Episode 05, Fusion 360 Assemblies and Joints

hello everyone and welcome to episode 5 of fusion 360s Tech Thursday today's session is about assemblies and joints I get asked this question quite often how what's the best way to assemble components together inside a fusion 360 so I'm going to show you some of the basics and then I'm going to show you some tips that I've learned using the the assemblies making things a little bit easier to work in complex assembly so let's dive right in okay so what we're going to talk about today is this assemble menu now I have been asked in some of the chat that my menu looks a little bit different than what you're used to typically you would come over here and go to assemble or whatever that was the previous version what I did is under preferences preview we have this UI preview and I highly recommend taking a look at it because we've spent some time making the menus a little bit easier to use a little more manageable all the commands I kind of write here across the top such as your solid modeling your surfacing your sheetmetal and then the assemble menu and this is where we're going to kind of focus today I'll also share the files that you see now way you can play around with these so I'll put those in the description a little bit later ok so you can see on the screen I have a bunch of different components and I can tell that they're components because of the little cube icon if they were bodies they would have a little cylinder icon now you have to have components to assemble things ok and again I've talked in but previous livestream the difference between bodies and components so if you haven't seen that particular a session I'll also link to it in the description highly recommend watching that one I talked about the difference between a regular body and a component and we also talked about how if you want to assemble anything if you want things to interact with each other they have to be components okay so under the assemble menu in fact you'll see the very first command is new component but then there's the joint command okay and there's two different kinds you'll see the joint command and then as built joints and I love as built joint expect you'll see me I'm gonna show how powerful these are here in a moment but we're gonna start with the joint command okay and what this does is it brings up the joint menu and sure enough you can see that it says component 1 and component 2 so it basically tells you hey these have to be components to be able to position them one of the other questions I get asked a lot is well how do you know which one to move like how do you know where it's gonna go and so a little trick that I've come up with is using these little numbers right here which one do you want to move and where do you want to move it to so that's kind of how I remember how this thing's going to work so for example if I wanted to move this you know cube shape right here this would be my component 1 this is the one I want to move and where do I want to move it to I want to move it to this other gear housing down here so hopefully that's a little trick that you'll remember that I use that helps me remember so I'm gonna say component 1 is gonna be this guy ok now just looking through this menu really quick the other important thing is this motion type and you'll notice it remembers the last motion type that we've used and in this case I had done a pin slot example but you can see we have rigid revolute slider cylindrical pin slot planer and ball and so I'm going to talk about these so rigid basically ties down all degrees of freedom okay let me show you what I mean by that so I'll use this cube as an example here so typically when in especially in other CAD systems back in the day when you wanted to move something you would basically say for example mate that face with this face over here and it would basically slide I'm just kind of freestyling here it would slide that over until those faces were in line with each other then you might say mate that face with this face down here and it would slide the part down until it was touching and again I'm just kind of free handing it here but now you can see how it's touching that face down there and then finally you might say something like mate that face with this little tiny face right here and it would slide this forward etc but you can see it's basically tying down those degrees of freedom so it was basically saying this wall over here has to touch this wall over here the bottom of the block has to touch the bottom of the part and the front of the block has to touch that other face and so you're you're tying down those degrees of freedom it could also rotate around for example this axis or this axis or this axis and so that's your 3f side your six degrees of freedom it can move left or right up or down forward or back it could rotate around any of these other axes okay so when we were designing fusion we said there's got to be an easier way and so what we do is we actually tie down all degrees of freedom and then open up the ones that make sense so for example if I wanted this rod to slide through this block I don't want it to move up and down I don't want it to move left or right I don't want it to rotate around any edges or anything like that the only thing I want it to do is to be able to slide forward and back through that block and so we would tie down all those degrees of freedom and open up that one degree of freedom to allow it to slide forward and back through the block and you'll see this as we start to go through okay so let's go ahead and do a joint command so I'm going to say joint what's the one that I want to move well it's this guy and where do I want to move it to I want to move it to this kind of shaded block right now I'll explain that in just a moment I'm going to zoom up on this and you'll notice as I move around I get a lot of little icons that appear and they appear on a bunch of different faces and again depending on what you hover over you're gonna get different results okay so what these little tick marks are is it kind of helps guide you so it's kind of hard to see but there's little round ones in the corner those are end points there's little triangles in the middle those are I can't really point to them those are midpoints so I could catch to the middle of this edge for example so circles are endpoints triangles or midpoints then you'll see a square right in the middle and that's basically the centroid of that face you'll notice if I come over here we can see the square right here in the middle I mean kind of move out of the way you can see the circles and the triangles let me go to something that has some other geometry on it like this notice in the circle there's a little plus symbol I'm kind of hovering over it right now I'll move away just a little bit that's the center of a cylinder or a circle so it's like an axis okay so what this allows us to do is we can pick very specific points so in this case for example maybe I want to grab this upper right corner so I'm just gonna go ahead and click on that upper right corner and you can see component 1 has now been selected where do I want to make it go to I want it to go to this green part but I want it to go to a very specific location I want it to go right there so I'm basically telling it line up those two corners so watch what happens when I go ahead and click on let me change this guy to rigid I'll click on this point and you'll see that that gray block is gonna move into place we go ahead and animate that and you see it kind of shake so the shaking you'll see on all of our motion types we have an animation that kind of shows is it gonna slide is it rigid so it's kind of shaking showing that it's rigid is it revolutes you'll see all of these as we go through so the the shaking is kind of showing that hey these are rigid with each other we've basically glued them welded them press fit them whatever term you want to use they are rigid with each other okay so I'll go ahead and say ok and we can see that's sure enough it moved that gray block from up here down to here and if I try and grab this gray block and click and drag it like for example I can drag all of these other parts no problem but I can't grab this gray part anymore because it is rigid with this green part okay now with that said there's a tip here that I get asked a lot also is how come you can move these other parts but not these you'll notice on the gear housing icon there's a really small little thumbtack icon and you don't see that on any of the other ones and that's because I've grounded this part okay you basically have to tell Fusion which part is stationary which part are you holding on to which part is bolted to the table or whatever and you would pick that and ground it so you can see right here that the gear housing is grounded so I'm gonna actually unground it and you'll notice that the pin goes away now watch what happens when I grab that gray block it moves with the green gear housing ok that's because fusion doesn't know which part is supposed to stay stationary all it knows is that they're rigid with each other so if one moves both of them has to move okay so we need to tell Fusion which part is stationary so here's another trick if you click on a part it actually highlights it in the browser you can kind of see that line right there so for example if I click on this one here you'll see that's the connector rod if I click on this guy here that's the crank arm so instead of trying to remember what did I call that part you can just click on the part and it highlights it in your browser so I'm gonna right mouse click on it and up near the top is the command called ground so I'm gonna go ahead and hit ground we can see that that little pin icon shows up and now if I try and click and drag that green part you'll notice that I can't it's being held in place ok let's continue on again I'm gonna use the joint command or the J key is the shortcut so I'll say joint what's which part do I want to move which one do I want to move well I want to move this gray part where do I want to move it to ooh I want to move it to this block down here okay so again I can kind of like hover over certain things or whatever but what I'm going to do here is basically say I want this edge to line up with this edge in here okay so I'm going to hover over this edge and you see that little round icon up here this is what we call our joint origin and you'll notice as I get near the middle it kind of snaps toward the middle if I get near the end it's gonna snap toward the end so every Edge has a start point a mid point and an end point doesn't matter which edge it is okay each edge has a start a middle and an end so what I had to do here is basically say you know what I want the middle of this rod lined up with the middle of that block so I'm just gonna get kind of near that middle mark right there and click where I want it to go to I want it to go to this other part and I'm gonna zoom up a little bit so you can kind of see what's going on here and again you can see this edge has a start a middle and an end so I'm going to go ahead and grab the middle there and watch what happens to my rod right there it moves into place and you saw the animation of it being rigid okay it's tied down all degrees of freedom well obviously obviously in this case we don't want to tie down all degrees of freedom I want it to be able to slide so I'm going to change my motion type from rigid to slider and instantly it opens up that one degree of freedom act I'll hit animate you can kind of see what that looks like so opened up that one degree of freedom so it can slide forward and back but it can't rotate it can't move up and down left to right etc I'll go ahead and say okay and now that part is in place and if I try and drag on it notice the result that I get it actually allows me to slide back and forth it doesn't matter if I move my mouse up or down left or right or in circles or whatever it's only gonna slide in that one direction okay now I have not set any limit string like that so you can see we can actually like clash with another part which in reality you wouldn't be able to do but we're gonna learn about limits here in just a moment so hopefully this is making sense now honestly using coming from other CAD systems I actually find the joints command in fusion to be one of the easiest ones to understand you basically say I want to go from here to here and I want it to do a certain kind of motion whether it's a revolute whether it's a slider whether it's a rigid etc so if you're coming from other CAD systems this could be a little bit different than what you're used to but play around with it and you'll see hopefully like I did that it's actually pretty easy to use okay so let's continue on here we have this gear floating up in space so I'm going to go ahead and again do the joint command and let's zoom up on this guy now remember I showed you what when you hover over faces you get these different tick marks watch what happens when I hover over this guy you can see it actually gives me tic marks for all the gear teeth etc but the one I'm most concerned about is this edge right here and notice what it's doing it's actually snapping to the center of this circle so this is actually doing almost like two things in one it's finding the center axis of that edge and it's finding the plane that that edge is on okay so I'm going to go ahead and just hover over like a circular edge and click so that's the component that I want to move where do I want to move it to I want to move it to this edge down here okay so I'm gonna go ahead and click and you'll see it move it into place but then we see kind of a weird result okay now why is it going up and down through the part well fusion remembers the last motion type that you've used and the last one that I did was the slider so it basically said okay you're probably still wanting to do a slider well obviously no we don't so I'm gonna come in here and say instead I want it to revolve as soon as I hit revolute you'll notice that it ties down all degrees of freedom translational freedom and it opens up that one degree of rotational freedom and it's pretty cool I would say like 99.5% of the time it figures out the correct direction to turn but you can see you actually do have control over here for example it's rotating around the z-axis I could say rotate around the x-axis now that doesn't make sense in this case but you can see that's sure enough it's revolving around the x axis or the y axis but we obviously want the z axis okay I'll go ahead and stop the animation now what what happened here well I told it to line up the bottom of the gear with the top of the hole that goes through the green part so if we were to section through right now this gear is basically sitting on the floor of this green part well you'll notice that we have some alignment options here and we also have these arrows over here let me just start with the arrows I could just grab this gear and drag it up you can see sure enough we're offsetting it 44 millimeters in the z direction so even though I told it to line up this bottom edge with this inside edge hard to highlight we're telling it off set a certain distance from that so if I wanted a little bit of clearance I could say I'll set it one millimeter or whatever and it's gonna do that I can also specify which angle I want this to be so let's say I want that to be a 45 degrees I can do that also okay I'll hit OK and now it's at 45 degrees but I can come in here and drag on this guy and you can see how we can rotate that around okay let's move on here let's continue with these little bushings that we see kind of floating out here I'm going to assemble these bushings into this blue part kind of out here in space and then we'll move the whole like blue part sub-assembly into location so let's go ahead and do a joint command and I'm going to just get near this top edge right here and I'll go ahead and click this is the one I want to move and where do I want to move it to I want to move it to this blue part now here's the catch I'm going to zoom up a little bit here and if I get really close you can actually see that there is a very small Filat on this blue part so that actually gives me two edges that I could catch too and one of them is lower than the other because it's a fillip so we want to be pretty careful which edge we're gonna catch too okay so I'm gonna kind of go like this you can kind of see as I move around the circle get a little bit smaller a little bit bigger that kind of thing so I'm gonna make sure I'm clicking on that outside edge and you'll see that that bushing moves into place but we can also see that it was revolving around again fusion remembers the last motion type which was a revolute in this case we're gonna say it's like a press fit bushing so I'm gonna come in here say rigid and I'll say okay so if I grab my blue part and move it around now we can see that that bushing moves with it okay I see in the chat window somebody asked where can we get this example file I will post it out into the description once the video is posted out onto YouTube oh it's not out there right now but I'm come back in a little while and it'll have that in the description so thanks for asking about that okay so let's do this other bushing I'm gonna go ahead and say joint grab the bottom edge but this time I'm gonna purposely make a mistake and let's let's pretend you didn't see me make this mistake but I'm going to go ahead and put it on that wrong edge on that inside edge so I'm gonna go ahead and click there it moves it into place it remembers my last motion type was rigid so this one's rigid I'll say okay and let's say I've done a bunch of other stuff so I can't really use the undo command very easily but as I'm looking at this I can see oh my gosh there's a little bit of a standoff right there or the other one there isn't and so if we look at the bottom sure enough we can kind of see it's positioned incorrectly so what do we do about this well all I have to do is go into my joints folder right here and here it's displaying all of the different kinds of joints that we've created in fact let me zoom out so you can kind of see there's our first you know rigid joint that we did and you can see it highlights it in my timeline there's the slider joint right there and it's a little hard to see but you can see that each joint type has a different icon so this one's showing it's gonna slide in that direction the little Lego bricks lot together kind of show that they're rigid with each other if I click on a revolute you can see it has like a little flag in fact when I rotate this you'll see that that flag actually updates with the it's hard to see the angle in there it says 65 degrees okay but all I have to do is click on this last one and I can see that sure enough it highlights that particular joint and say edit joint and it brings up my joint command now I can make the assumption that the component one that I clicked on was correct but where I put it too was incorrect so I'm going to hit the little X next to component two and you'll see that the part kind of goes away but it's now allowing me to select component two again so I'm going to be more careful this time I'm gonna grab this outside edge and you'll see that it brings it in place but it's upside down well that's where this flip icon comes into play I just click flip you can see that we can flip the orientation if we need to but sure enough it looks more flush that one there looks flushed it's looking good I'll go ahead and say okay so you can always edit existing joints in fact we could come in here and say you know what instead of a rigid press-fit joint I want it to be a revolving joint and you can see it's animating that that thing is revolving around okay so you can always come back and edit your joints if you need to okay let's go onto this red part here so again I can click on the joint command or I can just be out here and hit the J key on my keyboard J for joint and you'll see that it brings up the joint command again I'm gonna make a mistake I'll go ahead and click on this top edge I'll click on this top edge which should be correct it puts it into place it's a rigid it looks good but when I look at it from the side we can see that the red bushing is sticking out through the bottom well why is that well it's actually because the red bushing is taller or thicker than the blue part and I told it to line up the top edge with the top edge well I obviously want it to be equally spaced okay so I'm gonna undo in this example I'll just say undo and here is one of the tips that I want to share with you I'll say joint and instead of picking on an edge I'm gonna hover over like a cylindrical face and you'll notice that a cylinder has a top a midpoint and a bottom point same thing over here this cylinder has a top a middle and a bottom point so I should be able to line up the middle of this cylinder with the middle of this cylinder so that's what we're gonna do I'm gonna hover over this face right here I'm gonna grab this middle point okay then I'm gonna come over here and do the exact same thing I'm gonna hover over and I'm going to grab the middle point you'll see that it slides over and if we look at it from the side we now have some equal spacing because it basically lined up the midpoints of those cylinders okay I'm gonna cancel out of that and I'm actually going to show you another little tip that I find very very useful that not a lot of people know about so when I positioned this red cylinder over here you'll notice when I do the joint command I get a lot of flashing so it's trying to catch two edges two faces two edges two cylinders inside cylinders outside cylinders it can get pretty confusing trying to catch that middle point right there okay what I want to be able to do is to control my selection and that's the exact key you want to hold down so notice as I'm moving around it's catching all of these edges and faces and stuff like that but when I hover over this cylinder I can kind of see what I want so I'm gonna hold down my control key and now notice that it is not snapping or selecting or highlighting those other edges I've controlled my selection to just be this outside cylinder as soon as I let go of my control key I'm back to catching edges and faces etc but if I hover over this guy hold down my control key now your notice I'm controlling my selection to that inside cylinder so again I'm using a little saying I want to control my selection then that helps me remember to use the control key same thing over here as I'm moving around it's trying to catch two faces and edges etc it can get pretty confusing I just hover over I hold down my control key and you'll notice now even though I'm moving over on these other faces it's not highlighting or snapping to those okay so I'm going to go ahead and control my selection to that middle point and say okay so you hear me say a lot of times I come up with these little sayings you know like which one do you want to move where you want to use your control key again I'm hoping these are helping you they help me I'm trying to remember which order do I do things and how do I get that selection to happen so let me know if this is helpful if you didn't know about this whatever throw it in the comments I like to like to learn that you guys are learning from these web sessions so so let me know okay now I have this blue part fully assembled in fact if I move my blue part we can see that everything moves with it okay so now all I have left to do is to put it into place and I'll use the joint command one more time what's the one that I want to move I want to move this blue part so I'm actually gonna look go underneath this blue part a little bit and grab maybe this circular edge right here okay which component don't want to move it too well I'm gonna move it to this connector rod here and again I have to be a little bit careful because there's a chamfer here with a outside and an inside edge so I want to make sure I grab this outside edge I'm gonna go ahead and click and we're gonna see a couple issues okay first thing is we see our bushings that we just assembled floating out here in space and this freaks a lot of people out there like hey I just assembled those why didn't they move and the answer is actually right here we're only dealing with two components at a time the one that we want to move and the one that we want to move it to ok so we're dealing with the blue part and the gray part as soon as I say okay fusion says hey those bushings are supposed to be in the middle of the blue part you know cetera etc and so it updates it as soon as I say okay however here is the issue that we're gonna see if I look at this from the side we can see that it did exactly what I told it to it lined it up exactly on top of that gray part but we can see that there's a gap here and again this is because the gray part is thinner than the blue part okay so let's go ahead and fix that you might be saying well all you need to do is you know do the cylinder thing like we did with the red part however there's no cylinder in here there's no midpoint to catch so here is one of the other tips that I'm going to show you and that is a command called between two faces again not a lot of people know about this and I'm going to show a couple examples of this will do this blue part and then I'm actually going to go to another part just to kind of show you how useful it is so I'm gonna say joint then I'm gonna right mouse click and you'll see there is an option here that says between two faces now we have to remember that it's in the right mouse click menu so I'm gonna say between two faces I'll grab maybe this face here I don't even have to rotate it actually knows hey you're gonna select a planar face so we're gonna grab this face right here and then you can I move up here I'll hover over this circular edge and I'm gonna pause here for a moment so you can kind of see what's happening on the screen it's hard to see but there's that little tan or orange whatever color you want to call it plane between those two faces it's almost like a mid plane between those two faces then we can also see the joint origin is on that plane in the center of that axe so we're basically saying let me click a point out here in space that's on the axis of this circle so I'm going to go ahead and click that guy there in fact if I hover around you can see how that's kind of just in the middle of space right there but it's perfectly lined up in the center of the circles then I'll come over here control my selection to the midpoint here because we caught basically the middle over here we're going to catch to the middle over here we'll see it slide into place let's kind of look at it from the side and sure enough we can visually see that we have equal spacing now and hopefully this made sense we we basically said find the center of the circle here in space between those two faces yeah let me zoom back out the last thing is you'll notice that it thinks it's a rigid joint because that's the last one that we did well I want this to be a revolute joint so I'm going to turn it to revolute we can see that sure enough that's revolving around that axis I'll say okay and there we go all of my other bushings move into place and if I grab this blue part we can see that it revolves but it's also kind of forcing the slider to only be able to slide so it's kind of limiting my motion a little bit but we can kind of see how this is going to work okay so the very last thing we need to do is to connect our blue part with the gear but you'll notice we're actually missing a component we don't have a pin that goes through these parts well you don't actually have to have a solid model to create a joint so I'm gonna come over here and say joint again I'm gonna make a mistake here to show you the power of fusion so I gonna say let's line up the top of this red part with the top of this gear and you'll see it's gonna move it down and it kind of simulates it but you'll notice I get a warning that says the selected joint type would result in a conflict well what does that mean well it's trying to put this red part way down here but fusion knows hey I'm supposed to be up here so I physically can't do that okay and physically you couldn't do it anyways because they would intersect each other so I wanted to be able to revolve but I also need to be able to have it move up or down so it can be in the correct location on this part up here so we're actually going to open up two degrees of freedom we're gonna use a cylindrical joint and what this does it actually opens up a rotational and a slider joint it's kind of hard to see in the animation but you'll see it moving up and down but it's also rotating around okay so when I say okay it actually updates this you can kind of see as I rotate around we're now lined up with that gear and the red part moved into the correct location okay if I rotate this gear around we can actually simulate how this is gonna work now you'll notice it gave me some some red arrow or red explanation points saying hey this can't work but as soon as I hover over those it basically updates them and obviously this does work so I'm going to go ahead and rotate this around and we can simulate that this is actually an assembly from like a sawzall machine where a motor turns the gear and a blade is connected to this particular rod right here and moves forward and back so that is the basics of using the joint command inside of fusion 360 I'm gonna show a couple of the other joint types and then I'm going to show you the as-built joints which I think are awesome so here's like a cool example I'm gonna go ahead and say joint again so we've talked about rigid we talked about revolute so we talked about slider and we've talked about cylindrical then we have pin slot so pin slot is basically exactly what it sounds like if you had a pin that needs to move forward back through a slot and rotate for example it opens up those degrees of freedom planar is like a hockey puck on an ice rink you want it to be able to move like in the X and y direction in any direction in the X and y but you don't want it to move up and down for example and then ball joint ties down all translational degrees of freedom but opens up rotational degrees of freedom in fact let me let me show you that one this is actually kind of cool I'm gonna let's just insert a mcmaster-carr component so I'm going to go out to mcmaster-carr and let's just do a search let's just do the search for a ball joint I'm gonna say ball joint actually you know what let's do a you join this is pretty cool let's do a u joint and I'm just gonna grab this guy here and in mcmaster-carr if you see this little cad symbol it means that there's a three-dimensional representation that you can download you can see there's a drawing of it and I have it set to step so I'm gonna just say save and in less than a second it brought this in okay now if I open this guy up we can see that there's some bodies here and if I try and drag this you can see it moves everything around so I want these to be complete so I'm going to say create components from bodies so now I can actually separate these and move them around individually so that's proof to me that their components I'm going to go ahead and click on this guy that's component 3 let's ground him we don't want him to move so now if I try and drag on him he can't move now I can move this other guy but we've grounded this guy okay and then lastly let's just do a ball joint oops let me go to assemble joint let me for now let's set it to rigid just for for fun I'm gonna say this component here and this component actually you know what let's let's do this the right way I'm gonna do it as an as-built joint because it's already where it needs to be I'm just gonna go ahead and show the as-built joint I'll say as built joint I'm gonna set it to ball and you'll notice as built joint is very simple it says what are the components and what's the motion type so I'm going to set it to ball this component and this component and then you'll see on my cursor it says select reference so I'm gonna just click on the ball and it gives me a preview of what that will look like so you can kind of see it's rotating in all different directions I'll say okay and now if I grab on this part I can simulate that this is a ball joint okay now unfortunately I can also go into the part which is not realistic okay so here's a really cool trick under the assemble menu we have a command called contact sets and I'm going to talk about these a little more but basically it it live checks to see if parts are intersecting with each other or clashing with each I'm gonna say an able all contact and it's gonna analyze now as I move this around it's gonna analyze am I gonna hit anything so you'll notice as I come over here even though I'm still dragging to the right it physically can't go any further same thing going toward the back here you can see that it's hitting this shoulder and I can't go any further that direction so this is an exact simulation of what this ball joint could do okay pretty cool okay so I'm gonna show you as built joints like I mentioned previously this is probably my favorite part of the assemble menu I just find them so useful and so powerful but what they are is if your assembly is already assembled for example maybe you downloaded something off of grab CAD or mcmaster-carr or you've assembled your you know weight when you design your assembly you designed them in place and all kind of stuff and now you want to simulate how are those going to move well you would use as built joints so I'm gonna show you again with a mcmaster-carr component I'm gonna say insert pick master car I like to make the window just a little bit bigger and let's do a toggle clamp so let's just do maybe this clamp here I'll do these hold down toggle clamps and I'm just gonna randomly pick maybe just like this first one here it has little CAD symbol and let's do a save and it's gonna bring that toggle clamp into fusion and this this is a huge way of saving a lot of time for something that you know might already exist so instead of having to model it yourself you can just go out and say hey is there a toggle clamp is there a gear is there a pulley etc so you can see it brought this toggle clamp in again I'm going to right click on bodies and say create components from bodies now these are all individual components that I can move around okay so they have to be components to be able to move okay so the first thing I want to do is to make something rigid so for example I'm going to click on this part here and it highlights its component two so we'll right-click and say ground and now I physically can't move that part anymore okay I can move the other ones but I can't move the grounded one so here's where as built joints is just so powerful I'm going to say as built joint and a lot of these are revolute so I'm going to change this to revolute what are my components well let's just say this guy and this guy and then it's asking for a reference so what is it going to revolve around and I can pick on edges I can pick on cylinders it doesn't really matter like faces for example even this blend if I wanted to okay but I'm just gonna grab a circular edge I'm gonna click on it and it instantly gives me a preview of that revolving around so it was already in the correct location I just said hey revolve around that pin and now when I grab on this part we can see that sure enough it's revolving around that pin we also see an issue the rubber handle isn't moving with it so that is rigid group very useful command I'm gonna say rigid group and I want that guy and that guy to be rigid with each other so now if I move the metal handle the plastic one moves if I grab the plastic handle the metal one moves they're rigid with each other so very very useful for example let's say you're designing a cabinet or something in fusion and you have a hinge that has three screws on each side you could have those screws positioned in the holes and say rigid group these three screws with the leaf of the hinge and when that hinge moves those screws move so let's continue on with this as built joints you'll see how fast this is revolute well I know that this guy and this guy revolve around that edge I know that we kind of zoom up here this guy and this guy revolve around that edge and finally this guy and this guy revolve around that edge so you can see how I've built all of those joints now if I grab my handle we can physically see how these are gonna interact and remember I didn't model this I actually downloaded it off of mcmaster-carr but I'm able to work with it just like it was created inside a fusion 360 now we see an issue we we have this guy over here that's not moving with it and we can almost think that this is like a sub assembly they should all move together so I'm gonna use rigid group because right now these are all individual components that can move I want them to move together so I'm going to say rigid group that one that one that one that guy that guy that guy so I select all of the parts I want to be rigid and now if I move any of them doesn't matter which one they all move together very very useful instead of saying this nut is you know connected to this washer which is connected to this you know rod which is connected cetera et cetera you could that way but in this case we're just saying hey those move all together however I want it to be able to slide back and forth in the slot so I'll say as built joint slider I'm gonna say this washer and this part right here and then it's asking for a reference well I just want it to slide along this edge right here so I'm just gonna click on that edge and you can kind of see it gives me a preview with that washer kind of sliding back and forth okay but watch what happens now if I grab any of the parts whether it's the rubber stopper part or the nut or whatever you can see that sure enough that slides back and forth and if I grab the handle they move together so we can kind of see how that works and just like before you'll notice there's a mechanical stop on this flange if I drag like so it's actually gonna slice through it in fact we're gonna get some really weird results we're like intersects itself which obviously can't happen so let's use that contact set now this time instead of saying enable all contact I'm gonna be more careful I'm gonna specify which parts I want to analyze if I said enable all contact right now it would actually try and analyze all of these threads which it could bring fusion to its knees potentially so in this case I'm gonna say unable contact sets and you can see we got a new little item here in my browser okay and then I'm gonna come back in here and say new contact set so we enabled it we said turn this option on now I want to say new contact set it's asking for the bodies or components and I want to say analyze when this part in this part might touch so you see two selected I'll say okay I'll drag to the right and notice it stops okay it stops right there because it physically can't go any further now I see another issue right here whereas I'm moving this around it's kind of sliding outside of this part here okay so here is where we could set some limits so I'm going to go into my joints to my slider and say edit joint limits and I can specify my minimum and my maximum limits so I'm going to say let's just say the maximum is over to here or the minimum is over to here and the maximum was over here for example I'll say okay and now if I grab this guy you'll see you can I can't go any further to the right I can't go any further to the left so I'm basically limited how far I can slide that back and forth now if I drag this guy here you can see that it no longer goes outside so that's the joint limits now why would I want to do this well maybe I'm mounting this clamp onto my CNC machine and I want to see do I have enough clearance for the gantry do I have enough clearance for the z-axis as it's moving along I now know exactly how tall this particular clamp is I could take measurements for example I kind of know the envelope of this clamp okay hopefully you found that interesting I mean just how quickly I was able to bring in somebody else's CAD data whether it came from a webpage or a customer's webpage or mcmaster-carr or whatever and we were able to add those as built joints into it very quickly and simulate how that thing is gonna work so pretty pretty cool I think okay the last thing I actually realized coming back to this we talked about the between two faces I told you I had a better example so I'm gonna go over to this tab right here and we can see that I have kind of like this rocker arm type looking part and this flange that it's supposed to connect to or something like that okay so I'm gonna go ahead and make a joint command here so both of these are components so I'll say joint which one do I want to move well I want to move this guy here so I'm gonna grab that edge where do I want to move it to I want to move it to this edge over here and when I do that it's a cylindrical let's just go ahead and say we have a looot okay we can see unfortunately that there's a huge gap okay and I want this to be centered now I could grab this edge move it over maybe figure out mathematically how far that should be let's just say two and a half millimeters or something like that I could do it that way but that's not how you should do it okay so let's go ahead and do this again so I'm going to say joint and I'm going to right mouse click and say between two faces I'm going to go between this face here and this face over here let me kind of zoom up so we can see what's going on here now it's asking for a reference I'm gonna hover over like this circular edge and again it's kind of hard to see but you can see how that plane is now right in the middle between those two faces and my little joint origin is right in the center axis so I'm going to go ahead and click there I'll make this be a revolute now I want it to line up with the exact center here also so I'm going to hover over the cylinder control my selection so I can go endpoint midpoint endpoint I'm going to grab the midpoint there we can see that it moved my control arm over to the bracket and we're perfectly centered between those two faces I'll say okay maybe we ground this guy and now when I grab this rocker arm we can see how it's going to move on that bracket for example okay even though it's kind of there's no pin in there or anything like that you can see how that's going to move okay so I'm at the top of the hour I'm trying to keep these an hour or less I kind of went through some of the commands in assemblies I wanted to show you some of the tips that are not quite so well known like the between two faces the which one do you want to move and where do you want to move it to and stuff like that so hopefully you found this beneficial again I appreciate all the positive comments I've been getting on these live streams it makes these a lot more fun if you have any comments if you have any ideas that you want to see on future live streams please put them out into the comments and I will try and add those to my list and come up with something for you so with that I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day thank you you you

Channel: Brad Tallis

Views: 10,258

Keywords: Autodesk, Fusion 360, Brad Tallis, Assemblies, Joints

Id: XU4UDcsTQOI

Length: 58min 52sec (3532 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2019