Fusion 360 - Piston Rod Assembly Tutorial

the ultimate fusion 360 beginners tutorial building this assembly coming up in this video we're gonna cover how to build an assembly we'll start by building some components building a piston and rod arm getting all the sketching right getting the constraints right avoiding some of those mistakes that all beginners make like constraints and dimensions and sketching hey I'm Tyler Beck and on this channel I do fusion platform tutorials so if you're new here consider hitting that subscribe button I'm doing weekly videos that help you ramp up and design faster in the fusion 360 platform so question for you guys what CAD packages have you used have you used SolidWorks have you used inventor or pro EE let me know in the comments down below I'd love to know your background and where you're coming from so let's jump into fusion 360 and get started with this assembly alright so here is the assembly and when we look at this thing we've got it looks like a couple parts and we've even got you know a moving piston pretty cool and when you're first looking at this it's easy to get intimidated I think it's easy to feel like this is just too difficult for beginners but let's break it down first let's just look at the piston piston still a little intimidating but when we break that down into its features the very first feature is not as bad so this isn't that hard it's not as difficult to create so let's jump into that let's get this let's get this started so I've started a brand new design and I might go ahead and just save it to give it a name maybe call it the assembly that I'm planning so we give the assembly a name we save it that kicks in the autosave let's start a sketch but turning on the origin making sure everything's seen I'll select the front plane make it easy and start a sketch and what this is is a round part so we'll just sketch half of the shape and if you're brand-new too if you'd like to see a tutorial just on revolves I've actually got one I'll link that up below should be that card popping out you can go check that out if you're interested so when we look at it this is the sketch that we want to do we want to sketch just basically some lines and a few angled lines with some dimensions we'll start throwing that together sketch dimensions versus sketch constraints which one he is first and I try to use constraints first basically I try to describe the part to fusion 360 and then it'll obey and be more intelligent so first I would say that this should line up with the origin and I like to have construction lines I like to select lines and and make them for construction that makes it a little easier to see it you can also just add constraints as well so we'll select these and get construction there we go so this is lined up with the origin that's great and it's got some built-in constraints already these perpendiculars at the corners so what's I'll start dropping in some dimensions ok as I'm sketching it looks like I messed up I've got one point 4 inches and I intended to do this all in Noah meters so I'll go up to the unit's select it hit the edit command choose millimeters and you can set this as your default or you can change it in your preferences so we'll leave just this file at millimeters start dragging just dropping in these dimensions you okay so when I look at this sketch it looks like everything's black which means it's fully defined and there's a few shortcuts I use that I'll talk about here in just a minute but one thing that stands out is this is a revolve so this is half that 32 is a radius but what I want to do instead is what if you want to do the total diameter you actually can do try that center line to this point right click diameter dimension and now it stretches it doubles it over and it's because I went from a construction centerline to this side point and now I've got a diameter so everything's all black meaning nothing will move and it's constrained let's now create the revolve rather than learning all these pull downs and learning where everything is I like to use the S key I hit s and it wakes up my modal toolbox and what that means is it's sensitive to whatever state you're in but what's even cooler is you can search so I could search revolve I don't even have to go find it in the create space select this profile we're gonna spin it about this Center construction line and that gives us our solid and our solid has looks like this little step cut out cut out looks really good so next what I want to do when I look at my finished version I created this kind of slot or solid part that we're gonna cut out in a minute so let's go back let's create the slot I'll just start a sketch on my front plane that happens to be right in the middle and if you want to visualize or understand look at this thing cut it in half maybe we'll inspect it and we use the section analysis I'll use the same plane and it cuts it a half and all that is is a view it's not actually doing anything to the model but it lets us view half of it so now what I want to do is sketch our shape so on this face almost s and in half so we can see it and I will just start sketching down and what I want to draw is an arc I'll drag out with my left clicker I'm holding the left click down which allows me to do this cool tangent arc trick makes a little bit faster for me and now I'll drag some dimensions onto this thing okay so this is supposed to be 30 and this is supposed to be 12 looks good what did whoops constraints did I fail to add it looks like I'm not lined up left to right so there's lots of ways you can do it my favorite way is sketching a centerline going up there we go looks like I messed up again alright so this sketch doesn't look correct let's uh let's stop the sketch for a second because it's too deep it looks like I may have messed up how do you go back to the original sketch I come down to my history tree and I can find my first sketch edit that sketch right click and edit it let's update this dimension that's incorrect it's supposed to be 48 there we go that's much taller I hit the green check mark it does the revolve again and look it's updated everything and that's the power of parametric modeling by making these updates things update correctly we can now hit the Q command I love that one select everything and extrude we'll do an extrude two sides we'll go all the way and all the way and okay it cut it out wrong thing so again right-click come down to your history tree right-click edit the feature and choose the right feature which in this case is to join great okay next question how do I turn this section off it's gonna be found in the found in my feature tree here under analysis that's where section views get stored I'll turn that off that view and I can easily turn it back on now that we have this cylinder and what we want to do is make a cut at the bottom I will select the sketch sketch on this face will sketch your rectangle and I'm going to hit the s command hit rectangle what I want to do is a center rectangle I'll start from the bottom here at the origin and drag it out and I need it to be 26 so I hit my dimension who will select this line and we'll do 26 this should be about 24 and we'll hit Q okay so I have my sketch created and what I'd like to do is select that sketch hit Q we'll start cutting it out and rather than just cutting at a crude distance all the way through I'll select up to an object up to this top face and go ahead and back it off leave 10 millimeters and there we go so we leave ten and very cool it's cut it out turn that sketch off all right now what we want to do is cut out this counterbored hole in our piston so I want to relocate it a counter more and you could do this all manually if you like but I'm gonna use the whole command so I can hit s and type in hole and what you need to do is have a point so I'm gonna go to the trouble of placing a point right out on this face and an easy way to do that go to construction choose a tangent plane I select the face and there it is it looks like it's put one right tangent to that face I'll hit enter and we'll start a sketch I'll select the plane hit s start a sketch it'll look straight at it okay s for this shortcut key type in point I'll bring up a point and I'll just throw a point out often space so now if I grab my dimension to the point and dimension what I want to do is dimension where the point or center of that hole goes and what I know is the point is 30 from the top and it's centered right in the middle so how would you do that well I like to hit the S key sketch a line right from the middle it just snaps right on and that line is construction and then I attach the point so now it's centered and then I'm gonna attach a different dimension I delete it the other one X I didn't like it I'll dimension from top to bottom is 30 great we have our point off in space it's right at this tangent face you know on the cylinder and if I ass and type in hole it's gonna drop in a hole right on the point let's go select the right one it's a counterbore excuse me it's a countersink and then I just fill out the values that I know okay so what I'll do is fill out these values and the total the depth is thirty-two thirty-two the diameter and and you'll see it's starting to take take shape starting to look kind of how it's supposed to great we have the countersink and I like it on both ends so rather than redo it it looks like I have a plane right in the middle I want to mirror this across so pretty easy to do will hit mirror I'll select the do I want a mirror face so in a mirror bodies I'm gonna mirror a feature if you want to learn more about mirroring and patterning I've got a video just on that check that up I'm gonna put that link in there as well it's like the feature mirror plane right in the middle and the mirror feature is we're mirroring the counter side countersink hole done so looking good so now we need to create those kind of ribs those we need to cut out those slots for the piston and what we should be done with the piston now let's start a sketch let's start a sketch on the front plane and then what I'm gonna do is just sketch a series of rectangles and because they're kind of all different you could do these separately and pattern them you could do it separate sketches and cut them one by one but I'm gonna save a little bit of time and do it together so I sketch the rectangles I had D I start dimensioning now how do you change these values so you place the smart dimension 2.4 you can double click at any time and change this number to update the values Izu man I roll my cursor and I zoom in on that object will keep filling these things out now what I do know is I'd like for this value all right I'll click on the the edge and I'll hold command down and select the next edge and in the constraints over on the right I'm going to set it to be equal drop in a dimension and I know that all the widths should be equal so select these edges these entities we'll hide the body and I'll select each edge go to my constraints and set them to be equal and we'll set all the lines this is a good one select each line I want them to line up with each other so I'll use what's called the collinear so I'll select all three lines I want all three lines to line up that is collinear and it's still selecting it all right so I'll select these two lines I'd like those to be collinear or line up and of course you could just do the center line trick that I like to do draw lines make them construction snap them on that's a great way to do it as well bring the body back there we go let's hit the finish this command will start a revolve and what I want to do with this revolve is select these three objects and I want them to cut so those are going to cut and I'm gonna revolve about an axis and I'll choose the axis goes to cut it cuts it out and there we go body it's not a component yet which I need it to be a component I want three components at the end of this thing when we look at our finished product this is three different components we have the rod and then the top of the rod those are two different ones and then the piston I can even have fusion 360 visualize for me with colors it tells me which body is which pretty slick and that's shift in all right so how do we make this all into one body I'm gonna right click and do a new component I messed up when you're starting an assembly what you want to do is create a component and then start building within that component luckily you can go back and drag within I'll show you how to do that but moving with components that's when you're assembling stuff if there's gonna be movement between parts then you definitely want to build components for each one and then have it assembled so if you have questions about components and bodies I'll link up Lars this video you did a great job explaining the difference between bodies and components so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag back on my timeline this is how you go back in time you can go back before you got started in the history and roll all the way back right-click new component and this drops in a component and let's give it a name we'll call this the piston got it now here's the tricky part we drag and roll our tree drag enroll our history and what I want to do is select everything and bring it into the piston and I kind of tend to like to do just a couple at a time maybe one at a time and I'm looking for sketches that I can drag in to my components tree and all this is doing is telling build it all within one component not up at this other assembly level okay we want to be able to understand which components go with which and there's a color feature within fusion it makes this a little easier on you turn on the gear and component color swatch so now everything that falls under this pink line goes to one component I can even hit shift in and now everything's pink so it looks like that's one component terrific that's what I intended so let's start our next component and we'll build out the rod starting a new component is really easy right click Choose new component it gets started and you can see this little eye this eye shows what's active what's being worked on so when you're working on the whole assembly may be adding joints you are gonna activate this one when you want to go back and work on the piston and make edits and changes and activate it and work on it but for now we're gonna be working on this component we'll give it a name this is the rod now I'm gonna hide the piston while I'm working I don't want it you know showing up I want to just be able to work on the rod separately and we'll get started so this is what we want to build first with the rod and the component it looks a little intimidating but it's not too bad and to give you a little trick we actually could do this in one sketch but let's keep it really simple and let's get that going first the first sketch we need to do is a series of circles and then lines and arcs and start dimensioning and adding relationships and constraints so let's do that now we'll start a sketch I'm going to choose from the front top or right plane and we'll start by sketching some circles I'll choose the top plane and we could get away with just about any of these we're gonna move the object later so just need to use the origin correctly I always like to start at the origin whenever I can makes life a little easier and all we really need are two circles right out of the gate we get those circles going it's 32 in diameter and this one is 62 in diameter yeah we're pretty close let's do the distance between them I scroll with my mouse wheel to zoom in and out and I find that this I drag this does it move it does still move up and down and again I love just sketching lines between things and selecting the line making construction making sure that it runs horizontal choose the horizontal constraint and now for sure this is sitting where it's supposed to terrific oh I'll hit s and sketch another circle and another circle and I'm going to go ahead and add the cut of cut out holes now we don't have to do that we could do that later we could do this as a solid first but I like to do it all I like to put what I can to make it an intelligent sketch without overdoing it so this dimension is 22 and this one it's 50 there we go so we've got the holes - and now let's sketch the shape of the rod I'll go to my line and this is where it gets interesting I've got one line going across at kind of an angle and then I've got some arcs that connect up to the rest of the shape but they actually don't even connect there they kind of go off in space a little bit and curve around let's go up here and line out in space and then another arc at the end alright so let's start adding some dimensions that we know I know the center point of this it has some dimensions so we'll dimension in the center the center that's 58 and then I know the height and it drops it into place great that's the center point of this radius and when we drop in a radius as well it's now gonna be 50 that arc actually pops into place you can see it's now turning black showing that it's constrained or defined it knows where to sit in space okay I'll drag that back and then we can mirror that if we like that will draw another line and we'll set these two to be equal to each other and set a radius for this arc should be 20 so if we need to sketch this slot by itself I'll sketch a line I'll click and hold the left click down and drag out tangent arc and do another one down here and so I can sketch a slot all by itself sketch it manually I'll add a coincident from that point I'll add a coincident to the line as well it's coincident but it dragged it down so let's drag everything back and to kind of get this thing into shape so sometimes this will happen you've got a line and an art just kind of running out of shape so what I need to do is make these tangents so it's nice and smooth the transition is smooth between them I'll do tangent down here as well generally that's the rule is tangency is a pretty safe bet okay and we'll do a dimension from these two center points of 100 I know the value from here to here is actually supposed to be parallel so let's drop that in and the distance between those two lines is five what else is missing I've got a radius of six down at the end and 125 from the point to the end point of the hole there we go looking much better what I want to do is mirror sketch mirror everything they sketch up here across the center line so it s mirror I'll select the entities up above a mirror across the center line there we go looking good we're almost done it says this is a tough sketch it's really tough okay next we'll sketch a three-point arc from endpoint and point select those two and what I want to do is I'd like this arc to have the same look and feel as this arc or the same Center Point select both and do concentric and now that knows where it sits in space it looks like the wines aren't finished as far as the total height so let's add what dimensions I do know I know the distance from this point to that point horizontally is 36 that's the midpoint that should line up I'll draw just lines and make a construction and vertical and now it should line everything up boom everything's in place looks really good it will close the sketch all right so using one sketch you can actually do several different features and this is kind of a more advanced tip that I like to show people that have been using fusion 360 for a little while but this is a cool way to do one powerful sketch and add some feature so let's look at that we have this one sketch and what I'd like to do is several different shapes from one sketch go to your tree go to your kitchen go to your feature tree and make sure the sketch is shown and then hit extrude or cue I'll hit Q and I'll extrude this shape up do it symmetric so we'll do type in 35 and that's the whole length from top to bottom is 35 and it's not it's a new body that's fine within the component and there we go so you'll notice the sketch went away and you can simply just show it again and I'll hit Q and I looks true this going up will do again symmetric full 15 and height it's joining up with the other perfect hit okay we've got that shape we'll select the sketch again hit Q and it's a symmetric extrusion it's 22 total length total height joint and there we go let's turn off the sketch so it's easier to see there's our rot arm it looks really good and we'll bring in the piston so we can see it got both if I activate the assembly now I can see both looks great so this looks good but we're not what we need to do is do the where the bolt connectors are go there's some slots so let's start a sketch and let's look at our origins and our planes there's a plane that runs right in the middle of this hole all had started sketched there and what I'm going to do is sketch out line an arc line and close it off and you know what I'm actually going to sketch it into the other to make sure it joins up completely so I actually over sketched it a little bit but from that point from here to here say is five point seven I will say that these two lines hide our body these two lines are equal this line to this line this line to this arc is tangent the diameter or radius it's good to go we'll run these in three millimeters let's add a line bring the body back and so what we're gonna do I'm going to extrude this and should we go ahead and put the hole in we can but it's better to do the holes later if it's gonna overlap but we could we could sketch the hole now it's fine there shouldn't be any overlap we'll go ahead and sketch the hole and hit Q I want two components so that they could bolt together all right so next let's cut this thing there's a few ways you could do this but an easy one is start a sketch and I'm going to do a centered rectangle type in rectangle and we're gonna go very small we'll make sure it's make sure this is high enough that's fine but we'll make this very small this is to account for some of the tolerances that we're gonna expect or maybe even some of the shrinkage from casting or whatever the manufacturing methods might dictate I'm gonna make a tiny actual cut and remove some material now we don't have to do it this way we could just slice it and then there is no material removed and but let's say we're accounting for some of those manufacturing methods I just want to bring that up that's one way we could do this so it looks like I did something wrong I went up to the assembly and I activated it right now it thinks I'm trying to work on all the parts at once and I sketching and doing things that's not what I intended I'm gonna cancel I'm gonna go down to my rod and you can even see my colors I'm gonna try to connect everything to the rod this sketch should be in the rod so that's something to be really careful of when you're creating several components together is to make sure that all the features and sketches are in their proper component only you don't want to separate them out you want to be careful to activate the one you're working on now that this is active I can select the sketch I'll hit Q I'll do it two sides will go all the way all the way on both hit okay I'll do all the way through a cut hit okay and we've got it sliced it's tight removing a tiny bit of material and maybe that's more than I had intended I could go back and edit that sketch and change it so what I have is when I look I have two different bodies I have the lower and the upper and the upper I'm going to right click and choose to create a component from that body and so now that's its own component it's gonna move around in space we could say that it's the rod upper and there we have it alright so now that I have three components when I go to the assembly level I double click and activate that now turn on the piston I can move everything around because nothing is locked in space joints joining stuff together putting stuff together in fusion if you're brand new and you want a full explanation check out this other video that I did getting beginners started with joints but let's look at the piston and the rod assembly going together I'm gonna ground this lower arm so that something is fixed in space to move around right-click and ground it and there are some best practices around this if you're doing extensive assemblies with grounding but for basic assemblies like this grounding one component typically works fine okay let's bring this one back there's a really cool joint when things are in the right place sitting there it's called and has built joints I'll hit shift I'll go up to assemble and you'll find as built joint or shift J I'll select the two components and I'll say that they don't really move with each other hit okay and now that one's joined to the other and that one's super easy this one's gonna be a little bit trickier we want to bring the piston down here and join it up so hit I could try selecting here and here but when I want to get him centered it's gonna be harder so what I'll do is I'll right-click in space between two faces I wish this was a little more obvious than it is but it's there with the right-click select the two faces and then when it allows you to do if you hover over the different options you can select the joint disk that's right in the center between the faces that got selected next right click and space between two faces select the two faces over here and then same thing when I hover around it shows me that joint disk that's right in the middle and it brings that over to align them don't worry about that joint not solving on the preview now I could build in some movement I'm gonna say allow to spend like a revolute looks good and then I can even start set where it beat starts it's try again 270 and there we go that looks much better hit okay it solves the other joint and now we have the piston and the rod arm you'll notice that mine slices all the way through if you'd like to capture that more realistic contact it's pretty easy to do go to a symbol and Nabal all contact move it it's gonna bump into it and this solves fine we have a smaller assembly and there we go thanks so much for watching this video hit the subscribe button hit the like button post a comment for me if you've got more questions about this tutorial I didn't cover enough or you want to see more in this this type of tutorial let me know in the comments down below appreciate it

Channel: Tyler Beck of Tech & Espresso

Views: 58,515

Keywords: fusion 360, fusion 360 tutorial beginner, fusion 360 sketch, autodesk, engineering, mechanical design, industrial design, product design, cad, cad software, free cad, free cad software, autodesk cad, 3d cad solution, autodesk fusion 360, fusion360 tutorial, fusion 360 beginner, tyler beck, Fusion 360 Tutorial - 12 Sketch Tips Everyone Should Know, fusion 360 tutorial, fusion 360 autodesk

Id: xM_djDHkp14

Length: 41min 16sec (2476 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2017