Fusion 360 Tutorial: Get a Grip on Components, Bodies & Assemblies

as you are diving deeper into fusion 360 you're destined to battle the whole bodies versus components assemblies can you even link in parts well today we're going to straighten all that out and ensure that you understand the whole parts components assemblies so you can make your parts in greater happiness hello everybody my name is Lance Christensen and thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video this channel is for people who hate struggling with their cat and cam software so I really appreciate all your comments and feedback down the comment area if you like the video do me a favor and hit the thumbs up if you don't well here thumbs down and if you haven't already I would really appreciate if you hit that subscribe button now let's jump in today's topic bodies components assemblies let's get it all figured out a fusion pot file is really a component see that little white square block that shows you a component a component contains sketches bodies and its own organ so when you go ahead and start a new sketch and you start modeling up your part when you when you use the extrude command it becomes a body that body will always live within a component now components also have joints from movements so this is important when you start assemblying things together it also have names and part numbers and descriptions this is extremely important when you're trying to make bill of materials for your drawings now bodies can't do any of that now if fusion is your first CAD package you don't have to worry about this next part so if you have ever used anything like in vendor or SolidWorks you used to take an assembly and kinda like break it down part per part so for example these pliers and the heat or not so at this point you will start drawing up each part individually in every part component kind of world and then with your different drawn up components the four different components you will then go in in an assembly file and you will and you will then insert them into that assembly file so the problem with this pair of pliers or well whatever it is is that it this is a lot of files right now you specially get a big assembly you have a trial powered number two is that all these parents are linked to the assembly but can be a big hassle when you start moving things but having to start moving things around is sometimes oh well then the assembly can't find that part so now the assembly cannot display that column there's a big issue where is that part you lose a reference to questions why can't we just do an assembly inside of just one component and not ending up with all these files and second of all how can we make a leg that is strong enough so this thing just stays intact I almost screwed the screws all the way through my hand so to be able to do everything within one file there's a couple of things we need to be able to do we can take a body remember that always are inside of component and we can turn that body into its own component so now we extend up with a component within a component and that turns it into this assembly mode let me show you what I'm talking about so you will see if I go into the bodies and I right-click on it I now get an option called create components from bodies when I click on that I am now creating a component out of that body but means that this component now has its own work offset and has own the bodies and sketches now also look up at the top that icon have now change from a single component to kind of an assembly icon now I got to give you a little bit of a warning though because we are capturing the history within fusion 360 right so every time you create a sketch you extrude it out then that will be remembered inside of the software now the problem is that we Scott it out with a single component and we drew up that one part of these pliers and then we turned it into an that body into a component what that causes to do is we have kind of a break in history if you look at the screen you will see that our our new component only has this new component icon versus if we go up to the main assembly component you will see the previous history so it's not taking the history and converted into the new component that stays where it was many times when you know that you want to create assembly from the beginning you're better off going in and actually create the component before you start drawing things up and create bodies that way all the history will be captured in the component from the beginning let me show you what I'm talking about now so let me just delete this part here kind of starting over from scratch so if I know that this is going to be an assembly file I'm going to go up and I'm going to right-click on our top component here and I can create a new component so now this new component will contain its own sketches and bodies and its own origins also so let me go in here and start sketching inside of this new component so we got one component created and to continue the assembly we're just going to go in and create another component now the nice thing about this is that we can now use that first component as a reference for our second component just a couple of things to address here first of all notice this little black dot next to each component that is how you specify which component you want to be active so you will see that when you activate a component the other components becomes opaque or see-through I also have to admit that I do realize that with my clearances and such with these pair of plyers yeah they wouldn't work in the real world now another important thing that I just got to point out and this I stumbled a little bit on this in the beginning is that even though that you activate a component if you do any sorts of cut as we're going to do here some clearance cuts and you will actually see that fusion 360 will cut through everything it sees not just the component that you have made active so you will see that I'm going to go in and activate component number one but makes everything else or peg and I'm going to just create this little sketch to do some clearance cuts now I'm going to cut through both sides of this and now when I go out of it if I go up to my top component you will see that the cut made it through both components what I don't want well again then it's because fusion will cut through anything it can see so the trick is just to hide with a little light bulb the second component when you do the cut in the first component and then everything is as you as you would expect now let's go ahead and do the same cut on component number two so we will activate it we will hide component one and then we can go ahead and do our cut so this is one of my favorite things we are only using one file but we have multiple components within this file now many times when you're doing assemblies you want some kind of a movement and in this case we're going to use joints now I did a video a few weeks ago on joints so definitely check that one out but one of the joints I did not call out on that one is the joint we're going to use here and that is called S built joint what is very perfect for this scenario so we have model of these plier handles the way that we really want them inside of an assembly and now we can apply a s built joint for these pliers so let's go ahead and do that so you're going to go into the drop-down just where we found the other joints and you can click S built joints now this is pretty straightforward you select the bodies that you want the joint should be applied to and then you can literally go over and select that joint organ now we'll get the movement and of course we can also control limits just like we did in the previous video so if you go back over to the joints folder you can right click and then you can set up limits so in this case I'm going to make it zero and then you can add some kind of a degree that these pliers can open up so we have our two components and we have added our S built joint to get the movement of the pliers now we still have a couple of of components right in there the bold and not and in this example I am actually going to use reference models because yes sometimes you do want to have parts like screws or knots or other things that you want to use from the outside and bring into the assembly so you can definitely do that so if you go out to the data panel you can right click on the component that you want to insert into the current design and just hit insert into current design now when you do that then the pipe will be brought in and you can now use the joint command just like we did in the video a few weeks ago and also notice here how I use the trick by holding down my control key so I can pick up that center point now we can do the same thing for the nut go in right click insert into current design and we can also get that one in place with the joint command now one thing to notice is that the components that we brought in to this design have a little chain link next to them and that shows us that these components are actually referenced outside our current design what means that we cannot really modify these bolts or nuts inside of here because of their reference outside you would actually have to go out to that individual component or slash spot file and make any design changes there you do have the option to right-click on a linked in component and you can actually break the link if you want to in that way everything is kind of like contained within it so I talked about earlier that many times when you have linked parts in the past things were kind of like loose references and suddenly come like your whole assembly will blow up well the way that we have secured that that don't have it inside of fusion is well let me show you if we go out and we right-click on the bolt what is really just a a single component and we say we want to copy it we can copy your to any project that we have available but if I go up and I try to do the same with our assembly file of the pliers you will see that I don't have an option to put it into any project that's because fusion is aware of that the Assembly of the pliers have linked in components the bolt and the nut but of course there is times where you want to take a fold aside and you want to reuse it in another project so the way you do that is you go up here at the top in your data panel and you click up on the link that will take you out to your browser now out here in the upper right you can actually go out and you can save your whole assembly as a fusion archive file this will let you bring this whole assembly down local on your machine then you can just navigate to the project where you want this assembly in and you can just upload it with the upload button right from the data panel so I really hope that you found this video helpful if I did a half a decent job you have a little bit a handle on components bodies and assemblies as always I love your comments and feedback down in the comment area if you haven't already I would really appreciate if you hit that subscribe button and also don't forget to go and download your free C&C handbook right on cad/cam stuff com just click that link below and you should get that PDF so until the next time I hope you have a super awesome day I have a heater of that turn up

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 288,305

Keywords: Autodesk, Fusion 360, Tip, Tutorial, CAD, Beginner, Assemblies, Joints, Components, Lars Christensen

Id: HBJMgkzkaas

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2016