this is a great fit.

Start the glue

This is easy to do, but it can get messy. I'd recommend keeping kids and pets away from this stuff, if it gets on them, it'll likely get on everything. Give yourself a decent spread. It doesn't have to be super thick, just enough to hold down the caps.

I'm sure some of you are wondering why we're spreading this stuff. There's two parts to it. First, the clear coat resin won't pour in like water. It's self leveling, but you will still need to spread it, and that makes it really easy to kick up the caps. The second reason is, these caps will be trapping air in them, so even if you managed to pour the clear coat perfectly as to not disturb the caps, there's still a chance they'll float upward, and poke through the clear coat, thus making the table bumpy and exposing the cap, which we're trying to protect.

Place your caps

This is an easy step, but take your time. once they have that glue on them, it's a pain to clean them off, so if you drop them incorrectly, just lift it out and use another one. You might also consider tracing a guide into the glue to make sure you're keeping a straight pattern. If you're doing a large table, that'd be a a real dissapointment to spend an hour placing your caps just to realize you were slowly building in a rotation to the left. As you can see above in the picture of the glue, I did a straight line against each wall of the table. This was intentional so I could watch that I was laying the caps in straight lines.

Once you finish, let the caps dry into place over night. You'll want this to dry in a calm area where it won't get pet hair in it or caps won't be bumped out of place. Anything that happens to it at this point can't easily be undone.

It's time to apply the clear coat

I was about to head up to a hardware store and buy just about any clear coat resin until I did a bit of research. I wanted to make sure I was purchasing something that looked like it'd be pretty resistent to stratching and yellowing over time. Depending on where you're planning to place this, you might want to check the same stuff out. I went with an epoxy called Kleer Kote that had pretty solid reviews.

Before we pour, make sure your table is level. The epoxy is self leveling. It'll pour out like super cold syrup, but it will level out while it dries, and you don't want it to level out into something noticably off.

I'd also recommend doing a test run. I wanted to know what I was really getting into, just how self leveling this was, ect. I mixed up probably a little over two ounces and just poured it onto some wood I had laying around. I wanted to see how quick it would dry, just how self leveling it really is, and how easy it'd be to spread. The first time I did this, I didn't mix it very thoroughly and it still a week later remains sticky. I did a second test run of about two ounces and it dried solid over night.

Time to get serious

I mixed this about one red solo cup at a time. I wasn't sure just how much I've be using in all honesty so in exact measurements, this took me about three red solo cups worth of mix. I poured it pretty slowly. I wanted it to go on as smoothly as possible so that it wouldn't create any bubbles. One thing that did happen was, air bubbles did appear spurratically. This seems unavoidable, when they did appear I just took something to smooth them out. This mixture is self leveling, but it moves pretty slowly. My best advice is take a solid amount of time to mix it, pour slowly, and if there are any bubbles, just smooth them out. If you pour a little too much you can relax to a small degree, it'll layer up on itself before going over an edge as well. I poured this late in the night, and by the next morning it was perfectly dry.

Now that it's finished, if you look really closely you can see small indents where it looks like the different thicknesses of the resin dried at different speeds and created slightly different thicknesses, but you can hardly feel it. You can hardly see the clear coat in any of the pictures, which I suppose is a decent statement to how effective it is. The bonus is, in person it really makes the caps shine and stand out. So now that it's all finished, all that's left is to kick back and enjoy it.