3D Printing

First 3D design: Toaster Oven Foot

First sketch created entirely be me, creating a part that replaced a broken toaster foot, printed on a 3D printer

Mike Hollyman

Oct 4, 2019 • 3 min read

If you read my previous post (How I learned to 3D Print), I finally took the time to learn Fusion 360 as a design tool for creating 3D objects from scratch. This knowledge opened up the world of possibilities for what could be created / fixed / improved with the 3D printer.

One thing around the house that had been broken for a while was a plastic foot for our toaster oven. It had cracked a while back, like your typical person I tried to fix it with super-glue, which lasted for a little while before breaking again.

To me, this piece was the perfect starting place for something I could design and print. It had the following characteristics:

It was small - it would fit in the printer bed
It was pretty close to being a normal shape without too much manipulation. Mostly a rectangular box.
It had a challenge of holes for the screw, which would be fun to tackle
The color black would fit perfectly with the existing feet

The only tools I needed to get started were:

One of the original feet from the toaster oven
My calipers (seriously, this set is great from Amazon)
Some paper for notes

I sketched up the rough dimensions of the part, then used the caliper to measure them out as precisely as I could. I wasn't too concerned about the sloping angle of the original piece, something more of a rectangle would be fine and functional, but I did end up playing around with that a bit to make it look a little more "decorative."

Here are my original design notes I took:

Once I had the basic dimensions sketched up, it was off to Fusion 360 to see if I could translate this into a design.

I ended up with a final 3D design that looked like this:

I had to do one test print in order to get the right location for the little notch underneath the foot where it attaches to the toaster oven. Until the first one was printed, I had a hard time determining the exact offset from the other foot.

I have uploaded my STL file to Thingiverse.

Overall, I am quite pleased with the results and surprised at how quickly I was able to learn the tool and create this sketch for a real, working object.

Here is the final output for comparison:

Original Foot on the Left, new Foot on the Right

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