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

Planning out the design

When working on projects, we need to first plan out the design, thinking about what exactly we want to accomplish. If you do a Google search for bicycle water bottle holders, you’ll see a multitude of different ideas for various styles of bikes. We want to come up with a simply designed, 3D-printed water bottle holder that will hold a typical 8-oz plastic water bottle. It will need to be held in place on the bicycle pole with a grip or a clamp with a screw for tightening.

Now that we know what it is we want to accomplish, let’s start to plan out the design.

I have taken a photo of the location where I want the bottle holder to be placed on my bicycle. For my bicycle, I want it on the pole underneath the handlebars, and I’d like to make a bottle holder for my wife’s bike as well in the same location:

Figure 6.1 – My bicycle with a tapered pole

Figure 6.1 – My bicycle with a tapered pole

You can see via the photo of my bicycle that I...