Designing Furniture with Fusion 360 for Absolute Beginners!

one of the most powerful tools that I use in my shop actually isn't inside of my shop Don my computer it is fusion 360 which is the 3d modeling program that I use to do pretty much all of my really big builds and in this video we're gonna walk through the full process on how to make a coffee table in fusion 360 alright welcome back i'm brandon and this is the make or break shop where in order to make things we've got to break a few things along the way because mistakes are always part of the process now we know the sexes are gonna happen but what I find is using digital tools help you make those mistakes when it doesn't really cost you money especially in material and sometimes even time so you might be familiar with Sketchup or some other 3d modeling tools but they're great aids just to help you figure out what you're going to build in my case I really love using fusion 360 and actually compare it to Sketchup and why I use it over it in this video right there but we're gonna get into making this coffee table that I found online and turn it into a digital model like this if you guys want to download the model yourself so you can be looking at it as we're going there's links right down below in the description alright so we are going to do a quick design inside a fusion 360 we're going to be making this coffee table for the most part we're actually going to add a divider these legs are going to be straight and then we're going to do dovetails for the attachment and then we're gonna do a sliding dovetail in the middle we're gonna jump over into fusion this is actually what we're going to make right here but we're going to recreate it so inside of fusion and the way this works these are all of your projects and so this is kind of like a folder so I'm already gonna go into my coffee table folder I'm gonna do a new design all right so if this is your very first time in this environment some quick things to kind of get around now first off if yours looks different than mine your display settings are down here so you can kind of adjust all of these I'll just scroll through real quick so you can see if any of yours are different to get around I'm using a three button Mouse first off zoom is your scroll wheel and if you hold down the scroll wheel that is kind of your pan and then if you hold shift and then your scroll wheel it's going to bring up this orbit and I always have it on constrained orbit because it works a lot better also all hopefully all the keys are showing up down here at the bottom as we go and I type a bunch of stuff in another cool thing is this little guy right here this is basically you can move your views around this is like a little tiny workspace if you hit home if you get confused if something gets super messed up you have no idea where you are just hit home you're gonna get back to that standard view and then it's also nice if you want to do a straight-up talk to you then if you want to front etc that's super nice to work with that so the biggest difference between Fusion and Sketchup is how you approach it kind of from the beginning you want to think of everything as sketches where you're going to constrain everything and then also the big thing is you can have parameters and these are going to be things that we're gonna call out as we go so these are just like overall dimensions and things that maybe you want to adjust on the fly as we're going so a couple things that I know I'm gonna want is an overall height for stuff we're gonna do a 16 inches and there's a little plus right there sometimes it's hard to see we're gonna go over all width you can't have a space in this and I just capitalize every word it's just the way I do it the width is the shorter distance for me so length is gonna be the length how long something is in the width is going to be how wide something is and then we're gonna make this let's make this two feet 24 inches and then a for the overall link this is going to be let's call this 48 cool a couple other things that we are going to keep track of one is the height of the legs so again if we switch over to our pictures basically what is this distance from the bottom to the top leg height and what's cool is not only can you type in actual numbers but these are now formulas like you could use in Excel so we just declared this value so we can actually use that overall height we're gonna take the overall height we're gonna make at the box so kind of the middle point let's start out let's say that whole thing from here to here is like six inches that's gonna give us 10 another good one to do is just your stock so I usually do plywood I'll do just material I guess thickness we're gonna call this 3/4 of an inch um and then the last thing that I want to do I want the leg diameter these are gonna taper and so this is going to be the diameter at the bottom we're gonna make it pretty small so we're making an inch now you buy like me and then others make sense minds totally different that's the point you can adjust this after we're completely done with everything which makes this really great if you kind of have a stock design did you do for most things whether it's for you or for clients and you can just throw in the dimensions and everything gets repopulated which is amazing all right now let's actually get into making things we're gonna start out with a sketch also kind of the way this works this is your master you're gonna see in a minute we're gonna create components living them drop down here but our origin is inside of this folder this is all of our XYZ you can turn all this we can turn all of that on and you can see it as our planes and those are the points so we're actually gonna keep it off for now and then up here under create there is create sketch and we want it to be on the bottom basically and then we are going to do our four rectangle this is gonna give us a two point rectangle or you can click it right there we're gonna start at the origin and as you like go around it's gonna lock the stuff so like right here it's locked to this axis now it's locked to this one but now this is locked to the origin and that's going to get into doing constraint sketches here in a second so you can see what's cool about this is now you can adjust this but that also means it's not constrained so we want everything on here to be black when we're done with it it is constrained this way and so there's a bunch of different ways you can do it so this symbol is this horizontal vertical guy what that means is this and this are horizontal to each other as well as this and this and then if you click right here you can see that it is constrained but this one in this one to the origin if you ever wanted to leet these constraints you can right click delete and then you can see now that is no longer horizontally constrained but if we do want to do it click it again and now it is constrained this is a super easy way kind of to see what you want to constrain alright now this is a top-down look so this is going to be our overall width so to do this we're gonna hit D that's going to sketch dimension and this is our overall length scale room out and then this is going to be our overall width all right and so this is basically the top of the coffee table as well as the bottom of the coffee table then the other thing we want to put on here is the leg so the leg is gonna be a circle or as of right now it doesn't matter where it's at Edd's so you can see that's not constrained so we're going to select it with the D and then pull it out and this is going to be our leg diameter is that one inch so I'm hitting an escape and that is getting me out of the constrained dimension what we want to do is give basically the distance off of the edge so I could make this a parameter but really regardless of the size of this I want this to be let's call it I don't know let's see four inches to see what this looks like yeah we'll go with four inches I think that works we're not going to do the other legs there's a couple features you could use you can mirror as well as you can do a rectangular pattern but we're actually going to mirror the finished body and so that's so that we can adjust other elements and it's going to pie plate to everything else so this sketch is done you can see everything is black you can't move anything around we are good to go so we're gonna start off with the leg to do that you want to create a new component so kind of the best practices with fusion is you always want to make something new with a new component and in terms of woodworking if this is going to be a different piece that you're gonna cut and have to assemble like if this is going to get screwed to something else or glued to something else if it this is a different piece of wood that's a different component so our leg is a different component then everything else this is kind of the master assembly and this right here this makes it active so anything that you do now applies to the whole assembly but we are just gonna be messing with the leg so we're gonna go to that you can also right-click it and actually you can right click it and hit activate but we're already on it so now we are going to make our like our panel has changed up so this is like contextual depending on which you are working on here's your create and your modify this is what you're gonna be in mostly again modify that is where you found the physical parameters alright so we are going to extrude you can also see the keyboard shortcut is e and one nice thing about fusion 2 is it does a pretty good job kind of explaining what things are going to do and then it will kind of walk you through the process so e for extrude we're going to select this guy it's blue so now that we know that it's selected and just to give us some perspective you can see this arrow so you need to pull it up or down so you can see positive five and a half to a negative 10 but we already know this this is our leg height which is 10 inches you I see it in there and so as right now we're gonna let this be a new body inside of this leg component we're gonna go and hit okay and now we've got this created but we actually want these to taper so you saw there was a feature as we were going through the options that it was taper but this was already made what's also nice about fusion is instead of having to delete it and redo it if you just right-click down here this is gonna be our entire timeline of everything we make right click hit edit feature this brings us right back to what we just did let's make a taper angle of whoa that's way too big eight five let's go three cool and now we have a slightly tapered leg usually once you're done with a sketch or you extrude it's going to hide it and so you'll have to go back in and get it back all right so we're gonna do a new component this is bottom efore extrude thickness and you can see that we've got that there but this is now attached if we make this active this is like on the bottom that's not what we want we want it up there so how do we move it if we go back to what we just made edit that feature you can see there's some other options over here so start is where we actually want to start this piece from so I just is from object we want this top piece right there and you can see now it's going to the top that I can also see that I've got that circle in there because I didn't select it so you can go up to the profiles that we want select that and that's gonna fix it new body cool now this is created cool keyboard shortcut is if you select something you hit V it's gonna hide that component so next up is we're gonna make the walls and then we're going to make the top to do the walls we'll actually go back to this sketch this is something we could have just done a second ago I just double clicked it I'm gonna hit R for rectangle we're gonna make them so you can see this is right here this is locked on if for whatever reason I just did it like this so I'm making this like side wall and you need to get it actually back on there is this awesome coincident so I'm gonna hit this I'm gonna hit this it's gonna connect them same with this now I just needed to mention this guy thickness cool so I just want to do one of the walls because we're going to mirror a bunch of other features that we make here in a second alright a new component this is going to be what's called wall and we're gonna extrude again we're gonna start from an object and this time it's going to be from the top of this guy it's kind of hard to see but it is highlighting it and then we're going to go up okay so we could either do this as a parameter or we can just do it right here so this distance is going to be our height - our leg height and then since it's in between it's going to be minus two times our thickness four and a half part of a fusion is gonna do the math for you so you don't have to like measure stuff and figure all that out so we've got that there so now that we've got our basic pieces put together what we're gonna do is starting to mirror things and to do that you're going to use these construction planes and we basically need to have one going right through the middle here and then going through the middle here which is really easy with the midplane again I'm on the top level assembly and then you can see this construction plane gets made and this if you see that blue guy right there if you click it and pull it up you can adjust how big they are and this is literally just to make it easier for you this doesn't affect your your final design or anything and we're going to the same thing [Music] so the first thing that we are going to mirror legs to start out so if I go and go create again I'm at the top level assembly I go mirror and then I'm clicking my leg I want to mirror it I got the object now the mirror plane it's gonna be this guy so you can see it's over there and then I'm gonna do it one more time if you right-click it's gonna bring up this really cool menu where you can customize all this kind of stuff but it also brings up your last thing that you did so I'm gonna go repeat mirror this time we're selecting two things and we're going across this plane so they're good all right cool now all of that is done so now that we've got those mirrored I'm gonna turn this construction plane off another cool feature about this time line is you can go back in time make edits and then pull the timeline back forward and it populates everything forward so what I mean is right now let's say I want to make a fill it so I want to round this over right here at the bottom if you hit F or you go to modify or actually is right here fill it hit F fill it you're gonna go up like this there's ways to make these as actual copy so you literally could copy and paste it and that would that would change everything but I did it a little bit different so if I wanted this to apply to everything else what I need to do is back this up in time till before they were made and now I do the fill it wants to do anything to fill it pull this back forward and it applies to all of that which is super handy we've got our legs and just to make it clean we're gonna label them so this is going to be front left so now we're going to create our top piece one option would be if you hit em and that's going to bring up this move copy we could select this and then we could do create a copy and then we could pull it up and then we could actually place it here I'll show you actually how we do that and then we would do em again selecting this entire mixture component is selected we're gonna do a point-to-point and so our first point is going to be this guy the next point is here I didn't have the component selected so make sure you have it selected then first point here second point here and you would have capture that position so it stays so that is one option but what I find sometimes is when I scale these things later that doesn't really lock the position that well so instead let's delete that what we're gonna do is a mirror again is usually the safest thing so we're going to mirror this up so we need another construction plane again I'm on this guy so we have these two but we really need one cutting the middle of this so we are going to do another midpoint midplane and this let me turn the bottom off it's going to be between here and here okay and so we've got this guy so now if we go and create and mirror along this plane and then you can see it's right up there cool so now we are working with multiple components and the only one we have left is this guy over here so we've already got those construction planes made again we're going to go to mirror we're going to select this wall and we're going to go around this cool so that is our overall shape so we're gonna go ahead make a divider here as well as with everything you really can make things a bunch of different ways we could go back to the original sketch and then make a divider in the middle then pull that up but what we're going to do since you haven't seen it is we're gonna do it all within a new component so we're going to call it the divider I'm get so you can see I'm selecting the front face and now I'm on the front face and you can draw here so we could do this again this is going to be the thickness really when you're drawing like you can just go ahead and attach stuff this is already gonna do these constraints then I'm gonna do here in a minute as you can see that's already coincident but I just do that just in case you missed that and you need to connect it now we are going to make a construction line so just like a construction plane we can do something called a construction line l4 line and then hit X and this is construction and this is basically just a dotted line and I'm going to just have it going at a 90 degree angle is what I am shooting for and then I want this to be in the very center so we can use the symmetry here here and here now it's in the center and now what this means is I can do the symmetry again between here here and here awesome now that's attached all right so now I'm gonna use parallel to get this here get that thier finish the sketch so you see that dotted line of a turn so these dotted lines that are brought in those are projections from the things that we've done before sometimes it does it automatically but it is super helpful and I'll show you actually how to make it if for whatever reason it decided not to do that so I'm going in and deleting this and so again you can see this is now not attached so if you hit P now we're on project and then click okay now you've got that blue line right there which we could make a construction line we can make it whatever we want but let's say I want to bring this top one in as well P okay and now we've got those in there so if we hide all this again you can see that is actually part of the sketch as a projection which we can use to constrain our sketches all right so we're going to finish the sketch now all right so we've got the sketch done and now what we're going to do is extrude this across so so yeah I forgot to put that line right there I just I don't want it to go if we go back into here so I don't want it to cut through so let's go back into that sketch real quick and add one more line all right and then here you can see what I saw not attaching what I'm trying to do it from here so I would do the project project okay now I've got that line in there finish the sketch and so with that line I can now go across then we're going to extrude it you can go like this select this here which is great but you can see the distance is still an actual number so if we were to go and adjust this for the future it would still keep it at 24 inches it wouldn't lock it to whatever the new distance is going to be so instead of doing that what you want to do is go to object now we select it and it's going whatever that crazy thing I mean it's basically to the backside and we hit OK and we are good with the divider cool so now we've got all this made we need to actually do the joinery so let's start off we're going to do Tenon's for the legs so like I said before we want this to apply to all the legs so we're actually going to back this up to when it was just this leg and now go into it and create the joinery for it so this is selected and we're gonna want to make a new sketch and then I'm going to take the bottom actually off so I can get to here I'm gonna make it a circle and then we'll make it I don't know an inch it's really big actually let's make it point seven five there we go I was about to make it 75 inches and then now we're gonna turn the bottom back on actually we're gonna hit extrude now we're going to turn the bottom up bottom back on and just like before we are going to do to an object so to this top piece right there and it is going to join so now we turn everything back on go forward and you can see we hide this that that populated to those other ones that's great but if we turn the legs off we've got the holes that aren't in the actual bottom piece so to do that and so this is actually another really nice piece about fusion vertices Sketchup so with Sketchup you'd have to go in draw the circles make the holes all that kind of stuff but there's this really cool feature called combine which is right here again I'm on the master assembly go to combine and then you want to collect your target body this is what is going to be adjusted and then tool bodies this is what is going to be subtracted from it or added to it so you can do a couple different things over here or intersect all that kind of stuff right now it's turning this literally as a tool body so these actually won't be here and sometimes sometimes this isn't selected so if I did that we've got the holes but now our legs are gone so if you go edit feature you just wanna make sure that's always selected so you keep it then if we take these out you can see we've got our holes for the bottom all right so that's great but maybe you want to be real exact and you're like you know that's that's awesome but I want to have a little bit of a tolerance in right here so you can go to modify and then you go off set face and then make sure you're going negative and let's say we make it a 32nd of an inch and that will offset it but so you can see that is good to go but we actually want that to apply to all of these but we're actually just going to redo that something we're just happening we're gonna turn the legs back off we're gonna go to offset faiths and we're due negative 32nd of an inch then we turn all this back on you can see that we have that gap right in there cool so the legs are pretty much done now what we can do is go on to the side all right so I actually had to drill in the body it was turned off for the top alright so now we are going to make our actual dovetails for these side pieces so I'm gonna go into this guy making my active component we're going to do a new sketch on top of it and then we're gonna start to work on our dovetails this is just an easier kind of an easier way at least for me you can draw out the shape that you're looking for and then start constraining it outside so the first thing I want to do is these need to be equal in length and as always if you start just playing around with it you can kind of see what else they still need to do we're going to do symmetry on this so we're going to do a construction where we have the symmetry and then oh that's still going kind of crazy we're gonna go ahead and bring it on so I kind of get an idea what it's going to look like so we are going to do another construction line but first I want to project let me just grab this entire now we have got it and then we are going to and actually we're going to turn the body off for now so I can see what I'm doing and we're also we want to grab this and that is the top we also want to use that in the sketch as well so we want to first off this is going to be a through dovetail so this needs to be collinear as well as this needs to be coincident and you can see that these still will adjust you add a couple more dimensions first is gonna be our overall width of the duffed hill it's making an inch for now and then we need our angle which is going to be I'll say 80 degrees all right now this is still moving along and we want to put this in the very center so we're going to do construction line go all the way through make sure it's parallel and then we're gonna do symmetry from the sides then we're just gonna line up this guy to this guy alright so actually the for whatever reason the dimensions got turned off for me for a second and so what I had to do was back out from the sketch and then right-click on the sketch and then go show dimensions and so now it's back on but now that we've got this made of what we need to do is duplicate this down the sides and so we're going to use a new guide called rectangular pattern you first want to select everything that you want to make a pattern of and then we are going to do it by the extent and so if you guys remember this is our total or this is our width right yeah overall width divided by two and then we need to subtract that from point five right that's half of this guy so back into there actually we want to back that out a little bit more you so it's a little bit closer to the edge okay I like that obviously we want more than just three and so we wanted to go in both directions so we're gonna do symmetric and now we only have three but if we keep it all you can see we're just adding these on I wanna go go through nine and say that looks like yeah we'll say that's all so that's enough cool and then to finish this guy off actually everything yeah everything is in there that we need because we projected all that stuff so let's turn our wall back on and what we're going to do is extrude it's gonna join again we want to you object just in case we changed the thickness later and you can see that is joined now we want that on the top and the bottom so another awesome thing you can do is not only can you mere components or bodies but you can mere features so what that means is if we go back in here we go to create and we go mirror I actually select feature and so this is what we just did so then we're going to do it across here and then you can see that it is popping up right down there our concern the construction planes off and actually forgot so I should have been making all of that before I mirrored this so that's to fix that we're just going to re-do it create amir already selected we got our plane turn these back on and there we go so just like before now that we've got this made we need to actually subtract that from this again we're going to use the combined feature which makes this really fast this is going to be you can select multiple tool bodies keep the tools cut it and then you can see that that is cut out thing with this and our tool bodies keep the tools and now if I take both of those out you can see that we have them there then last but not least let's go back into our divider we're going to make this a sliding dovetail so we're gonna do a sketch on top of it again we're going to make a dovetail this I'm gonna go ahead and attach it we're gonna project those lines and then we need to do a construction line right here in the middle so let's have symmetry around the center line and then we're gonna make this a function of the thickness so let's say this is material thickness - quarter of an inch and then the height is going to be the material thickness divided by 2 all right so then we need to set our angle at 80 degrees and then the sketch is done so just like we did before now we are still inside of the divider we're going to extrude this and then make sure that we extrude this two by to an object we're gonna join it and then just like we did before we are going to mirror that feature so it's like this guy turn the construction lines of back on and then plain that we need I think is right there it is cool and now that is created and then last but not least we need to go in and combine those guys all right so if you so now you can see we've the slots for the dead tail again if you want to do a tolerance you just go into that offset face and then we can make negative one thirty-second and then you've got your tolerance in there but for me we're just gonna keep it flush alright cool so that is pretty much the Assembly of this guy and now what is great and why I love fusion you know it but I really want this thing to be a little bit longer it doesn't need to be 48 inches it really needs to be 55 inches so you do that and thing expands everything updates everything's in the middle that's what makes this thing absolutely now if you remember the width is going to be a little bit different since we typed in just a hard number for the dovetails the spacing is gonna get kind of crazy so what you could do if we're making something massive like this is go back into this feature which is down over here Sketch jump in here and then you can increase this number to 15 maybe then you finish it in which you would have to do is actually go into this and make sure these are selected since these are new bodies join take it back here and then you can see that goes to everything else now I don't want that so let's back it up real quick there are ways where you can actually have that as a formula but we really don't wanna get into all that here and again if we want to do the overall height maybe we want to make it 24 inches and then another cool feature is if this inspect you hit measure let's say we want to measure from here all the way down here and then you can make sure your XYZ Delta's on and if you see that's right at that 24 inches if you wanted to double-check you did everything right so all of this stuff you can just adjust on the fly which is wild maybe we actually wanted this box to be bigger to do that we would make this number a larger and it's just like that you could even come afterwards and instead and maybe you wanna make this even easier and say box hi and we want to make this eight in here is change this to box hi then all you have to do is adjust the sky you can on the fly if you have that ton of parameters that you're working with there's only a couple that you want to play with you can actually star them make favorites so now for the very last part of this and this is just to make it look a little bit nicer we're going to go into the appearance so I just hit a that's going to bring up the appearance menu and then for would I find this wood solid down here does a pretty good job and we're gonna make this finished and we're going to make this a semi-gloss walnut you got to download it which is weird but then you can just drop it on to components and you want to make sure you have the component selected so then it's going to go all the way around it I'm gonna say all of this is gonna be walnut and then maybe we make our legs curly maple there you have it so we're not gonna get into doing a rendering in this video but you can do some pretty high quality renders directly in fusion 360 if you guys are interested in seeing that let me know in the comments and I can make it videos specifically for that so outside of computer actually make physical things inside of the shop and this is one of my favorite builds and I'll see you there in just one second and until next time go make or break something in your shop see you guys [Music]

Channel: Make or Break Shop

Views: 46,958

Keywords: diy, woodworking

Id: 5uKLnDZTBV4

Length: 40min 19sec (2419 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020