Flat-pack furniture design

hey everyone in this fusion 360 video I'm going to be sharing with you how to design a piece of flat pack furniture and really create a robust 3d model so that you can dynamically change your design on the go as always I'm recording myself along the way so that you can listen to my thought process and even see the mistakes that I know I'm going to make so let's get started first I'll right click at the top of my browser and create a new component for the seat of my stool by doing this I'm creating a much cleaner timeline at the end of my workflow I can right click on the seat and activate it and I'm working just with in this seat component I'll go ahead and create a sketch on this bottom plane and I'll draw out a 14 inch diameter circle so I can click and draw and after drawing my 14 inch circle I'll stop my sketch and I can now extrude it to the thickness I want planning to use 3/4 inch plywood but it'll most likely be about 0.72 so that looks good and I can go ahead and return to the top level of my assembly what I can do now is create some parameters for some values that I know I'll be using throughout the design one of these might be the seat diameter so I'll set create that as a variable next what I can do is create a very important variable wood thickness and I can set that equal to the value of 0.72 so now instead of these features just pointing at the number I can point them towards the variable so that if I change any of these my entire design will update so I can vary this to wood thickness and we're all set next what I can do is work on creating a leg component so I'll right click at the top of my browser create a new component I'll call this leg and I can now right-click on it and activate it you'll see that I'm now just working on this component and I can create a sketch on this side plane what's nice is that I can still interact with other pieces of geometry so I'll use project to project in some existing geometry and I can now draw some construction lines so I'll draw one line that goes from the origin straight down and I'll go ahead and repeat that command and draw one straight out and I'll select both of them right click and choose normal slash construction to turn them into construction lines now I want the legs of this stool to extend just out to the same diameter here of the stool so I'll draw a line that draw goes straight down from these projected edges just like this and I'll dimension that to be the height of the stool that I want and I know that it is 450 millimeters I know I'm bouncing between units but I just know that I want a stool generally it should be 450 millimeters so I can enter that select the curve and turn it into a construction line now what I can do is start drawing up the legs so I want the leg to be 3 inches across so I'll draw that line to mention it to be 3 inches next I'll draw a line that extends up to the base of the seat and I know I want this to be 2 inches from the outside of the seat so I'll draw it rather arbitrary and then come in here and dimension this distance to be 2 inches next I want the middle portion of the leg to be 6 inches below the base of the seat so I'll draw a line straight across and I can dimension that distance to be 6 inches so dimension there we go click both my lines and enter in 6 inches now I don't know the length of this line should be but I know that if I draw it from the end of this line to the end of this line what I want is for both of these to parallel so what I can do is select my parallel constraint and click the two lines that I want to be parallel you'll see that the length of this line adjusts in order to solve everything else correctly the next thing I want is part of this leg to extend up through the seat of this stool so that I can put it all together without any fasteners so what I'll do next is draw a line and I'll first draw a line out across and just draw the rough shape and I'll draw another line from the end of that segment up and then another line straight across just like that now what I can do is I can dimension these lines that I've just drawn I want that to be the same value as the wood thickness so I'll enter in wood thickness and I can now dimension this curve by left clicking and holding and I can dimension that to be 2.5 inches and you'll see that it shifted everything to the left when really I wanted everything to lie here on the origin so what I can do is draw one more construction line straight up and then I can constrain the end of this line to be on that line so let me go ahead and right-click and fix both of these so they don't go anywhere and I can now choose coincident and apply a coincident constraint between that point and this line and now everything adjusts properly what I can do now is mirror everything about my construction geometry so I'll choose mirror and I'll go ahead and pick the lines that I want so that curve this one left click and hold and pick the one that I want and I can go around and select the geometry that I like I'll mirror it about this line and now we have the profile that we need looks like I forgot one so let me go ahead and mirror this line about this right here and now we have the profiles I'm just going to turn this one into a construction line so that I have one clean profile here it looks like we have one more line to turn to a construction one so let me go ahead and pick that and make that construction there we go I'll stop my sketch and one last thing I'll do is I'll create one more parameter here and I'll call that a stool height and I'll set that to be 450 millimeters not inches so millimeters go ahead and select millimeters for my units and instead of just being the number here I will type in stool height so what I can do now is extrude this profile out so I'll choose extrude select my profile and enter in the value that I want now I want this to be symmetrical so I'll change the direction to symmetric but you'll see that it extrudes it by a value of wood thickness or 0.72 inches on both sides so I should really change this distance to wood thickness divided by 2 to keep everything aligned I'll go ahead and return to the top level of my design here and one thing that I want to check is that when I change these values everything else suggests so if I change the seat diameter to 16 you'll see everything grows properly if I change the stool height to 500 everything looks like it's working just fine one last thing I'll check is what if I chain the wood thickness two half-inch and you'll see everything work turns out just great so what I can do now is right-click on the leg select copy and I can now paste it I have two options for paste paste and paste new I want to select paste new so that the changes I make to one of them is doesn't affect the second leg so I'll choose paste new rotate it 90 degrees and I have the basis for my stool already what I need to do now is create some slots in both of these legs one at the top and one at the bottom so that these can all fit together all right click on leg one activate it and I'll hide the other component so they're not in the way I'll go ahead and create a sketch on this face it doesn't really matter what face I select and I'll go ahead and hide the body just so I have a nice clean sketch profile to work with I'll draw a construction line from midpoint to midpoint I'll select it and turn it into a construction line and I can now start drawing the slot that I want so I'll draw again one line straight down and one straight across and what I can do later on is I can then dimension these to whatever I want so let me go ahead and draw this straight across one more time a line from here to here and I can draw it off-center and go ahead and make it horizontal just like that I'll dimension these so I want this value if you think about it this is half of the wood thickness actually we'll make that web thickness they were you half the wood thickness and I'll dimension this and this is really half of the distance from here to here so we know it's six inches from bottom to this point and the wood thickness there so I'm going to say six plus wood thickness divided by two and there we go what I can do now is mirror these two curves about my centerline and we're just about ready to go one thing I need though is I know that I want these to actually fit together and I need to create some clearance so what I can do now is create my own user parameter I'm going to call it clearance and I'm going to give myself ten thousandths of an inch just to work with all around my design so if I go down here we can look at some of the parameters that I just entered so for this sketch I have wood thickness divided by 2 as that line I'm actually going to put some parentheses around that and tack on that clearance variable now you can see I have some wiggle room to work with I'll go ahead and click OK and I'll stop my sketch I'll turn the bodies back on and I'll extrude this by a value of negative wood thickness and now you'll see it performs that cut just as we want it I'll go ahead and return to the top level I'll go ahead and show the second leg and I'll right-click and activate that component and now we're going to recreate the same exact thing on this side just on the bottom instead of the top so let me go ahead and hide the bodies folder I'll draw another line midpoint to midpoint we might go a little bit faster this time because it's the second time around so I'll turn it into a construction line I'll draw one more line from this point up and that point across and I can now dimension this to be parentheses wood thickness divided by 2 plus clearance and I'll dimension this to that same distance that we had on the other side this is 6 plus wood thickness divided by 2 there we go I'll go ahead and mirror these two lines so I'll click those about this line right here I can click stop sketch show my bodies and I'll extrude this by value of negative wood thickness I can go ahead and return to the top level and by pasting new is that I'm able to have two different leg designs and they don't affect each other so if I hide this one we have a slot at the bottom and if I show this one i have a slot at the top so that they fit together perfectly the next thing I'm going to do is create a cutout in the seat for this to all fit together and I could use a boolean operation but I'd rather sketch it so I'll activate the seat component and hide the legs and we'll go ahead and create a sketch on this top surface again I'm going to draw some construction lines to help me along the way so I'll draw this line and I'll draw this line and I'll select both of them make sure that they're perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical just like that I'll turn them both into construction lines they don't interfere with any profiles that I create and now I'm just going to draw this shape that we see over here so I'll draw one line that extends out and I'll extend this down by some distance as you see I'm not dimensioning anything right now I'm drawing it and then dimensioning later so I'll dimension this to be a similar value that we see we have wood thickness divided by 2 plus clearance that way we have a little bit of room and then lastly what I can do is dimension this distance to be 2.5 plus clearance again giving us some room and the last dimension that I have is this distance right here which is going to be the same value as we had before wood thickness divided by 2 plus clearance and there we go all that's left is to mirror this about that centerline so I'll select those lines mirror it and now I have one of them and a little trick here is I can use actually a circular pattern to pattern all four of these about the center and if I change the quantity to 4 everything should line up perfectly as you see just like that so I'll stop the sketch and I can extrude this down another way I can do this I could type in the value negative wood thickness or I could say extrude this down to this surface right here and when that wood thickness changes that extrusion will change as well so let me go back to the top level as you can see if I show both of my leg components and I look at it from the top we do have some clearance built in here and everything fits together just perfectly now the very last thing I need to do is add in some specialty Philip's so that I can actually manufacture this using a CNC machine so if we look here at the top of the seat you'll see that I have these internal corners that I wouldn't be able to reach with a round cutting tool you can imagine a CNC trying to cut this shape out and I can't get that perfect 90 degree angle in the corner so what I'm going to do is actually activate the seat create a sketch and create what are known as some dog bone Phillips here so that the cutting tool can actually go into the corner come back out and everything can fit together perfectly I'll first go ahead and create it one more user parameter and I'll call this tool diam and this represents the diameter of my cutting tool I'll set it right now to quarter-inch and click OK what I'm going to do now is draw one construction line from the midpoint down to this point right here and I'll turn that into a construction line and I'll draw one more line out this way let me zoom in and again I'm going to draw an arbitrary line and I'll dimension this to be 45 degrees because a dog won't fill it needs to come out here at a 45 degree angle I'll turn this to a construction line and I'll draw one more circle and I'll draw it so that it's coincident on this line and the diameter is tool diam there we go and now it's constrained to be on this line and now the key step is that I need to dimension the distance from this corner to the middle of my cutting tool lengthwise to be half of the cutting tool or the tool tool radius rather so I'll set this to tool diam divided by two and now we'll see that it lines up perfectly I'll go ahead and mirror this line about this construction line I'll click stop sketch and what I can do now is extrude these six profiles down by a value of negative wood thickness let me rotate for a clearer view negative wood thickness and I want to perform a cut and now you'll see that the cutting tool can actually get here into the corner and everything can fit together one last step is to create a pattern of these for all of the other corners so being that I'm recreating a feature that's going to be into the create menu pattern and circular pattern and what objects do I want a pattern I'll just pattern those faces about this central axis and how many do I want I want four of them and you'll see that when I click OK it creates them just as I want them so if I'm somewhere where maybe they're not using inches are using millimeters and they tell me they're using a six millimeter cutting tool I can change this to six millimeters and you'll see they change they tell me they're using a half-inch that will change as well that's a little bit too big so I'll drop it back down to a quarter I'll go ahead and return to the top level the assembly so we can see how everything fits together and as you can see right here I have these nice dog bone Phillips so that everything fits together if I wanted to go one extra step what I might do is add that clearance variable to my tool diameter so let me go ahead and do that so my tool diameter it is exactly 0.25 but I might want to tack on plus clearance that way I have just a little bit of more breathing room so that everything fits together and up and I'm not scraping edges of wood together to fit this all together so there you have it as you can see these dog 1 Philips are really useful if I hide the seat I'll show you the other areas where we where we would need to add them so you need to add them in any internal corner so I would add them right here and on these corners that you see right here I'll spare you the time because it's the exact same steps of drawing a line at a 45 degree angle and placing your cutting tool there as one final step I want to show you just how robust this model is I can go to my parameters and come down here to the bottom and if someone tells me you know we're not using three quarter inch wood we're using eighteen millimeters I can type in eighteen millimeters everything changes maybe again we're using a six millimeter cutting tool there we go and if someone tells me hey I want a stool that's actually 500 millimeters tall I can enter that in just like that so as you can see creating a really robust 3d model pays off both during the design process so that you can quickly iterate on your design by just changing one or two values and most importantly when you go to manufacture your piece it may not work the first time you might need to change the clearance that you set up the wood thickness might be slightly different than what you initially thought it might be and this allows you to change things on the fly and really create a real product very easily so if you have any questions about any of this feel free to leave it in the comments section below if you like these kinds of videos where I walk through my thought process give it a thumbs up and if you want to reach out to me directly you can tweet me anytime at Taylor underscore Stine thanks for watching

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 154,249

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, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, cloud manufacturing, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution

Id: DHrP1MunhFw

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2015