Book Image

Improving CAD Designs with Autodesk Fusion 360

By : Kevin Michael Land
Book Image

Improving CAD Designs with Autodesk Fusion 360

By: Kevin Michael Land

Overview of this book

Autodesk Fusion 360 has become an indispensable tool for designers, tinkerers, and engineers worldwide thanks to its versatility that allows for large-scale assemblies and smaller, quick 3D prints. If you’ve faced challenges with learning Fusion 360, this book will help you overcome them and build the confidence to design your own projects, explaining step-by-step instructions and the purpose of each tool. In this book, you’ll dive into the design workspace and learn sketching fundamentals such as setting up a component, recognizing when a sketch is fully constrained, and parametrically flexing models. Through trial and error, you’ll work on multiple easy-to-build projects to create simple, useful items that can be quickly 3D printed for use around the house and then advance to much bigger projects that require joint connectivity and large assemblies. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to sketch fully parametric designs, translate them into 3D models, and create your own unique designs.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Simple, Fun Projects for Around the Home
7
Part 2: Bicycle Water Bottle Holder Project
13
Part 3: FORM Modeling Techniques
17
Part 4: Working with 2D and 3D Scanned Images

Measuring the dimensions of a water bottle

As we learned from Chapter 6, calipers are a helpful tool for capturing the dimensions of real-world objects. In this section, we will capture the dimensions of a few water bottles of different sizes: a large pink metal bottle, a medium-sized red metal bottle, and a small plastic bottle. We will measure their dimensions and note them down so that we can bring those dimensions into Fusion and find a general size for the bottle holder. All these bottles maintain an almost constant diameter throughout their length, so we won’t have to worry about varying widths too much.

Figure 8.1 – Various-sized water bottles

Figure 8.1 – Various-sized water bottles

Let’s look at typical water bottle sizes and get the dimensions for them. As you did before, grab your calipers and a measuring tape to capture the overall length and width. This time, I won’t go over each step but will show the dimensions that I measured. If you have a bottle,...