Inspired by the Henchmen Pub, I decided to add optics to my bar. I kept seeing these for sale from UK miniature shops and had to look up the word “optic” because I hadn’t heard it before. They’re dispensers that hold a bottle upside-down and pour a measured amount of liquor. They seem to be more common the UK than the US.

Many years ago, when I first got the idea to make a bar, I bought a batch of cheap bottles on eBay (probably from China) that were not very well scaled. I cut these down to use in the optics.

After cutting off the cap, the bottle *almost* fits.

I then cut off a small slice of the bottom and sanded so it’s a good fit. The optics are made out of pewter and can be bent slightly, but I didn’t want to bend too much and risk breaking them. I colored in some parts with black Sharpie to make them look less like raw metal and more like the pictures I’d seen online. I also replaced the labels with ones I printed.

My shelves are too thin and flimsy for the optics to hang off of them. Instead I built a box to sit under the shelf. This is the same width as the wine rack that goes under the bar, and they will both be centered in the space.

I drilled these holes with the power drill… not very well.

Here’s how they look. It bothered me that the two optics on the right sit slightly higher than the two on the left, due to my messy holes. Rather than prepare a new piece of wood, I forged ahead, thinking I could fix it somehow. (Why do something over when you can deal with it later?!)

After staining the front piece, I glued scraps of wood to the back for the side pieces of the box to attach to. (As you can see from the guide line, the two high holes are actually in the right place, it’s the other two that came out a hair too low.)

Here’s how the assembled box looks, with the wine rack below it.

So remember when I said I didn’t want to bend the pewter too much or it would break? Trying to make an optic sit a little lower in the highest hole, I *gently* tried to tilt the part that sticks into the hole and… yeah.

I tried gluing the broken optic directly to the box, but it didn’t hold. I’d ordered the optics from a site in the UK and wasn’t willing to spend a bunch of money to ship a replacement, so I planned to make a new box that only held three. Then I got the idea to stick eyelets into the holes — not only does it make them look neater, but it gives me a new way to hang up the broken optic.

I’m still kind of amazed this worked. Using super glue and tacky glue, I managed to glue the tiny nub left behind on the back into the eyelet hole.

The gin bottle lost its red stripe in the process, but at least it doesn’t have to be trashed! Because I was too lazy to fix my mistake with the holes, the four optics are not exactly lined up, but everything’s so busy, it’s okay. Ironically they’re too low to actually put a glass underneath, but I was constrained by the height of the shelf.

I’ve also continued to make bottles. After my first batch, I wanted more variety and came up with some new ideas for making Christmas light bottles.

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I’ve been looking at other people’s miniature bars to get ideas and I keep coming back to the Henchmen Pub. (I wish there were more pictures!) I especially like the lighted fridge under the counter, which was made by Elf Miniatures, but my bar has shelving underneath that prevents putting in one of those. Instead I decided to cover up the two fake cabinets under the front side of the bar with printies to make them look like built-in fridges.

I found a picture online of a double fridge that had roughly the same proportions as the cabinet doors, and then manipulated them in Photoshop to make them the correct width and height. I also duplicated the sides and top so they can wrap around the edge of the cabinet door.

After spraying the printie with matte sealer, I cut it out and scored the edges so they’d fold neatly over the edges of the cabinet door. Rather than cutting out the white space at the corners, I left them attached to the top edge to become tabs. The top edge gets glued down first with the white tabs draped over the sides, then the sides get glued down over the tabs, so no wood will be visible where the side and top edges meet.

Here’s how the first one looks. Next to it you can see the cabinet doors that are getting covered up.

Because these are under the front of the bar and not the back like in the Henchmen Pub, they’re almost impossible to see. Looking in through the top of the roombox, you can get a glimpse of them in the mirror, but once there’s stuff on the bar I’m not sure if that will still be the case. Maybe next time I’ll realize I’m doing something that can’t be seen *before* I put the work into it. (Not likely.)

Even though they’re nearly impossible to see, I wasn’t happy with them. It looked too much like a printed graphic glued on to cabinet fronts. (Gee, I wonder why?) I decided to add a small border around them to give them a more built-in look.

Here’s a view in the mirror again. That’s a lot of fake wine!

Next I worked on bottles. I already bought a bunch of bottles for the bar, but not nearly enough. They’re expensive — the best prices I’ve been able to find online are $3 for a finished bottle or about $2 for a blank bottle that I can add my own graphic to. I’m planning to put bottles on both of the long shelves along the back of the bar, and maybe also under the long shelves, on the bar itself. (The short shelves on the side of the bar will hold glasses.) At about 30 bottles per shelf, it adds up! In the interest of not going broke, I’m going to supplement the “real” bottles with some made out of Christmas lights.

Joann Swanson has a great tutorial for making bottles out of Christmas lights. The lights she used have long necks that really do look like bottles. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to find any like them. Even when the picture on the box looks the same as hers, I’ve opened the box to find they just look like regular Christmas lights, with a pointy end and a ball at the tip.

The closest I’ve ever found to Joann’s lights are these, which I picked up a few years ago at a thrift store.

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