Fusion 360 Tutorials The Basics Sketch, Extrude, Cut, Join

Welcome to all you Technivores out there. I am Technivorous. Today we are going to do some simple tutorials in Autodesk Fusion 360. Now if you're not aware of Autodesk Fusion 360, you can get a student license and use it for free indefinitely, and it is an amazing CAD tool for 3D printing. And not only will we be making our model in Fusion 360, we will also be slicing it in Fusion 360 as well, and we will print it out and I will show you our finished product. So we're going to make something really simple today, and it's something that I find pretty handy. Basically it's just going to be a harness that you mount to your wall that holds several rows of wire. So we're going to start with a simple sketch, and that's this button here. And in order to sketch you have to pick a plane to sketch on. In the beginning you don't have any planes in your architecture, so you're just going to use one of these origin planes. So I'm going to select the bottom face, and we are now looking at it from the top down. Like I said, this is a pretty simple model. So we are first going to stretch up, or sketch up, our extrusion. And we're going to go ahead and make this about 55 millimeters wide. You can go ahead and hit tab or click over to the next dimension here. We're going to make it about 100 millimeters long. So this is going to be pretty small, but it should print fairly fast and be functional for what we need. So the first thing we need to do, since we have our base platform that we're going to work with here, is finish sketch. Then go ahead and click on the plane you just created. And this is the extrude button right here. Now this button works for extruding in both directions, and there are a couple different ways to do this. And in fact we'll go over it real quickly. So right now it's saying the start. That is where you're beginning your extrusion from right now. It's set to profile plane. I can set it to offset. That's one of the other ones that's commonly used. And say we set that offset to five millimeters. Then when I drag this out and start extruding, you'll see it doesn't start immediately from my plane. There's a five millimeter gap in there. We are actually going to extend from the profile plane there, just because it's a little bit simpler to deal with. And below the start you have the direction. Now you can choose one side, two sides, or symmetric. And this is pretty self-explanatory. One side will let you grab one side and move it in either direction. Two sides you can extrude both. It'll give you another arrow, and you can drag that down. And if you're looking at symmetric, it is exactly what it says it is. There are again two arrows, but you only need to move one to get it to do what you want it to do. We're going to set this to five millimeters. No, excuse me, we want four millimeters. And that should be sufficient. Actually, you know what? Yeah, I think that'll work. So, and then you see the taper angle. We're not going to play with this at all, but you can make it so... Actually, let's just show you. Okay, so if I put 20 degrees in here, you see I get a tapered edge. It expands outward as it rises, and it does that in both directions depending on what you have selected there. So we're going to change that back to zero, because we don't need that. And the operation, now this is what you're trying to do. And in this case we are making a new body, but there are other selections here. And those are join, cut, intersect, new body, and new component. We're just making a new body at the moment, so we're going to leave that how it is. We will go over those other ones in just a second. So, and by the way, you use your mouse wheel. Scrolling up will zoom out. Scrolling down will zoom in, and it depends on where your mouse wheel is. That's where it'll zoom to. So it's pretty slick. You can use this guy here to navigate around. And the next thing we're going to do is make some minor adjustments to this. I'm going to go ahead and take this plane right here, and we're going to hit sketch. So now we are drawing on that plane that we were just, that is the top of our cube shape there basically. So I'm going to be using some rectangles. Basically what we want to do is make these about two millimeters wide, and then we're going to put a one millimeter gap in there. So we are going to keep duplicating these just across here. And I'm using rectangles because it allows me to start at this point, and then set the dimension of the width. The height kind of automatically snaps there. And we are basically just going to repeat this process. So what we can do is go in and select these sketch elements, and then we can copy or move them. We are going to, doesn't want to let me move it, huh? I think I got to get these ones as well. Okay, let's try that again. We'll go to modify, move, and then we will select our lines. Ah yes, doing it this way does give us the chance to create a copy. So basically, take that, drag it over, we'll make this minus six. That should give us our one millimeter gap, and hit okay. We are going to repeat that again. A lot of repetition here, but you'll see why we are making these lines in just a moment. As I said, this is going to be a mount for putting on the wall and holding different wires. And I'll show you one that I have already had for a while now. And let me do that if there's anything selected. So, and I will show you the one that we're printing now. So modify, hit copy. All right, now in this instance, minus 12 puts us where we want to be, which makes sense because we doubled it last time. It was minus six. It should be minus 24 this time, but we'll find out. Let's do it one more time here. Move, copy. Yeah, when I mass select things like that, it gives me issues, which is not cool. So we'll just keep rocking like this. Okay, so I was just going to finish this up and skip ahead, but then I realized what I was doing wrong here. So I'm going to go ahead and grab all of these, and I'll show you the easy way to do this. Grab all of these. Don't need that one. And then the menu just got shortened here. So you can scroll down to the bottom and then hit create copy, and then move it. This time we're going to do negative 48. Should put us pretty close to the edge. Quite looks like we have a couple more rows to go. So we're going to go ahead and we need two more. Let's do modify. We'll just do this the quick way. And I think this one should just move six again. And there we have it. Okay, so looks pretty good. I do have one uneven spot on the end over here, so I'm going to go ahead and add one more rectangle. That one is going to come in and meet at the end of my last full two millimeter end there. Right about here. And then we are going to get back to the finished sketch. So we're going to go back into our model mode here, and we are going to grab extrude once again. And I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit first. Then hit extrude, and we're going to select all of the one millimeter faces. So every other one, the thinner ones. And if you accidentally click one like I just did, just click it again. It'll go away. You don't have to hold shift or anything while you do this. I'm just clicking them all in order and selecting them all. None of the ones you click should be on the very end. Okay, and then we're going to take and drag that arrow down. And you'll see all these red lines. This is because this time we are cutting. If you look at the operation, it automatically assumes since we're going backwards through a model that we want to cut. Now we can go ahead and join. Then we get this nice heat sink looking thing. But we are not going to do that. We are going to cut. So we're going to hit okay here. And there we have that. So you see it kind of looks like a comb here. Now we're going to come to the side plane. This one's going to be real simple. It's just one rectangle. And we are going to put it in pretty much just like this here. If I remember to click. There we go. Finish sketch. Go ahead and grab this bottom part of it. And we're going to drag it all the way back through there again using cut. So you need to hit extrude again. Bam. There you have it. Okay, so we are almost done except we need some way to mount this to the wall. So what we're going to do in that case is grab this plane right here in the back and hit sketch. Get to a good position to where we can work on it. And then on both ends I'm going to do a 5 by 10 millimeter rectangle. Finish that sketch. Go ahead and grab both of those. This time you are going to have to shift to click because we haven't hit extrude yet. If you hit extrude first, it's going to get you to select the profiles you can actually select to without hitting shift that way. And this time we are going to extrude. So it says new body. As soon as I start extruding from here it says join. So that's what we want. I think we're going to do eight millimeters here. And we are getting right to the end of it. So the last thing we're going to do to this model before I show you how to slice and print it is grab this whole feature here. And we are going to place it in the center of this model here. Now this is, as you can see, not quite going to go all the way through my model and I need it to. So I'm going to grab the end, pull it here. This is a screw hole by the way. So we're going to use this to mount our wire rack to the wall. So we'll do that again. Right here. I want to again make sure that it goes all the way through our model. And I am looking at the hole radius here, this four millimeters. That's about right, so that's what I want. We're going to hit okay. And you can also do this by grabbing both of these planes or clicking on one of the planes and sketching circles on both of them and then extruding those through. But this is basically our simple model here. And it is really simple, but it should print relatively quickly to give you an idea of what you're capable of with some quick drafting in Fusion 360. So what we need to do from here is check out one of the other workspaces. Right now we're in the design workspace. Let's take a peek at the render workspace just because it's pretty. And then we'll go over to the manufacturing workspace. So this gives you a rendering of what the model should look like when it is completed. You can go in here and change the appearance and a lot of that stuff, make things look pretty realistic. We'll play around with the renderer later. Right now we want to go to manufacturer. From here we're going to click setup and new setup. And we are going to make sure that we have a 3D printer. So in here there are some examples. We're just going to grab the Cruelty Ender 3 real quick. You can filter this by additive and stuff like that. But this is the one that I want, Cruelty Ender 3 select. It's going to give us a build plate there, which is nice. So it gives us kind of the dimensions of our printer. We are doing additive and we can select some settings. We're going to use a 1.75 millimeter PLA at a 0.2 millimeter layer height. Again, all of this is built in. You can edit and make your own by going to the edit. But for right now we need to go ahead and see. So now I need to select my model. So that's here. Hit okay. It'll automatically move it to the bed there. And here we can play with some settings such as infill and things like that. Right now we don't need to touch any of that. I'm going to look at the print settings real quick to make sure my temperatures are set correctly. It's a little high. We'll do 205. Bed temperature 55. We are going to run this on the Ender 3 here. Let's say that that's accurate. 2 millimeter layer height. Infill. There is a percentage for infill around here somewhere. There it is at the basic. We are going to do 100 percent. Hit okay. Don't need a raft. Don't need any of that. And then the last thing we need to do is generate a toolpath. And this does take a second, but it shouldn't take long. So we have generated our toolpath. I've inserted a micro SD card. What we need to do now is go ahead and go back to actions and hit post process. Oh no, it's not quite done generating yet. There it is. So now that we have a toolpath, and you can see that here underneath your setup that you've created, the toolpath, you can click on that and then hit actions and post process. And you should have this handy little menu right here. We are using generic FFF. Everything is pretty much built in. We just need a program name or number. And it did require me to use a number last time. So let's do this. And then just click post. It's asking you where you want to send your G code right now. I'm going to throw it in this guy right here. And then it is a waiting game for a few minutes. So we'll be right back in a second once this is finished slicing our file and everything. And when it does finish up, you're going to receive a notepad file. It's going to pop up looking something like this. This is your G code. This is all the stuff you're going to need to print the file that you just made. See all those commands there. Go ahead and close this up. And we have it saved to our disk already. So we should be good to go and throw it on the printer. So we'll do that now. And I will show you what it looks like when it comes out. And here you see our finished model on the build plate. It took about two and a half to three hours. And that is because of all of the outer perimeter walls. So the walls print the slowest of any part of the model. The infill, you can go pretty fast. But for the walls, you got to slow down. So this should work pretty well. What we're going to do is take it by those two screw holes and mount it to the wall. And when we are done with that, it should look something like this. This is the wire holder I'm currently using. And as you can see, I am out of room. So we are going to go ahead and mount this other one to the wall and sort out some of this mess. And that's going to be it for this video, guys. Don't forget to leave a like down below. So that lets YouTube know that you like this video. So YouTube can let other people know that they might like it as well. And hit that subscribe button as well. We appreciate you watching. And we will have more Fusion 360 tutorials coming at you. In this one, it was pretty simple. We covered some basic extrusion methods, including cut. And we also added some holes, but didn't get too in-depth. In the next video, we'll add a couple more tools that we haven't used yet. And it should be pretty interesting. So stick around, guys. That's going to be it, guys. Thanks for stopping by. If you'd like to become a Technivore, don't forget to hit that subscribe button down below. And YouTube is suggesting a video for you right here. And there's a playlist right here that's just 3D printing stuff. Also, if you'd like to see your name up top with the rest of my Patreon supporters, head over to www.patreon.com slash Technivores. There, YouTube can contribute to the channel and make the Technivores channel even better.