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

Making design changes

We will first start with some simple design changes to our model such as adding in tolerances so that the slider will easily go in and out and also removing some added material to make the bottle holder a little bit lighter.

Adding tolerances

For those who may not be aware, a tolerance is a small gap that allows a part to slide or move without scraping against another part. The amount of tolerance depends on what you are trying to accomplish. For instance, we want the Holder 2 part to have a small tolerance so that it doesn’t get stuck when sliding it in or out. Let’s start with changing that first, as follows:

  1. Open the Ch10 Holder Improvements folder and open the file that is in that folder.

This is a continuation from Chapter 9 but notice that since it was copied from Chapter 9, the version starts at v1. So, if you start a new design in a different folder, it will start off like it was new and not keep its design history. This...