Designing Laser Cut Joinery in Fusion 360

hi folks this is Tanner Reid product design engineer at Autodesk and today I'm going to be taking you through a workflow to kind of explore different joinery methods that we can design for laser cutting so it can be a little bit tricky sometimes I think if you're trying to design in 3d and then break it down into 2d for manufacturing your prototyping in this case and then bringing it back out to 3d to assemble it and to you know to visualize it and finally to actually build it so we're gonna do is kind of show you how that process can be done with layers of cut board the Ergun laser cutting which gives you a bit more freedom than your joints to for sort of aesthetic and strength purposes so to do that we're gonna be going back sort of a flashback to a project that I had in college it was the first project for a class called mechanical prototyping which of course was a class where you learned how to prototype things design and build them and so for this first project we had to create a box didn't matter you know anything about it except that it had six joints six fasteners and you know you had a certain amount of wood that you could use to actually laser-cut to make it and so in the class I sort of employed a three-layer strategy so each of these walls for a six sided cube we're made with three layers of cut and yes and the top part had sort of like a lid that popped off of it but the goal of this is that you can actually when you have different layers that you're stacking two laser-cut you can get sort of some more dimensionality in terms of how these parts interact and assemble and fit together so when you have these laser-cut pieces you can have things like mortise and tenon joints that are hidden and fit in beside other parts that they're going to interact with or you can have these steps dovetail joints that normally you couldn't do with a laser cutter with just one layer because obviously you can't you can only cut in that one direction and all of it sort of pieces together to make a finished box and so I'm not going to go through these there were other things that we did like you know creative things like cutting things into the sides of the walls I'm not gonna show you any of that you can kind of have fun and you know go crazy on your own there but we're gonna cover sort of the joints that we're that we're going through and on this we're gonna be covering a sliding dado joints that's that lid that I was showing you a second ago as well as a rabbet joint mortise and tenon joints a butt joints a dovetail joint and a lap joint question mark because I know it's a little bit difficult once we sort of get going with it with the different layers and modifications it gets a little bit tough to actually classify you know what kind of joint this is we're gonna call it a lap joint because why not and finally a hidden snap Joey and I chuckle a little bit because this one I haven't actually tested like I haven't built it you know in person but like two seconds ago I decided that it might be kind of a cool thing to explore a little bit just to get your juices flowing so you'll see that happened I can't make any guarantees with the one that I make but you know you should have fun with it and see what you can get to work and so all of these are sort of in these three different layers to avoid some of the limitations that you get with other joints that are more typical for laser cutting so when you're designing for 2d you get a lot of things like captive nut joints which are I think one of the most clever designs ever I love them but they limit you a little bit in terms of strength in certain directions as well as like aesthetic you know issues that you might have you have other things like you know these sort of sliding and locking mechanisms or stacking or some of the simpler you know just kind of like tongue and groove and I think a tongue and groove but just you know teeth fitting together but we're gonna try to avoid those those limitations by making this with these three layers thick walls and so we're gonna end up with a box like this one with a sliding lid and again that box just to show you a little animation here it's gonna have a sliding lid six walls and those six walls are all going to have three different layers that will be cut profiles so when you glue these layers together they're going to be able to assemble into the full box so with that in mind we're gonna go ahead and get started the first thing I always do is work with parameters so when we start building our box I just want to give it a couple of variables to define the first one will be the length of the box so this is a cube we're gonna make so each of them can all be L I mean link that's fine and then I also want to define the thickness of the material that I'm using in this case we can just kind of assume you know three millimeter thick wood but this way since we're defining everything by these two different values if we decide to layer to make a larger box or to use a thicker kind of whoo or a thicker acrylic or whatever we're cutting we can do that really quickly and olive our you know there won't be any sort of sort of design problems that come from that it can all update from B's numbers that we change so I'll start with that guy first thing I want to do is show my origin so I can like what I'm working with here and I'm gonna start with an offset plane that's gonna let me draw my first wall on so I'm gonna bring this out to length divided by two so that's saying you know all the way out to the edge of the box essentially if you want the box to be centered around the origin and then I'm going to create a sketch on that new plane and if I face it I can start with a center point rectangle draw outs and name its length on the vertical and length on the horizontal whoops didn't like that in and then I can say stop sketch never bring this out again I can now go to create and say extrude I can pull that into negative thickness so what this is saying is that I want the outside wall of this box to be you know lengths wide and so as a result I'm going to be stacking these layers inward towards the origin that way our thickness is going inside so if I take this new one I'm gonna go over here two bodies and click on it and I'm gonna go in to create and I'm gonna say pattern rectangular pattern and for this I want to make sure the bodies is checked and for my direction I'm gonna choose that axis there and if I look in I can pull those in make sure that there's three layers because that is what I want this one is also putting three in a different direction I'm gonna change that to two one just to make sure that those are all set to not patterning over each other and on here I'm gonna make the distance negative length times two that's gonna make sure that excuse me negative thickness times two that got a little crazy I get a fitness times two that's going to make sure that they're all stacked close to each other and say okay all right their exact thickness is apart and now we have our three layer wall on the outside so I want to do now is make the other five walls similarly so if I take these three bodies I can go to create I can say pattern and circular pattern and I can pattern all of these around that central axis and if I make four that's gonna give me four walls to my box so you can see them overlapping in the corners and the reason that I want these overlapping in the corners throughout the design process is because those are where the joints are happening these are where we're going to be modifying these edges to fit together and so it's really nice to have them all overlapping from the start so that we can just take away until they all fit so finally what I want to do is take these three take these three layers and I also want to copy and paste them to be on the top in the bottom so I'm just gonna say Apple C Apple V and I'm gonna change my pivot point to be the origin and then I'll say done and that way I can just rotate these 90 degrees oops that was wrong rotate the 90 degrees and that's gonna stack them flat on top there and then finally what I can do is just a quick mirror so if I go to create I can say mirror and I can take these bodies that we just created those top three choose my mirror plane to be the bottom of the origin and then I could say okay and now I have a fully fully defined box with three layers on each side and now I want to do is make each of those sets of three walls into their own components so I'm gonna go over here to the global space and say new component and I'm gonna name that one front and then I'm gonna do the same thing for the back and once I have that I can actually go in and drag each of these walls that we've made into their respective components so these are the first thing I want to put them on the front wall so now we have each of our sides in separate components with their three independent layers that way as we're defining you know each of these joints we can do them by cutting into individual groups so to start this off I'm going to hit shift and that's gonna turn on component color cycling that way we have different colors for each component makes a bit easier to see each wall and what I want to do for this top top component is adjust its three layers to shrink in the sides of the top two and to leave a little bit of a lip on the bottom layer that way we have a place that we can make a track for this to slide in and out and if you look at this we want this to no longer interfere with each of these walls that's sort of our goal for each of the operations that we do is to cut away material so that are no longer interferes with the walls that way when we're finished it all stack together in this case it's pretty simple we just want all three of these fitting are all three thicknesses of each of the walls to cut into the top layer that way it just slides right inside of all of the other ones so to start that the first thing that I'm going to do actually is to rename the bodies in each of our components so I'm going to just hide each of these for a moment and on the front wall I want to change the names of my bodies to outside inside and middle this isn't necessary but it helps you when you're navigating and cutting things away from each other just be able to select them in the tree rather than in the browser so I'm gonna go through now and do that for all of these all right so what's the read all those there I'm gonna start cutting away and so to do that the first thing I want to do is activate the top component this way I'm only working on those parts so if I do that I want to hide the bottom and hide the front that way we're only really focusing on the where the three walls that go around it are interfacing with it so the first thing I want to do is make this top layer cut in so that it no longer intersects the three layers of each wall around it so I'm gonna go to combine and modify and I'm gonna choose the top layer and for my tool bodies I'm gonna select all nine of the walls that go around it then I say cut keep tools say okay and now I have a step up and it's no longer interfering with the three walls around it now I want to be exact same thing for the middle layer that's here and for my tools again same thing cut keep tools say okay and now if you look I've got our two top layers cut in from the side walls and I wanted a now instead of cutting in three layers thick three layers deep excuse me into the inside layer of the top I only want to cut in two layers so that I leave you know one little piece to go in and slide through a track so to do that I'm going to do another combine I'm going to choose my target by it to be that inside piece and for my outside tools I'm gonna choose the outside and middle walls of each of these other components say cut keep say okay and now as you'll see we have the top piece with two stepped in and a little shelf around the bottom which if you'll look at our top layer is exactly like this so actually this component is finished now we've got it done but its joint isn't finished if you remember we've got still three tracks to put in or four along the walls around it so I'm gonna go in now and cut into each of these three walls a little slit for this to go into so I'm going to start with this wall that's our right wall I'm gonna activate it and I'm gonna do a combine click the inner wall and for my tool bodies I'm gonna choose that bottom inside layer and you'll see where it's fixing to cut it out I'll say ok and then if I slide this around you'll see what we've cut out a track now for it to slide into so the next one that I'll do is the back I actually don't understand do this real fast on the other two the same way but it works the exact same all right and then once all three are there I'm going to activate the full assembly and you can see now where we have these different tracks that are going to hold our dado joints for our top piece I also want to make sure that this thing fits through the top or the front wall as well so I'm just gonna hide the back left and right and I'm gonna show the front wall which is right here activate it and what I'll do is take a combine and for all three of these I will cut out that top piece that we have there so we've got two more times get this guy those guys good and finally for that outer layer as well and if we activate the full thing now you can see there's no interferences and we're gonna have that nice sliding joint coming out of the front now if you wanted to get fancy I can show all of my other components and I can ground every one of them except for the top so I go through here I can ground those guys keep some fixed in space and if I go to assemble I can say an as-built joint between the top piece and like that left side piece my position can be along this edge between them make up slider joint which it already did there automatically for me and then say okay and maybe also go in to assemble enable contact sets and then I can make a new contact set between the back and that top piece say okay and now I have a functioning sliding dado joint as opposed to just a fixed one and that is the data joint so the next one that we want to do is a butt joint so if we look at our box over here I'm gonna hide everything except for the front and the bottom there you go and a butt joint is simply where one part just hits against the other one butts up against it nothing fancy no you know no geometry there except for hitting against it this is obviously the easiest one to do so I'm gonna do the same thing here I'm gonna hide everything except for the front and the bottom and all I have to do is draw in all three of those blue layers to where they hid behind the inside layer of the front this I don't actually even need the front for if you want to do it like we did in minute ago where we're working on using the combined tool and boolean operations to cut these out you can do that in three steps you know one for each layer or what I can do is just activate the bottom hide the front which is here and instead I can go in and do a press pull and I can click on each of those three front faces and I can move them in so I can do negative thickness times three and when I say okay that's gonna move them in behind the front so if we look at the front now you should see it butt up against it and now we have a functioning butt joint pretty simple and quick again you can do is a thousand ways the boolean operations are better for like more complex things whereas really quick simple stuff you can do with the press pull up next we have the lap joint so if we look at these this back wall here the purple one it has two walls coming up against it this red wall and this blue wall and the black joint is very similar to Bud joint except that a portion of the wall will extend past so it locks into it a little bit it's like it's a like one step more interlocking than a bunt it gives you a little bit more directionality in terms of your glue and like where things are going with prototyping it's if you know in this case it's much more of an aesthetic purpose it's just to cover up the outside wall and make the back of it look like it's full so that you lose a joint that goes between them but we're gonna do that one now pretty quick and it happens on both the left and the right walls so what I'm going to do is show the back and the left and the right and hide the top bottom in front and we can do here if we look back again as we have each of these two walls step back one fitness so we want to bring them back one thickness and then we also want to bring in the inside two walls of the back wall to come in two thicknesses so to do that I am gonna start off by hiding the back wall and I am going to activate the left wall now I'll do a press pull not on an edge let's do it on oh sorry yeah we'll do a press pole there we go on those three edges and we're going to bring them back negative fitness and then we're going to activate the right wall and do the exact same thing negative thickness now if we go ahead and show the back wall again we can see now where we've come close we just need to bring that back wall in it looks like two layers what did we have for this one we had the back wall coming in all three layers so I will let you know let's do a boolean operation why not we'll go to the back I'll choose a combine I'll choose that middle wall and I will cut it using all three of those I'll do the same thing for the inside wall as well and there we have two fully functioning lap joints again pretty quick pretty simple one step up from the butt joint in terms of complexity but it gives you a lot of freedom to decide where your edges are gonna live if we're gonna be laser cutting this if we're gonna stand it afterwards you might have burn edges that matter so it can be a structural help but in this case it's much more aesthetic so we've done the simpler joints where you're just pressing pulling or doing boolean operations but now I want to move to one that's a little bit more complicated that requires a little bit of sketch work as well very simple sketch work but a little bit of sketch work and that is the mortise and tenon joint so I want is to hide everything except for the right wall and I want to show the front wall and in between these I want to be able to have more santen and joint between this right wall sliding into the front wall so if we look back at our original box here what I'm going to do is hide the back wall and the right wall as well as the top and the bottom and if we look at this one now you can see we have one middle layer that has two protrusions that stick into the front layer there so if you look here we've got to that kind of slide into it and that gives us more of like a locking joint and if we move this front piece away a little bit you can see where that is so the middle layer of our left-hand wall has two protrusions and they will slide into holes cut out of the two layers of the front wall and if we go back to our box I'm gonna start off by cutting off all three layers thick of the three layers of the right wall I'll turn our component color cycling I'm going to activate the right wall and I am going to hide the front and we'll just start off with a pressed pull of the phases on this side so we'll do a press pull between those and we would go back negative thickness times three now the next thing I want to do is bring out two protrusions from the front of the middle layer so I'm gonna go into my bodies on my right side I'm gonna hide the outside piece and I'm gonna hide the inside piece leaving just the middle and I am going to create a sketch on that on the Front's earth or the inside surface of that middle piece and I'm going to go over to line and I'm just going to really quickly rough out two rectangles and when I make those I'm gonna go over to my constraints palette over here on the right and I'm just going to make make sure that they're the equal distance top and bottom as well as an equal thickness and what I'm gonna do is draw out a couple of quick construction lines that go between each of these and what that's gonna allow me to do is first square it all up so I'm gonna say horizontal vertical for this piece and this piece this piece this piece and this piece and then I can go in and again make these into construction lines I think we're in a selection filter here just select all click on our construction lines and make them construction and then what I can do is make them equal also that way these are evenly spaced and what I can do now is make sure that these are the right dimensions so for this one I want to make sure that it is two thicknesses thick so I'm gonna go to thickness x two and maybe for this one we can just say maybe our length divided by four that way we make sure that if we ever change the size of our box these aren't going to go like overlap in weird ways and do stuff that we're not expecting so once I have that I can say stop the sketch I can spin that around now I can click on an extrusion for those two there and I can go back a distance of negative thickness with two S's make sure it's on join say okay and now I have my my two protrusions coming out there for my mores and tenon joints so the next thing I want to do is make sure that those two things are cut out of the front panel so I'm gonna go and hide the inside and outside panels of that will of the right wall and then I'm going to go and show the front panel and activate it as well so now what I can do is a simple combined operation between that inside wall and the the right wall panel that we had there say okay I can do it once again for this inside wall that's here make sure it's on a cut do the outside there and say okay and now if I hide my right wall you'll see that we have those two cut out pieces for our laser-cut parts and with that we have also a corresponding right-hand wall that fits pretty beautifully right in there and if you want to look at side a little bit you can do you know show you with hidden edges and you kind of see where those parts line up another thing that you can do when you're working with these parts is to do a section analysis so I'm going to go up and activate the whole thing and with a section analysis I can click on one role drag it back and you can see where the other two are fitting in together and in this case again we have like zero tolerance thing happening here but that's because with the laser cutter we should be fine and it'll stick together anyways so we'll keep that that looks good say cancel on that and now we have our mortise and tenon joint finished so I just realized that we totally forgot to do one of the easier joints the rabbet joints so for that one what I'm gonna do is go back to our original box here and show you all the different parts and we will change our colors there and if we look at this one I'm going to do a section analysis on the back wall so that we can see the way that each of these two side walls is interfacing with the bottom so by simply stepping them one thickness each we end up having a stepped rabbet joint and through that we end up getting an outside wall that has a a flush piece that goes all the way down at the bottom so for aesthetic reasons this one's pretty simple it also locks them in a couple of do so to do that what I'm gonna do is switch over and I'm gonna shift and once again for our component color cycling and I'm gonna hide the front wall and I'm gonna show the back or the bottom which is right here so to make these line up what I'm gonna do is start by press pulling these two inner walls to be above their corresponding bottom walls so plan in southern bunch of garbage ooh I'm gonna hide the bottom that's what I'm gonna do first and I'm gonna show the right side I then activate the bottom sorry hide the bottom activate the right side and what I'll do now is press pull this inside wall to negative thickness and then I will press pull this wall to negative thickness times 2 now what I can do is deactivate the right side by activating the bottom and I will show the bottom and for this one I'm just gonna do a couple of combines probably so we'll do the the bottom there and we'll make that side piece the cut and we'll do it again for this middle piece and this time I want both the outside and the middle to cut it and then finally I'll do the top piece there and I will use all three of these to cut it away so the next thing I want to do is make that same step pattern on the other side to match the other wall so I'm going to go through the exact same process just to get to match up with the other side so that is the completed rabbet joint and the next one that I want to move on to is the dovetail joint so if I go back to my box design here we can see the back panel having sort of like upside-down pyramid steps coming out of it and correspondingly on the back on the bottom we have each layer getting a little bit wider and wider towards the top so the idea here is that you know if you haven't used them before with a step dovetail joint is that you can slide it in in one direction and it can't come out in the other direction so it keeps it really steady very strong joint and pretty easy to do with a laser cutter so what I'm gonna do is turn back our component color cycling and I'm going to hide our two side walls should be left and right which is suddenly escape there it is and I'm gonna turn on the back wall so if I go on show our back which is here all right and I want to start cutting into what that shape will be so what I'm gonna do is hide my back wall actually we're gonna go back and hide it and actually no no we're gonna show it we're gonna show the back wall and I'm going to create a sketch actually gonna activate the back wall ha all over the place activate that back wall now we're working in the back wall and under sketch I'm going to say create a sketch I'm going to put it on the back of that wall turn it over hide the bottom and now we're working strictly on the back so what I want to do here is draw out a couple of rectangles so I'm going to go to sketch I'm going to choose to point rectangle and I'm going to draw it one two and three so I actually drew that in the wrong direction so I just pick this back up I can scale it back in and we're gonna be dimensioning this afterwards so it'll make sense in a second and then once again I'm going to use my constraints to make these equal so this one should be equal to that one this one to that one and I can also go in now and start dimensioning out their thicknesses so this one should be exactly thickness thick and it should be this distance should be thickness and this distance should be this and the same on both of these sides as well thickness and all right so now what I want is three more of these and I want to make sure that I know exactly what width this is so to do that I think I'm going to define it from the bottom so I'm going to actually say instead that this bottom rectangle here is going to be three times the thickness if I want to be really robust I would make this be you know like a certain percentage of the full length that way if we ever changed the link that's not going to wig it out or anything but in this case I think maybe it's just easier to make it a thickness gonna know that we're not going to be changing this later anyways so we'll leave that on that thickness and now I need to draw three more of these similarly so I'm going to do that little fast as well all right now the last thing I want to do is give them equal spacing so I am just gonna draw a line from each of their midpoints to each other there are multiple ways that you could do this you can also you know only do two of these and then mirror them across that's probably a lot cleaner answer for me conceptually it's just little bit better to do it this way I don't know I just what I was thinking so put in those three make them equal and once that equal I can also make them construction lines and then I can say stop the sketch now if we zoom out look at the back section I can take each of these profiles and I can go back negative thickness x 3 say ok and now I have my cutouts for those steps dovetail joints and if I deactivate the back by activating the bottom I'm now working on the bottom pieces make it visible there and what I can do now is a combine and I can use all three of those to cut the bottom I can use all three of those to cut the middle and I can use all three of those to cut the top and now we end with a a very clean edge right there where other pieces are going to come in we have our step dovetail joints between the two so if I activate the total top you can see they're three separate levels on each one coming together to make a step dovetail joints and if I hide just so you could get a better idea hide the back if you look at this we can see a little bit better how this is actually going to print out on the laser cutter so we have a top section there that's pretty simple it's a rectangle with three fat edges if we hide it you see the next layer is going to be a larger rectangle with some skinnier edges and then finally we have the last piece that's gonna be kind of laser cutter that has your thinnest dovetail joint steps there so again whenever this box is put together those three layers are gonna stack together and glue just like these three layers are going to stack together and glue and then once they are finished when you assemble it those will just slide right into place so that is the finished step dovetail joint all right so the last thing that I want to do now is design a sort of hidden latch they can snap into place and hold two parts together if I want to find out sort of where I want to do that it can be a little bit tricky because when you're designing with these different layers we've sort of started out with all of them intersecting and then moving them out so they're no longer interfering to make joints we end up having a lot to keep track of you know like is this edge intersecting with this one did I get all of them right am I missing something so one really handy thing to do is to show all of the walls which I'm gonna do right here and if we zoom in a little bit there's a tool under inspect called interference and with interference I can go through and select all of the bodies in my model I'm gonna click on compute and that's gonna tell me if there are any things that are overlapping I can also say include coincident faces but the way that we design this all of our faces are pretty much coincidence so that's not helpful so we're just gonna leave that unchecked click on compute and you'll see that it gives us nine different warnings which makes sense because we still have one column here that we haven't addressed yet it has three layers intersecting three layers so we've got nine total problems and if we look around the rest of the box it looks like we've actually done a pretty good job of making all of the other joints come together they should be pretty much finished so I'm gonna working on the latch on this corner here so I'll say okay that's good all we got to do is clean this up and if I go back to the box design we can take a look at a section analysis so if I want something that's gonna go right in here I'll show you one that I've already made so you get an idea what we're going for and this is a latch that will come in from the right side wall and just snap over a little piece that's left over inside of the front wall so the idea here is that we can make a little latch sort of like this one that you might see with more two-dimensional sort of design we've got these two parts to come together has a little bit of a leeway so that the wind this when the snap slides over this protrusion here it's gonna snap up from these angles they're gonna push on it and move up and it's gonna snap run the back and lock into place so we want to do is make us a similar one but we want to hide it so it won't we want it to be hidden inside of a cavity inside of these three walls and so we can do that by cutting two holes into one of the walls and cutting one large hole into the middle wall and then this snap come in from the from the right side so that's all we're gonna do now again I haven't like tested this you know to know if it actually works if you laser-cut it you know what those sizes need to be you know so I would say if you're doing something like this do it a little bit less rash than I am doing it you can actually think about it a little bit and then you know do a couple of test runs on a couple of small pieces of material before you print out your whole box and try to assemble it or excuse me cut your whole box so what I'll do then is we'll start by focusing on the shape of the latch so I'm gonna go into this wall that's here if I click on it I see that that's my left wall I'm gonna activate it and I'm also going to isolate it so if I go down and say isolate that's gonna show only its and I want to also hide the inside and outside walls because since I want this to be sort of a hidden joint I want to focus on the middle wall it's gonna be in between those two layers and I'm gonna start a sketch on one side of it and again I mean obviously you'd want to put it like three or four of these features or you might want to put on I mean there's a whole you know range of things that you could do with this but I'm just doing it as an example so I'm also going to show the front here so you can see the layers that we're working around and what I want to do is start off by projecting these three faces that way we can design to them so I'm going to type in s to get my tool box project and I am going to project these three profiles now if I hide the front and I'll tell you what I want to do actually let's stop the sketch and I'm going to modify this wall a little bit before I start drawing that sketch so I'm gonna go back to before I made the sketch and I'm gonna show the outside and inside but I want to do right now is go ahead and and work on that clearance problem so if I do a press pull up here and modify and click on these three faces I can move them back negative thickness times three and say okay and now if I turn on my front you'll find that all of our interference has gone there and so just to make sure that that is the case I can go to inspect one more time say interference bring it across say compute no interferences so now those two are officially a butt joint we can say this box is finished but I do want to show you the latch so I'm gonna hit hide the front and again I'm gonna hide the outside on the inside move to the right I'm going to skip ahead to when I had created the sketch and I'm going to double click on the sketch to edit it and now I can come in here and draw this latch system so the first thing I want to do is define the part that the latch is going to go over so I'm gonna draw a little line right here and I'm gonna make it coincident and what I also want to do is draw out a line for a center line so we're going to design one half of the latch then just mirror it right over so I'll do is bring this down a little bit and now actually I'll bring it up a little bit sound like that yeah that's good and then I'm going to draw a line coming off of and again this is like no precise tolerancing here I'm just drawing this just kind of free-forming it I'm gonna come up and then I'm going to give it a little bit of a lip so that it can latch over the side and then I'm going to give it an angle and then once I come up I can draw another line across the top and from there you can play with these you can give them different thicknesses again what would really help here would be testing this after you laser-cut it and get some ideas of what those dimensions need to be but this works for the entire latch snap you can imagine this piece protruding off of this we might want to bring this down just a smidge and then that way you have a rectangular piece to cut into for it to snap over so you'll see that kind of happening in 3d in just a moment so now what I want to do is go to sketch and say mirror and for that I want to click on each of the components that we've drawn here and I want to mirror it across this Center that we created and say okay and once we've done that I can say stop the sketch and now what I want to do is have those protrusions actually extruded but when I look at this I might have a couple of design choices here so we sort of roughly guessed you know what these tolerances should be to go around this piece that comes in but I did not do that for this edge I forgot to add a couple of lines there so I'm just gonna go back to the sketch and I'm going to say l4 line and I'm just going to draw something to just slice that right off and then I can say trim which is T and that's gonna let me get rid of some extras that we have there and then I can say stop sketch so once we've done that now I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and I'm gonna use the extrude tool to extrude these two profiles which you can see there and I'm gonna bring them back negative thickness make sure it says join and say okay and now we have our hidden snap feature to go over and slide into the inside of the front panels now with the front panels I want to come in here and let's say where we have front there we go and if we look at this it's sliding into the bet the inside and the middle of the front so I want to ignore the outside of the front so I'm just gonna hide it for a moment and I want to design if I look at this it needs two holes in this piece one hole here that can cover both this piece sliding in as well as its deflection as it's being pushed over that Center pole and I ate it for the same thing for the other side on the inside I need holes for these things to set in so we need holes for when they're deflecting and then they finally snap into place I'm just gonna put one large cavity there that's the easiest thing to do I think so what I'll do is hide actually I'd already hidden let's just move this in and out what I'm gonna do is activate the front panel which is here we're gonna say fit so you can see what we're doing here and what I want to do is draw a sketch around these intersecting pieces so you can already see where they enter where they're intersecting in the plane right now so I'm gonna start a sketch and I'm gonna create it on this body and then what I'll do is say s which is opening up my tool box and say intersect you can also find this tool under sketch project include and intersect and that will choose a body and it will create a sketch sketch geometries of where that body intersects the plane so then I can say okay that looks good and what I want to do now is create a couple of lines that are just going to give it some leeway so you'll see that what I mean for the in just a second so I'm going to give these two a dimension of let's just say thickness times two maybe they're not just thickness and we'll do the same thing on this side and then if we say stop the sketch and what I'm gonna do now is hide my left-hand panel and now I can do an extruded cut for these two profiles and I can bring them in negative thickness and that's going to cut them right through now the next thing that I want to do is hide the inside piece that I just drew but I want to show the sketch that I just made because I can take those same profiles to make my entire cavity that goes back through the middle layer so now I can say negative thickness times two that's going to cut through that piece and if we show the inside so the inside and the middle and hide our sketch now we can see that we have sort of a pocket with a bar going across the middle so that's the piece that our latch is going to snap over and if we show the left side piece which is here whoops there we go and let's go ahead and activate the full thing and now we can see where that snap comes in and goes across that middle bar so again just just show you stepping across and then of course we've still got our front outside piece that's gonna hide all of that and if we show all of our other components we have our completed box and I'm gonna forget about those walls there I'll show those and just to make sure that everything looks good I'm going to do a quick section analysis on this side and bring it back in and take a look at what our system actually looks like which if we show it here you can see our snap coming in snapping over the bar everything looks good and I think this would actually work pretty well I don't know for sure that's just kind of going on intuition but it seems like it worked pretty well you could make me do it like a simulation analysis up to see how that's gonna work if it's gonna snap off or not with wood you can't really do that very you know predictably but if you're doing acrylic or something we can see if that would work but for this sake I'd say we're done I think we have our completed what I'm calling a hidden latch joint or a hidden snack and that also completes the box and finally what I always like to do with the design is go back and make sure that you know the way that I've designed it if I made changes that it's a robust design that can update with those changes the first thing I want to do is just add some holes and each of these walls kind of like our original box over here has so if I wanted to do that a really quick easy way to do that would be to go back into the sketch that made the original first wall double-click it and what I can do is go into sketch and give an offset and I could offset that a certain amount so let's say like negative 4 times thickness maybe yeah that's fine they get a 4 times thickness say ok and then stop the sketch and here it should be the exact same as was before if I go back and edit my original extrusion I can actually change that profile to just the outside and if I did this right everything should blow the same it does so that's our finished box with its holes cut in it and we might decide to that we wanted to change the size of it or change the thickness so just to make sure that all that works out smoothly I'm gonna go in and change this from six inches to eight inches make sure that change is okay looks good I think all of our joints update it appropriately looks smooth and then if you want to change our three millimeter sheets to a two millimeter sheet see how that goes yeah looks good I think everything is all set and that about does it for us so thanks again for watching I know it's kind of a long video but hopefully it was helpful to you if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comment section as always or you can tweet me at Tanner s Reid we love to get any sort of feedback or questions that you have about the workflows cific and hop however we can so thanks again have a good one

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 27,727

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, Rendering, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, cloud manufacturing, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution, wood-working, joints, joinery, lap joint, mortise and tenon, rabbet joint, butt joint, dovetail joint, stepped dovetail, laser, laser-cutting, lasercutting, layers

Id: HKcgTsXM4h4

Length: 50min 0sec (3000 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2016