BBQ Salad Fork Adapter Tongs With Fusion360(Updated)

In this Instructable I will show you how I made these very useful Tong fork adapters for BBQ's or Serving Salads etc.

This is not my idea, I saw the Tongs online but no reference to the original designer and no reference to what software was used to design the tong adapter.

Rather than just print the adapter I decided to have a go at designing it myself using Fusion360.

I will be using Black PLA for Prototyping and then hopefully using a Translucent Green PetG Filament for the Final print, I've never used PetG before so it could be interesting.

Update: The print with the Translucent Green PetG turned out very well for the first attempt, some stringing was going on but I'd read about that in the forums, a bit of de-nibbing and all was well.

Update: Printed a different version to accept round handle wooden spoons, proper salad shovels, the el cheapo spoons were purchased online by a well known vendor.

Updated 11.07.2021 Photos of Tea Bag Squeezer added.

1.75 PLA

1.75 PetG

Fusion360

3D Printer.

2 x Forks

In this section we start off by creating a new sketch in Fusion360, you can save the project at this point but I seldom save any projects.

Select the Top plane and sketch a 25mm Centre Circle, from the centre of the circle sketch a line @ 80mm and 155 Degrees, then offset this line by 3mm and close the end with a line.

Now sketch a line through the centre of the circle, we use this line when we mirror the arm of the tongs creating our opposite side of the Tongs.

We then create a rectangle at the end of the tong, In the end I made this 25mm .

Using the line through the circle, create a mirror of the Tong arm using the centre plane.

Using the Trim tool, trim the unwanted lines as in the photo, we are now ready to extrude the sketch.

We can now extrude the sketch, in this case its 20mm.

The next job is to create a rectangle for the fork in the end of the protrusion of the arm, this rectangle needs to be flush with the inside of the tong arm as in the photo, (In the initial sketch we sketched off planes, from now on we are using faces to sketch from and planes to mirror the extruded component), In this case the rectangle is 12mm x 2mm this rectangle can now be extruded fully, leaving a slot for the fork.

We will now create another rectangle to the rear of the slot, this rectangle will then be extruded to 5/6mm and a line at an angle sketched on the top face of the extrusion, the outer part can be extruded leaving a wedge to secure the fork(Not on the original), mirror both the slot and the wedge using the middle plane.

We can now add fillets to the Tongs to finish them off.

We can now 3D Print the Fork Tongs adapter.

We can now go to the Make section of Fusion360 and 3D print the adapter.

Select 3D print from the drop down box and click on the component to highlight it, in my set up it opens up in Cura.

20% Infill and no support needed using the black PLA turned out a nice component, now its time to see if PetG has the same if not better result.

I printed a couple of prototypes with PLA made a couple of tweaks etc, to be truthful the PLA prints are pretty good, plenty of spring when pushing the tongs together etc.

Its a really cool idea whoever came up with it, I used it cooking some chicken nuggets for dinner, and used them to get them off the grill, (spoons could be used as well, or a fork and a spoon:)), In this case the fork dimensions are approx 10/11mm x 1.75mm there is play but using the wedge idea alleviates most of that.

The Translucent PetG unfortunately never arrived at the time of listing but I will update soonest with the outcome.

I hope you enjoyed this Instructable and hopefully learned something using Fusion360

Thanks for Looking.