How to Spec a Custom Bar Edge Profile
The edge is the part of a bar that guests touch, lean on, and look at most. It decides whether the bar reads heavy or light across the room and how it feels under a forearm on the third round.
Plenty of bars end up with whatever stock edge the fabricator had. Here’s how to spec one that’s actually yours.
Start with a section, not a rendering
A rendering shows how an edge looks. A section shows how to build it. The most useful thing you can send us is a cross-section through the edge, the slice you’d see if you cut the bar and looked at the end.
A good section shows:
- Overall edge height, top surface to the bottom of the nose.
- Projection, how far the profile sticks out past the face of the bar.
- Every curve, step, and flat, with radii where you have them.
- The underside, including any drip edge or return.
- How it meets the bar below: the face, the cabinet, or the die wall.
A dimensioned pencil sketch, photographed square, is a fine start. We’ll work it up in CAD and send it back for your approval.
A design note: soft radii where the forearm lands go a long way. Save the crisp detail for the parts people look at.
Height and overhang
Give us the finished height you want, and we’ll work back to the cabinet height. A metal top’s build-up isn’t the same as stone or laminate, so don’t assume the cabinet drawing will carry over unchanged.
Common starting points are 42 inches finished for bar height and 36 inches for counter height, with an overhang on the guest side that leaves room for knees and stools. Heights vary by project, so treat those as a starting point, not a rule. Check your local code, and plan for an accessible section where it’s required.
Tell us the stool you’re using, too.
Drink rails
On the service side, the drink rail takes more water and abuse than any other part of a bar. Decide early who supplies it and how it meets the top.
We’ve integrated KegWorks drink rails on two projects. At The Bar by Black Tap at JFK Terminal 8, we worked with KegWorks to bring their stainless rail into our bar so the rail and the zinc top read as one piece. At Uptown Social in Charleston, the drink rail along the service side is also by KegWorks.
For the spec, include the rail’s make and model, its width, where it sits relative to the service edge, and how you want the transition to look.
Basins, cutouts, and trim
Locate every cutout on the plan with dimensions: sinks, ice wells, beer towers, POS stands, anything that goes through the top. Attach the equipment cut sheets.
An edge profile doesn’t have to live only on the front of the bar. At Restaurant François in Austin, designer Janet Henrich of Henrich Design LLC wanted an ornamental profile that could work as basin trim around the bar. The scope was trim only. We started from an egg-and-dart profile we’d designed, adjusted its height to suit the bar, and drew the curved sections in CAD to follow the bar’s radius ends.
Don’t forget the ends and the interruptions: returns, end caps, corners, and flip gates. Show how the profile turns a corner and how it carries across a gate. At Uptown Social, the owners picked a pillowed edge, and we carried it across the flip gate.
Matching an existing profile
Sometimes the edge is already decided. At Black Tap JFK, designer Samantha Goodrich and her team at Richcraft Design had a profile drawn, and we matched it exactly, with no substitutions and no “close enough” trim. Matching an existing bar? Send the drawing and photos of a real sample.
How your drawing becomes metal
Your section goes into CAD. From there we cut the profile tooling on our CNC, so the edge is made for your bar, not borrowed from someone else’s. For the Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, we drew a profile for that bar alone and cut it on our CNC.
We use deposition to apply thin coats of material in a controlled manner to build up the surface, which lets us take on complex curves and custom edge profiles. It goes over a waterproof core instead of wood. Then the piece is sanded and finished in our shop. The result is real zinc, brass, or copper, living metals that will patina in service, carried right around the profile.
What to send us
- A section of the edge in any format. DXF, DWG, and PDF are the most common, and a dimensioned sketch works too.
- A plan with overall dimensions, radii, corners, and seams you’d like to avoid
- Finished height and overhang
- Drink rail make, model, and position
- Cutout locations and equipment cut sheets
- Metal and finish: zinc, brass, or copper, waxed or unwaxed
Edges are one kind of problem we solve. See our specialty projects for others.
Put your profile in our hands
Start with samples, then send the drawing. We’ll come back with questions, a CAD profile for your approval, and a plan to build it.