Fusion 360 - What's New Sheet Metal -Season 3

welcome to what's new in sheet metal this is the fourth video in this series and as i've stated before i have taken a 12 month vacation from fusion 360 and this is the time to catch up on all the great stuff the development team have been working on but we're gonna slow down we're gonna take it step by step we're gonna make sure that no man or woman is left behind so with that bend flat [Music] go hello everyone my name is lars christensen and thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video this is where we're going to catch up on all the what's new in fusion 360 over the last 12 months because let's be honest unless that you are a power user um you maybe have missed some of these maybe you're wondering why you would use some of the different options so give it a thumbs up if you liked the video give it a thumbs down if you don't leave me a comment i'm back and also down in the description area i have left a way that you and i can connect with via email so with that let's get into fusion 360. all right so first thing we're going to look at here i have this little sheet metal bracket here this is a um a bracket for when you're hanging your blinds in front of your windows then there's kind of two brackets of these sitting on each side holding holding the blind in place and this here is actually an imported model and you can see that a couple of reasons you can see this first of all this is a imported step file you will see that there's two bodies over here and if we go in and look at this first body you will see that there's just there's no sketches or anything in here so it's what we call a dom solid you will also see that i don't have my history turned on in here whenever you are bringing in a um like a step file or other type of file into fusion it ends up in what we call direct editing mode but what is new in fusion with sheet metal is that you can convert these what i call dumb solids step file or a solidworks file and vendo file into a actually sheet metal part right inside of fusion so if we go over to the sheet metal tab you will see there's an icon up here that say convert to sheet metal and if i click on that it will tell me that it's going to turn the history tree on so we can then enable design history and you will see that that's now activated down in the bottom and then all i have to do is select one of the the components or one of the sides faces of one of these bodies so i'm selecting on the side what belongs to the body over here and then it will call up your sheet metal rule set for whatever you had and if you're not familiar with with with sheet metal like in fusion you can totally customize these sheet metal rule sets so i'm just gonna pick the default i have in here and you will see that i've detected that this is one millimeter thick so this is a tiny little bracket so i'm gonna hit okay to that when i do that you will see that it converts it into from a body into a sheet metal part so if i just expanded here you now see that it has the rule in here and it has a sheet metal body we can do the same thing with the door piece here so now you will see the icons have changed a little bit but that's because now it's kind of like because we now have a sheet metal part it's ready to go but the convert is still sitting right down here under create click on that click on the door part here use the same template and hit ok and now we have two sheet metal parts that means that now we can just activate whatever which one we want and then we can go ahead and create a flat pattern from it so when you do that you got to select what is the stationary face looks like this bottom part of this bracket hit okay and then you will see that now it becomes a um a flat pattern so you can now use that for for cutting out with a water jet or a lace or or whatever you want we can do the same thing with the doll we can go down we can activate the doll and we can go over and say we want to do a flat pattern maybe we select that back face there hit okay and that will then become you know get that that flat pad on there now as you maybe have already noticed we actually kind of like have a sheet metal assembly so just in case you didn't know if you're already working with sheet metals this is probably not new to you but we can actually use our standard assembly tools inside of something like this so i can right click on the main body and i can ground it so now that is kind of grounded and stuck in space and then one of my favorite assembly tools is the ass build joint because this door is sitting where i kind of want it i can just go ahead and click the two components and then i can place i have a revolute here i can place that wherever i think i want it in here let me just zoom in let's click it right there and then we have a um a revolute joint placed and now this is uh this is working as an assembly so that is uh one of the new things inside of fusion here converting dom solids or importer models into uh into sheet metal now this part here the next to show you the next what's new i thought that it would be a good exercise and some best practices because i have a tendency to make these a little long so go ahead and actually let's um let's do this part from scratch in sheet metal inside of insider fusion and then we can kind of talk and we can do some tips and tricks uh in here i want to show you something about how we can we can do some of the different bands you will see there's like a little dimple uh in here i'll show you how i i cheat to get those in there some tips and tricks with the whole so let's let's do that so i'm gonna go ahead here and i'm gonna open up let's leave this one for reference i'm going to open up a new document um in here and again we're in the design workspace and we can go over to uh to the sheet metal tool over here and because we know that this is now going to be an assembly we know there's going to be multiple components in there we can do this what many people know as a rule one in the forum as we're doing with assemblies before we do anything we kind of create the components that we want within the assemblies it's just a good practice so i'm going to go ahead and say new components and it's going to give us a something here we can call this i call it before we call it the body but let's call it the bracket instead just so we distinguish the two i'm using my steel um my steel rules i set the thickness to one millimeter and i also have a bent radius here of point two five millimeters um that i've adjusted in there just in case you want to go in and work work with your with your own uh with that so i'm gonna hit okay so that and that's gonna give me bracket number one now i'm gonna go up and activate my my component again and i'm gonna do another one up here and i'm gonna call this one dull okay use the same uh sheet metal rule set so now we kind of have these two brackets in here and you just activate which one you want to model it and it takes a little practice and sometimes you know it takes a little too to um to get used to but let's go in and model this up now one thing i want to point out like again i know if you are a sheet metal expert this is probably way above then you probably don't need to watch this video but um what i've seen many people do when they start doing sheet metal parts is that they go in and they just create a um a sketch and you you maybe see me do it too because i'm sometimes uh so let's create like some kind of a sketch here you finish it up so now you got a rectangle and you fully define it and then you go ahead and you hit the flange tool the magic tool in sheet metal is the flam's tool and then you hit okay and then you kind of got your your basic shape here and then you can start adding more flanges and and start building up like this but what i want to uh to show you is don't forget that inside of a fusion sheet metal let me just delete all these again um sketches is actually more powerful so i can actually go in here create a sketch i'm going to do it on the side view here and i'm just going to go ahead and create a line and i'm going to go over and then go up a little bit like this and go go over like this so i kind of created a line like this and then you can go in and hit d for dimension let's fully define this one so i'm going to make this one 30. i'm going to make this one two millimeters and let's make this one i don't know six maybe like that so we have like a little line segment going like this and if you're sometimes i like to do a little like that okay so a line going over there up and over okay what i want to show you is that when you're working in here the flange tool will work with these so i can actually start on the flan tool right here i'm going to go symmetrical and i can get my first bends in i'm gonna go 15. um i can get my first band in here right out of out of the gate so that's kind of just an interesting way to think about this instead of doing the the square and then do a flange up and a flange over you can actually start out by maybe just getting getting something like this into place and at any time in the process if i just expand out the bracket here you will now see that we have one sketch and we have one sheet metal body in here nothing too fancy but at any time you can go ahead and you can create a flat pattern from that and you can see it flat with uh with the bend lines bend lines on there get out of that and then you have that flat pattern in there um to work with all right so um let's go ahead and just start creating our part here so i'm going to go ahead and go up here and i am going to go 30 millimeters up go out here too i'm actually going to go right to the outside of this like this um and then one trick i want to show you um that is new and now you will see you get a warning with the flat pattern because i added a new flange but you can always right click and just update the flat pattern and then it has taken that into calculation so now if i right click and i said activate then you will see we now got our second section over here or maybe get a little bit too too basic but what is new in fusion is that if i go ahead and activate the flans and i select this one here i'm going to select this one on the inside inside here i can start see here how i can start making the side um you can actually select multiple side within one operation if they go to the same height so i select the first one you can actually go over here now and hit add two and then i can select that other side and and just like that i can add two sides that does the same thing um within one command i'll show you that um you know so i got that there we could for example uh there's like a wrap around on this side here so i'm gonna go ahead and hit the flange again i can select this side i can select this side so two edges and um and then i can go to i'm gonna go adjacent here and then you will see that i can actually create two sides at once so what is super helpful about this is that we are kind of working with less operations right uh we get less of these these flanges down here what can be um what can be can be helpful all right um so that is the second thing that is what is new and that is actually all i have so converting um converting a a solid into a sheet metal um and then that you can now multi select in there i don't think i'm forgetting anything else all right let's keep working on this one because i think i'm going to show you some things that that you hopefully hopefully enjoy so um another trick with this fans tool is if i select this edge here and pull our nets out here you can grab this little handle and you can move it over now when i move it over you will see that it interferes with our already flange and you get a warning about it down here it's not an error it's a warning but what you can actually do over here in the flans command is that if i you see that it says full edge if i hit the drop down i can say two offsets and that will give me an arrow here and an arrow here now i can actually just drag an edge up like this and i can add in minus three millimeters maybe and i have now moved that edge up and now i don't have have an error anymore i'm actually going to go in and edit that feature and grab this ads because i want to control the depth of this one of the things that is nice when you're working in sheet metal is you can actually do i can even control if this is active so if i pull it so you see it's blue if i select this little uh snap point there you'll see that it connects to that edge so that is that is super helpful i'll show you that little trick again because i want the same thing on the other side just a little different so i'm gonna go ahead and do another flange here pull this out i just drag it out rotate it now we're going to get our warning that we are actually colliding with our part i'm going to switch this to also to a two offset i'm gonna do the same thing i did before i'm gonna move this one up about minus three like that so it's the same height but what i wanna change is instead of doing that to that intersection point right there i can also just select on that face right there hit okay and and then we kind of got got that laid out right there now at any point again like i said earlier you have this flat pattern here you can right click you can activate that and you can go ahead and see what you um what you have created in here so you kind of can go back and forth go back and forth all right so this is still we're still working just on the on the bracket here um and when i many times when i'm talking about modeling standardly i'm talking about adding your your fillets and and your your chamfers on here and the end that's kind of probably also somewhat the best practice when you when you're working in here so we're just going to leave leave that for right now but one thing i wanted to show you is how we can work with um you know we kind of got the base shape together here one of the things we need to do is we need to punch some holes in this and as this is um is folded here you can actually go ahead and just open a sketch on a face like here and it it acts the same way as if it was a um a standard um standard body you're working with so if i go ahead and i make a a hole here that is 10 millimeters in diameter i can go ahead and i can do a default dimension and i can place it let's do this 15 and let's do from here [Music] to i like the edge so this edge and do that 15 also so it's kind of in the center so that's a standard kind of sketch and you will see that it gets placed down here um we can go ahead now and do a extruder press pull same thing drag it through here now i will normally when i'm working with something like this i would normally not just drag it like this and leave it i it's just if you're changing things let's say we made this narrow suddenly we will have that 10 millimeter hole going all the way through so one way you can do it you could do uh just click on this back face here and then it will use that that measurement uh right there so we gotta cut that so that's one way we can do it the whole thing is folded up and actually i have a smaller hole over here on this side so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna open a sketch over on this face and then i can use the center of this hole so if i do p for project just like we you've seen we do in the modeling environment we can do that hit c for circle and now we're using that center point of the 15 and making sure that this five millimeter hole uh sitting over here and we can now go ahead and use cut through that drag that that way and click there now i know that if i ever uh need to change the whole location for this hole all i have to do is to go over right click hit edit sketch and if i change you know this dimension to 10 like this you know that our other hole will follow along so you kind of have these these different options in here another option we have when we're working in here is we can actually also do these in a flat states because when you when you're working in the in the tool and die when you're actually punching these holes you're doing everything when it's flat not when it's um not when it's all folded up like this so there is a function in here under modify that is called unfold you click on that and it asks for again a stationary entity so it's kind of like when we did the flat pattern so i'm going to select the bottom and there you can select your bands you can actually just go ahead here and hit unfold all bends if you're lazy like i am and hit okay and now you will see that you have kind of created a flat pattern but it's a flat pattern that lives in history but you will see in just in a second so it kind of lives within your history tree here you can go back and forth so there's a couple of different ways i want to show you how we could could play some halls now one way to do this could be to start a new sketch uh on kind of like this face or this face doesn't really matter it's like in this face and you could do something like f and hit o for offset and if i select here i can kind of like drag in if it was like in the center minus six and i could use this to play some holes and the way you could do that quickly would actually be if i exit out of the sketch is to go in and find the hole command because that also lives within the sheet metal you can select the holes you can select placement you can select multiple from a sketch if you have a sketch and we do that you could go ahead here and you could just click on these four things we could go in here and say we want five millimeter holes go all the way through hit okay and we have now placed these holes what um what is what is kind of cool um and that works if i go ahead now and i say let's refold the parts you will see that the part is folded up with um with these holes but another thing and now we actually have a unfold and a fold over here and this works down in timeline so if i go one back it's flat again um but i wanted to show you another way you can do this um because i think that there's many different ways um to place to place holes and and i just wanted to show this so if i go ahead here i just deleted the sketch and the whole command if i go ahead here and open another sketch on that same face you could draw a line and make that a kind of a construction you do that by selecting the line and hit x so now that is construction i would still maybe use my if i'm placing four holes as i'm on this part i might just sketch up a rectangle also and you could now use my favorite command with the symmetry command and that would be one point two point line so now this is uh these are symmetric so if i drag one corner see how it's symmetric over a line here and now we're going to default dimension we could place some dimensions so i'm going to select the edge of our fold here and maybe i'll make that make that six and then i could place a dimension from here let's make this 15 let's make this 15 so i'm kind of sketching the same thing as as we as we did before right and and if you want to select that whole rectangle here's a neat little trick if you double click on a line then it will select the whole thing hit x to make it construction now these shortcuts um and then i could hit c for circle and i'm just going to draw these circles up here again i'm just kind of showing you a couple of different ways you can do this and then d for dimension so i've just placed four circles that is wacky i didn't try to get them accurate and let's make the this one five millimeters you can see that it's black it's fully defined and then we use the equal command and just go around here and do all these to be equal to one another like that and that is that is fully defined and then we could now go in and uh and create um our extrude and cut these whole holes out that's one way we could do this i finished up that sketch but the reason i wanted to show you this is if i go back into the sketch here edit sketch you could actually go in and do a little drag a window around here and select all our geometry and then we could do a control c what is copy finish that sketch we could go up and open a new sketch on this face and do a ctrl v so again that's kind of like windows commands and that will open up the move copy and we can now move these holes up here and now we have these holes up here now you can see that they're not fully defined they're not all black because they are now moving around like this so we could go ahead and create a line from our origin again just to have a construction line here hit x to make it that use again the symmetry command from here to here to here that will make that concentric and then i think it was a six millimeters i did on the first one from the edge to this edge make that six and then i have copied one or the other within this so what is really left at this point is maybe going into extrude we can select all our holes like this and uh cut them through to the back side here and then we placed these holes here and now if i move to after the fold then you will see that we got these in here so a couple of different ways to uh to kind of achieve the same thing if you wanted to use the whole tool or if you kind of like want to work it out with the sketches i wanted to show you how you can control c control these sketches in case you you had not uh tried that that is one of those interesting interesting functions all right the next trick i want to show you i'm trying to i'm gonna wrap this up the next thing i want to show you here is um i put in kind of a dimple on the back and here we are gonna kind of jump back into into the solid workspace where you normally are working instead of the sheet metal but i want to show you how you can you can go ahead and do this so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to create a standard solid body so i'm going to go back into my solid workspace you can jump back and forth here you don't you don't have to do all in one i'm going to open a new sketch i'm going to select the side view because i'm going to use the revolve function for this and i'm actually going to hit p for project i'm just going to grab this back edge here and when i've done that i really don't need my my sheet metal bodies i'm just going to hide it for a second i'm going to create a line i'm going to find the midpoint of my projected edge here i'm just going to go back this really doesn't matter go up a little bit and then i'm going to go back here to make sure it's horizontal go back and snap it into um to a part here so i kind of have this rectangle here now i know that this part is going the thickness of my uh of my pot here is a millimeters thick so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create um what i'm going to do i'm going to create a line in here and i'm going to make that line a half a millimeter deep i think and then i'm gonna make a line vertical up like this okay so i got that and then i think i'm gonna go ahead and create a free point arc and just place an arc here like that and then if i use the tangency tool between that arg and this projected line then i actually get this here and i also want this to be tangent i'm going to make a little helping line here i'm going to make that construction and make a tangency between here and here so now i kind of got this little thing here let's go ahead and add a dimension here let's make it five like this so now it's fully defined so notice how it's straight line it goes a half a millimeter into our sheet metal part if i turn the sheet metal part on we can kind of see it there sticks halfway in there it goes around it might be a little too big but i don't think that will work um i'm gonna hide the body again now if i use i didn't put a link in here somebody will tell me that's a bad idea like that 30 that was full defined um now i can go and use the standard revolve feature inside of fusion so i'm going to go ahead and select my my profile and the axis to revolve around and hit okay now i kind of ended up with a kind of a stamping tool um actually we probably also want a little bit of a fill it on here we could add that now i guess um go ahead and add that i could also have done that in in the sketch that doesn't really matter now if i turn my solid body or my my sheet metal body on again you can see that these two are now intersecting let's go in and do a a section analysis select this top face so you can kind of see now how i have buried that um i buried that inside of there so turn the section analysis cancel the section analysis so what i can do and this is standard for um you know in the modeling workspace i can use this combine tool and i can go ahead and i can say my what is my target body that is our sheet metal part what is my tool body that is that stamp i just created and i am going to to cut but what i'm going to do is i'm going to say keep this tool body what means i'm this thing's not going to go away if i don't check this this will just be gone but if i say keep the tool but hit okay then well it looks like nothing happened but if i hide my my body you will see that i got the dimple impression in one side um but i didn't get it on the other side this is where i'm kind of like i'm cheating a little bit here this is a little bit of a me just um cheating so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn this body back on that we had and i'm actually gonna look up to the top view make sure if i go in to the move copy tool i'm going to select that cylinder and you see here it is and i'm going to move it in a millimeter minus one millimeter right there and i'm gonna hit okay so that body still exists now right now we still have the dim bowl if i turn the body back on i've now moved this in so it sits here and here is where things i think gets gets kind of interesting if i hide my sheet metal part again i can use this many people asking about what's the difference between extrude and press pull the neat thing about press pull is press pull does the same thing as extrude but it actually also can do other things you can go in here you can select an edge and you could actually now put a fillet on it i could use that instead of the filler tool but what you can also do is if i hit press pull here and i just drag i'm almost cutting away my little stamp here all the way back to my minus 30 so i'm literally removing the whole straight portion i had and if i turn my sheet metal body back again now it looks like i have that dimple and all i now have to do is use the combine tool instead of cutting i'm going to join this with that body like that and now that has now oh and i had the tool body on hang on edit turn off key tool body because now i don't care about that tool anymore hit okay and you will see that the body goes away and now i have created created this dimple and this it's all captured down here in the in the in this little workflow down here if i go up and i say that i want to activate my my flat pattern you will see that it becomes flat and the dimple the dimple still shows on like it had existed in there like i've been put in that way so that's the trick um to show something something something like that and i know that this is probably going to be a long video and another trick just to show you we can actually go in here down in our history tree you can do this in any workspace we can go and we can hold down control we can select multiple operations you can right click and you can create a group out of it so what this will let me do when i create a so i just down in this history too you can do this with anything down here i can just select here i can also hit shift and select the bottom one selects all these i can right click and say create a group and these are now grouped together if i right click on that group i can rename it and i can call this my dimple tool and now six years from now when you're opening this part up and you're wondering what the heck that was all the tools you used to do that that dimple what was kind of like a workaround kind of thing that you maybe want to not you know it's almost like an operation within an operation right so now you're kind of hiding that in there from that you can do the same thing with the holes if you think that these holes should have been you know grouped together as whole so this is one of the ways you can kind of and you can expand them this kind of way you can work with that timeline all right um i am going to add a couple of chamfers to these edges here because now i'm just about done with this part oh let's go three in like this and that almost finishes this part we need to put a hole here for the hinge let me just let's just flat pad on this activate so you can see the flat pattern is still good like that um let's um let's create that that last hole here so i'm going to go ahead here and select the sketch on there this is going to be a standard sketch right c for circle three millimeters d for dimension let's go ahead here and maybe do it three inches from there and 3.5 there hit q for press pull and we can cut that there i i still don't use the whole command even though that maybe i should that's gonna finish uh our one bracket here so now we could right click and then we could get this turned out to uh send that out to the laser cutter or what what we need so let's finish up the doll now the doll i'm gonna minimize this um the doll we just created the part but we don't have anything in here other than the then the rule um so what i'm going to do there is i am going to activate the doll and i'm actually going to use so now we can see how everything gets trans what is that transparent i'm actually going to go ahead and i'm going to create a new sketch i'm going to use the center plane here so we have symmetry but i think that i'm going to borrow this ad so i'm going to hit p for project i'm going to borrow the edge from our brackets right so i'm drawing that i'm going to hit alpha line and i'm going to draw a line that's going to go vertically up to about here and then i'm going to use michael incident for that line to that adds of our bracket so the daw right now as i'm working on this is referencing the bracket so i'm utilizing what i've already drawn up in the bracket now but i have the door activated on that little thing there so now i can go back to sheet metal i can say i want to do a flange i'm going to select that line select that line and now you will see that i'm getting i'm getting kind of like a flange out here and i'm going to go in two directions two sides so the first side here i'm just gonna go up to that face see i can also select the the face of our brackets i'm using that same one this other one i'm actually gonna stay a little shy of that edge so i'm only gonna go 10 millimeters i'm gonna keep it um i'm gonna keep it five millimeters short but again this is pretty cool inside of sheet metal i can actually go ahead here and hit the extrude and i can just extrude this phase out and i want that to be equal to the face on the bracket there so that gets the other um the other five millimeters and then i need to wrap around the edge and we will kind of like already seen how that works so we can kind of draft that around that so let's make that maybe five like that there and this is a sheet metal part by itself now it's not we haven't flattened it yet so we don't have a a flat pattern but again you can do this at any time but it's kind of nice that you can click on something and make it a flat pattern now we get to see it be like okay that's something we can we can flatten out and you can go back again you can see it there i still have the dough active and now i'm just going to go ahead and say i want to create a sketch and i want to create a sketch on this face hit p for project select this projected line and then i can do a cue stand and press pull i can pull that through there and now i have uh had that in there last thing i need to do i think to this part is put some fillets on it because i actually think maybe i shouldn't have made it all the way over to the edge let's put it around on here there you go a full round on there um but i think i'm gonna hit when i start spinning that around well let's try it um so this is now done that means if i go up and i turn my assembly back on this is now kind of the same thing as we had before let's adjust a couple things so i'm now going to go in and do what i did with the imported model i'm going to right click and i'm going to ground the bracket i'm going to go over here and now this door can move around right but the bracket cannot move around so now i can go in and use the s build joint select these two still remembers i want to revolute place that zoom in right there hit okay and let's see if we start opening this one here there's definitely some collision right there that is not not ideal so let's go down and activate the doll we can go back and find out what extrusion what excuse me was that that was probably that one edit nope that was the hole was this one edits yep that was five so i'll make it fall and now that doesn't hit but it does hit up here so let's make the bracket active and then we could add a fill it on this edge or make that one 2.5 maybe if that's enough and that looks that clear it i think it did so now we got that so and that should close up then you can always use these back to position and we can kind of see how the the bracket is all showed up this way so in the when we have this one active here we see everything that we did all together if we go down to the bracket you will see all the different steps we did for the bracket we go down to the daw and we will see the steps we did for the doll all right folks i hope that this was i hope this was useful you let me know you let me know in the comments please so the things to show was that we can convert a step or a solidworks or a mender file into a sheet metal part which is super awesome but then also how we can select multiple edges like we did there in the beginning and we can drag two sides up we can have multiple sides multiple flanges uh being created i am also going to leave a link to a video i did a while back about how you can test and figure out when you are flattening out something um how much you put in those sheet metal rules um some places some shops it's a like a rule of thumb that people are using and i'm sure somebody comments down if you're a sheet metal guy comment down in the in the comments area many places they have rules of thumbs of of how much to to your your k factor or whatever you're using bend radiuses is but i made a video on how to figure that out if you don't know where to start so you can do some testing you can find out that is really depending on the material it depends on what machines you're using and things like that so i hope i hope this was useful a little long but i kind of like to throw some of these tips and tricks and hopefully inspire somebody to uh to do something um send me um send me an email down in the description you can find my my email address and um and and show me some of the cool things you're doing with sheet metal love to see it hope this was useful until the next time i hope you have an awesome awesome day take care folks [Music] you

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 22,955

Rating: 4.9575033 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Autodesk Fusion 360, Fusion 360, Design, Manufacturing, Tip, Beginner, Lars Christensen, #LarsLive, Best Practice, Modeling, cam, cad, tutorial, How to, 3d printing, free software, software, Product design, Mechanical engineering, fusion 360 tutorial, fusion, autocad, design, inventor

Id: 1tURmm-Ywdg

Length: 44min 41sec (2681 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020