Kitchen Bump-bar Mount

grabcad

Bump-bars are an essential piece of equipment in a restaurant kitchen, they're used to control kitchen screens to clear orders and view stats. Generally they are zip-tied to the vertical pieces of square section of the work surfaces or their platforms.My kitchen, however, had no convenient mounting place. Instead, a small plastic self-adhesive hook was stuck to the side of a toaster. This hook had to be replaced weekly. Often the hook would snap or even wear right through, either allowing the expensive bump-bar to drop to the ground or hang precariously on a "stump".When I'm not in the kitchen I'm at university studying Mechanical Engineering and always looking for something to tinker with to improve my skills. My CAD skills were nearly non existent due to being a 1st year student with no prior experience so I decided to hone my skills and accept the challenge to 3D print a solution to this problem.The first step was to take measurements of the proposed mounting site, the vents on the side of this toaster (don't worry, this area stays cool!)Due to being completely unequipped for taking measurements in the kitchen, I had to "MacGuyver" my measurements.First I traced around the bump-bar to get the general shape for my mount.Next I needed to measure the holes in the side of the toaster. I found that the "flags" we used to poke into steaks in order to label their "cookedness" we're perfectly half of the width of the slanted vents.Using this information, I squared up a photo I took of the vents on the toaster and then scaled it accordingly using my vent measurements. I then placed the image behind my initial design to sort of "trace" where the hooks should go.As you can see, it's much more sturdy than the original solution and should prevent the bump-bar from falling and breaking. It's easy to remove when the work surface needs to be rolled away to be cleaned under.The benefit of 3D printing this design is that the hooks can be reworked to fit any location or object should the kitchen be rearranged. This also allows anyone else who uses similar bump-bars to create their own using my "hookless" STP file.