Concept to Cut Diagram - Furniture Design with Fusion 360 Part 1

hi there I'm Brendan with black flag builds and today I'm gonna walk you through my process for using fusion 360 to design furniture by building a table for my office I like to start my project by making a quick sketch on the whiteboard to conceptualize what I'm trying to build my drawing skills aren't the best but they get the job done as you can see here I'm going for a table that has a double thick plywood top and the surface will sit across two cabinet bases before I began I took some measurements of the space where this table is going to live and I've written down the dimensions on the sketch I have 72 inches for the length 23 inches for the depth and 38 inches for the height I decided to make the cabinet's underneath about 18 inches in width because I like the ratio each cabinet will be one-quarter of the total width now I'd like to point out that I chose 23 inches from the table depth because I wanted to be able to cut both layers at the top from the same sheet of plywood a full sheet of plywood is 48 inches wide but I need to account for the blade thickness so I can't just cut it into two 24 inch white pieces in my case I rounded down to the next whole number to give myself some wiggle room I'm also deciding to make the backs only 23 inches long this means the back of the cabinets won't be fully enclosed but it means I can make less cuts while breaking down my plywood you'll see what I mean as we go along the first thing I like to do in fusion 360 is to save and name my file this just helps me stay organized in fusion 360 we'll save in the background as I go so I'm gonna start by creating some parameters which will allow me to establish the critical dimensions early and if I decide to change them later I could do it in one place you can do that by going to modify change parameters and clicking this plus button here I'm going to be using 3/4 inch plywood for my build so I'll apply parameter and set it to 0.75 inches I'll also add a length parameter for 72 inches a depth parameter for 23 inches I'll also add height and this one's a little different I want to be 38 inches overall but I want to subtract the two layers of the plywood that are gonna be on the top and so I can actually enter math right here in fusion say 360 so what I'll do is I'll take 38 minus pi times 2 and you'll see I get a dimension of 36 and a half I'll also add width and that's going to be very similar I want 18 overall but I want to subtract the two plywood sides so I'll subtract plat times here I'll get 16 and a half I'm gonna have a kick height which is going to be the height of the shelf off the ground in this case at 6 inches I'll have a kick depth which is how far back my kick plate will sit and I'm just going to use a standard three and a half inches and then I'm also going to use a trim depth as explained in the sketch earlier this is just to avoid the baseboard trim and that's going to be 2 inches all right with all this set we should don't worry we should be ready to go so I'm going to start to model my table by creating a series of components I'll need a side a bottom kick plate and a back for the cabinets and I'll also need a component for my top surface so I'll start with a cabinet side I'll right click here and I'll go to new component and I'm going to slow double-click here and I'm going to change the name of this just to keep organized as I go so this would be cabinet side I'm gonna create a sketch by clicking this button here I'll choose the bottom plane to work off of for this I'll hit R on my keyboard to bring up my rectangle tool and I'll click from the origin and drag out so in this case I want to be fly and thickness and I wanted to extend back by the depth if I stop sketch and zoom out a little bit I can click on that profile hit a on my keyboard to extrude it up into 3d space and in this case I'm gonna extrude it up by the height if i zoom out a little bit we can see I have a simple plywood board just standing up in 3d space so next I want to model in the cutouts for the toe kick area as well as the trim avoidance area that I need to build in so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to swing this around to the other side I'm going to start a new sketch I'm going to click the side of my panel here and draw right on the side of this panel so the left edge here is going to be the back of my cabinet so I will grab my rectangle tool by pressing R on the keyboard and I'll drag from this bottom corner here and I want this to come in by trim depth and I want to bring it up by the kick height and then I'm going to draw another rectangle from the other corner and I want this to come in by the kick depth and kick height and height and so I'll stop the sketch I'll select these two profiles and I'll swing my view around here I'll hit a on my keyboard to extrude and I'll drag those through the board and you'll see I get a red box that means we're cutting some holes here I'm going to choose this extent option here and just say all and that'll just make sure that we go through the full width of the material that we're dealing with here if we change that in the future it will go through the full depth okay I'll click OK here and we have our cutouts next I'm going to create another component for my kick foot so we'll call this cabinet typically and I'll create another sketch this time I'm going to create this sketch right off the side of this previously drawn cabinet side and so this kick plate is going to go right down here in the front so I'll choose my rectangle tool with our on the keyboard and this is going to be a plywood thickness and it is going to be tick rate and that's pretty simple I'll stop the sketch select that profile swing us around into 3d viewer here it's like that profile again oh-kayyy for extrude and I'll bring that out by my width will create another new component and this time it'll be for my cabinet bottom and I'll click this create sketch button again I'll draw right on the side of this one and this is going to span right on top of that kick plate so I'll go from this front corner here and it'll be plywood and thickness and it will be depth and I'll stop the sketch very similarly we can just grab that profiles and then here a little bit so it's easier to grab and I'll extrude on I'll play width as well okay we're gonna create another new component this time it'll be for the cabinet back and very similarly I'm gonna create a sketch will draw right on the side again and I'm gonna draw from this top corner and I want this to be fly and thickness and in this case I'm gonna go down by depth as we discussed earlier I want this to be 23 inches to match sort of some of the other dimensions for easy cutting so that's what that's gonna look like I'll zoom in a little bit here and select that profiler just created I'll hit efore extrude and that will come out by width as well so now we can see we have all of the cabinet components needed to build a cabinet portion of this build except we're missing the other side so instead of creating a whole another one on this side what I'm going to do is I'm just going to duplicate it so making sure that my top level component is the active component I will click once on cabinet side and I will hit in for move and I click this create a copy checkbox and then I'll drag it over and instead of eyeballing it what I'm going to do is do a little bit of math here so I wanted to come over by the width plus the ply thickness and if I hit OK here you'll see that if I put it right into perfect position and perfect alignment for the rest of my cabinet now I'm going to go ahead and create my top so we'll do that just like we did the rest I'll create a new component and we will call this tabletop I'm going to create a sketch and this one I'm going to sketch on this front plane here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the cabinet that we already have here in place just a reference off length so I'll grab my rectangle tool with our and from this front corner here I'll go up by a thickness of ply and I will stretch it out by the link and I'll stop sketch and I'll zoom in just a little bit to grab that profile and then I'll hit you for extrude just like before and I'm gonna chew this back by the depth of my table all right and very similar to how we did the second cabinet side I'm going to activate my top level component here this work table by clicking this little checkbox here making sure that that's the active component then I'll grab tabletop and I'll hit them on my keyboard for move I'll check the create a copy a box I'll drag it up and I really just wanted to come up by the thickness of the ply and there we go okay now if we swing around to the front you'll see that I have a double thickness of plywood stacked right on top of each other and one left cabinet so far so the only thing left to do is to build the right cabinet and again to save us some work I'm just going to copy all of these components over to the right side so I'll select all of these here in the tree I'll hit em just like before trim move check the create a copy box and I'll drag it over and here's where we'll have to do a little bit more math so in this case I want to move it over by the length but then I got to move it back shift it back to the left a bit by the width of the shelf and then I have to also subtract the plywood thickness from each side of the cabinet so plywood times 2 and then okay so there we see that I'm in perfect the line that I have both of my cabinets on my double thick top in place the next step is a fun one it's really just to kind of give an idea of what this is going to look like once we build it and paint it and finish it so what I'm going to do is I'm a hip I hit a on my keyboard to bring up the appearance palette and I'm gonna type in pine here and fusion 360 as this pie in appearance built-in so I'm gonna drag this over to my table top one and my table top two we can see now I have a nice representation of what it would look like if I use two pine wood on the top there the next thing I'm going to do and thinking about painting the bottom sections a dark grey and so I'm going to look here like this metallic dark gray paint so what I'll do is I'll select all of my cabinet components and the tree over here oops I'll select all of the cabinet components in the tree over here and I'll drag that gray paint swatch right on to the model here so now we have a representation of what this thing looks like the next thing would be to export some sort of cut list so that we would know what cuts to make when we get to the shop what I'm going to do is I'm going to save this file as a different file and I'm gonna call it flat pack and the reason for that is so we don't make any changes to this one I'm going to deconstruct this model now into everything laying flat on some sheets of plywood so that I can get my cut list and I'd like to be able to retain this model so that I can see what it looks like in 3d assembled so the first step is I'm going to create a new component and I'm going to call this material and I'll create a sketch just like before in this case I'll create it will sketch on this bottom plane and I'll grab my rectangle tool and I'll drag out a rectangle and I want this to be the dimensions of a sheet of plywood so 48 inches wide by 96 inches tall if I get stopped sketch you can then select this profile and extrude it up by the dimensions of Mark live 1 and I'm going to go ahead and just turn off all this other stuff just to kind of get it out of the way a little bit and I'll start with one of my table tops so what I need to do is I need to use a feature in fusion 360 called joints and what that allows me to do is select a location on this piece and on this piece and put them together joint them together and so that will allow me to lay this piece into this plywood material so that I can create a Cutlass so let's just do it I'm gonna hit J for joint I'm gonna select this corner up here and I want to move it into this corner here and what I need to do is rotate it now so that it's inside of my plywood sheet but 90 degrees it looks like so I'll just take that mind you hear it okay I decided to speed this clip up because it's getting a little repetitive I'm doing the same thing over and over again I'm selecting my component hitting J on my keyboard for the joint tool selecting a spot on my component and a corresponding spot on the material to place it sometimes I have to rotate it or slide it into place as you'll see on the screen as it goes the only real gotcha is that occasionally the piece will appear to float over the material and in order to get a planar with the material you have to click the little flip button in the joint command which I'll place an image on screen here to show you what that looks like now that we have everything laid out on the plywood sheets here we can take this into a fusion 360 drawing and dimension it out so that we have a cut list I'll do that by going to file new drawing and selecting from design I'm going to change the state and half by 11 and hit OK take a few seconds for the drawing tool to come up and you see that fusion 360 gives us a pretty basic layout with some project details and a table down here and if I move my mouse around you can see that we're seeing these two rear rectangles this is because the default orientation is the front view if I change it to top we'll see that we have a more accurate and interesting representation of what our cut list you should look like so the next step is I'm going to choose a scale here you kind of just have to play around to see what will fit on your sheet of paper here it looks like 116 will fit pretty well so I'll choose 116 I'll find a place in the drawing where I want to place this and click and then I'll hit OK I don't really care to have all this detailed information for my drawing so I'm going to select that and hit delete now that we have our drawing placed on the document what we can use is the dimension tool here to get the dimensions for each of the pieces we need to cut so what I'll do is I'll click on an edge and I'll click again to place that dimension and you'll see now that we know that this board will be 72 inches long by 23 inches here if I need to get a dimension that's not as obvious like for instance these funky shapes here if i zoom in i can click one edge and then another edge and that will give me the distance between those two edges so I'm going to go ahead and speed up the clip while I go through and dimension out all of these pieces now that all the dimensions are done I'll just dress up the document a little bit further first I'll add a screenshot that I took earlier of the project so I'll click this image button here I'll find the image on my computer and you'll see I get a representation of what the image how big the image is going to be so what I'll do is I'll play with this scale here I'll try 1.5 and that looks pretty good so I'll just place it into my document there next I'll add some text and this will just be to add a little bit of a title just so I know what this project is called so I'll call this office table build I will Center it or make it bold and I'll make it a little taller those finishing touches we can save the document or save the drawing and we can output it to a PDF that we can print out for a reference in the shop so that concludes this portion of designing furniture in fusion 360 you can see I printed out my cut list here and this will help us build this thing in the shop in the next video this one wasn't too complex and there's a couple of things that we didn't really talk about in fusion 360 that we could maybe dive further into in the future we could talk a little bit more about joints and how you could build more complex assemblies with that we could talk about how you might add dados and rabbets and things like that and we could also talk about using the parameters a little deeper and how they can help you change your mind with dimensions so you went from 3/4 inch plywood 1/2 inch plywood you can change that in one spot in fusion 360 and so you see it update live in your model so thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed and learn something and I'll see you next time

Channel: Black Flag Builds

Views: 13,335

Keywords: making, furniture design, 3d modeling, fusion 360, woodworking, maker, woodwork, diy

Id: ty4ZiWixGY4

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/balthisar]

Great! Thanks for sharing.

[u/Triabolical_]

I've also been using Fusion for this.

Here's a project I did in Fusion, and then cut with my shaper origin:

http://www.riderx.info/cat-bed-elevation-device/