Festival Bar Mk I
I was lucky enough to end 2021 at a camping music festival surrounded by friends. As the shit-show that has been the pandemic lurched from one catastrophe to the next, I was too distracted trying to find that sweet spot between not being cooked alive by the sun and ensuring my thirst for beer was quenched to really notice.
It was also meant to be my mate Tony’s birthday celebration and he was talking about having some cocktails and a bar. And like a starters gun, my mind was off, thinking about how I could make a bar to bring that would not only look good, but endure the hardships of a camping festival. That meant it had to handle a stream of drunken strangers stumbling their way through campsites like human pinballs, bouncing from one object to the next until they find somewhere to strike out.
Like most of my designs, this bar is iteration numero uno. I had about half a day to finish the drawings and cut the timber before end of year shutdown.
Design Criteria
Packs down for easy transportation
Wheels to transport the bar from the car to the camp site and back
Ability to adjust the level of the bar on uneven terrain
Canopy to provide shade from the brutal summer sun
Non-porous surfaces that can be easily cleaned
Simple assembly requiring few tools
Robust enough to handle wind and human pinballs alike
Check out the video below to see how it all turned out ↓
I’m actually chuffed with how this turned out. Two days on a steep hill with decent winds and whilst I saw other tents and gazebos succumb to the wind, the bar did not. Sadly not shown in this video is the music activated LEDs in an arc over the disco ball.
As you might have noticed on the close up panning toward the end of the video, the wheels look precarious at best. In truth they barely held on as you can see in the video below where the bar was essentially dragged over the rutted gravel road. Wheels are at the top of the list of upgrades for Mk II.
