How to edit Thingiverse files for free using Fusion 360 Step-by-Step

all right good evening everyone let's say you want to take a currently existing file used for 3d printing and add your own touch to it maybe custom features and whatnot i wanted to show you how to do that quickly easily and for free step by step i'm gonna go through the whole process keep it as simple as possible and try not to go over anyone's head so um today as a good example i wanted to have a caliber mount near my desk so that i could mount my caliber here within arm's reach and have its own place so that being said i found this one on thingiverse.com which is a free cad warehouse for 3d print files which are commonly stl files but as you can see it mounts with double-sided tape or command strips i wanted it to mount with screws and i actually designed this earlier today because my mic wasn't working so i'm going to remake it for this video so as you can see here i designed it to have two screw holes that is my account here and if you want any of the files i'm working on in this video or just want to download that file you can do so at this link which i'll hopefully remember to attach to the youtube video we're going to do this uh together with fusion 360. fusion 360 down here is a cad software that is free for individuals it's great especially if you're into 3d printing it really does everything i actually uh prefer it a lot over solidworks for a lot of stuff especially uh it's crazy because all works so expensive but fusion is just so intuitive like it just is so much easier to get going and so uh before we start it's gonna be quick i promise uh but quick note i thought it was a lot all right i thought it was really cool that some people have watched this video back here that i posted i actually store a lot of videos on youtube for clients but they're private um just to introduce some things and when i got the alert that there was activity on my account i got worried but i found out that i left one video uh on public where people could find it i guess and that's cool because apparently some people subscribed and i got a comment so i really like that of course uh glad to see it was helpful and i'll maybe release some of my other videos that aren't under non-disclosures of course and whatnot so and shout out to uh d lan robinson for the compliment that's great so let's jump in step by step i'm gonna shrink this down and see what we can do so you've made it to thingoverse you found the file that you like click download all files once this timer runs down it will then download okay so you'll see it here in the compressed folder we need it to be outside of the compressed folder so i'm going to click that that's the easiest way to show you how to do this go up to files click that and then drag and drop the file that you want into desktop you can see here since i did this earlier the file already exists on my desktop so i'm just going to not attach another one we'll go into fusion so open up fusion and this is the um the file i did earlier today but we're going to make a brand new one uh that's just proof of concept there so you can click new design with plus icon up here or you can go to file new design once you have your new design open click control s or save and name it whatever you want so i'm going to call this caliper holder version 2 remake and you'll then see it rename itself here and start to establish over here okay now we have a file and we're ready to bring in the file we just downloaded off the line so click upload over here if you don't see upload like maybe it looks like this click the data panel icon find upload click upload and then select files so we're back at desktop and you can see there's the file that we downloaded just a second ago and we tried to drop it into desktop so we're going to click open and then you would click upload here you can see the files ready to be uploaded but again since i've already done this it's in fusion already so i'm just going to click cancel but you would click upload jumping back into fusion you would then see an uploading icon it would tell you about estimated time etc but this is what it'll look like afterwards you'll have a pink file over here or pink model and with that file's name pink indicates a surface model such as stl or if you're working sketchup etc a lot of those come in that surface models we're ready to import this into our existing design but let's go ahead and go here on the name right click and click do not capture design history we're going to do that while we're working with sdl file but we'll turn it back on in a minute so click do not capture design history continue we're going to then click the file over here that we just uploaded to fusion and drag it into the workspace so once it appears you'll also see that you have your first component here just click ok and then we'll close the data panel to just clean up the screen here so we now have a component and let's convert it into an editable model you can edit a mesh model but it's kind of um complicated and a lot of people get frustrated with it uh editing it as a mesh so i'm gonna show you how to edit as a more traditional tab model so uh we're gonna go up to we're in the solids tab we're gonna go to model or modify sorry and then click um or go down to mesh and then mesh to break so then we'll click the mesh body you could do it as a body uh convert it into a body but i might convert it into a component since there's only one thing uh and then i'm going to click ok now you can see i've created a new component here i'm going to go ahead and delete the stl component since i don't need it any longer and i'll click click and rename it main body or whatever you want to rename it all right you don't even have to rename it so now before we start capturing our design history turn that back on let's go ahead and do the last thing we need to do uh which is to clean up this uh face here you could edit again like this if you have enough experience but it's good practice to simplify this so in the surface tab click that will modify and then merge and then you'll click two faces you could do select chain i actually don't like doing that because i do some complex files that crash sometimes so if that's clicked um i suggest most people just unclick that and do it manually like this because it's less likely to fail um and for this video i'll do two faces at a time you can do more than that but again sometimes there's a system error so i'm gonna click ok and as you can see i just greatly cleaned up the model here let's see if i can go back and show you that again okay you can see uh there's a lot of faces but what i did was i did modify merge click two of them not slick chain and then okay greatly simplified now let's make it one so we can do that again i right clicked here repeat merge or you can go up and find merge um click two faces okay it simplifies again and here's where people get frustrated sometimes with fusion um again it's great software not missing at all but i've just noticed if you click the largest face for some reason and a smaller face and try to merge them before getting the smaller faces sometimes it'll crash and i'll show you that now it'll probably do it i'm going to click okay and you'll see it probably fail turn black over here on the screen and then you'll see the edit fail so there you go it's having a lot of trouble and then it failed to stitch so uh no problem at all don't let that stretch you out just grab the smaller faces click enter and repeat that right click this time and enter and now you can see we've gotten through to making this a nice editable model and i'm not worried about all these faces here since i'm not editing those features we're going to go back to the solids tab and now that we have a nice 3d model we're going to right click here on the name and then go to capture design history because we want to start treating it like a cad model so not a surface model and now you'll have a design tree down here or sorry i'm thinking solidworks uh now you have a timeline down here which will be super useful in the future um so now we're kind of done if you wanted to just simply do feature changes like extrude you could click uh face you know add some thickness maybe um or you could just drag and drop the whole feature or sorry not drag and drop i'm going to say that let's go back let's see create ah to hold out of my things okay sorry you click hole add a hole if you wanted that's a simple way of doing it um if you don't really care like it didn't matter like this one really doesn't matter i could just leave it wherever i want and just add holes but i want to show you a better way to do that which is to use the sketch feature to define exactly where those holes go so for this one i'm going to click this face click create sketch here that is the proper way to do that but let me first show you a problem that you run into a lot so if i click these two faces um sorry inspect click one face click another face it'll give you a measurement this is 14.96 inches which is wrong a lot of times this happens you could go in and correct it and set it up for the units to match when you uh import it but here's the easier way so 14.96 inches is wrong but if we go on to the um pictures on the average we can see the sizing of the caliber and we can if you look at the picture you can see the two faces and about where they line up on the caliber and you can just grab a ruler if you look back at the camera where i am uh and just hold it and then you can see one face is here one face is about there and if you look on the road it's about 1.5 inches so we know from here to here to need to be about 1.5 inches so and again there are better ways to do that but i uh want to make this simple so looking at that 15 inches uh pretty much we know it's 10 times bigger than the need space so let's just go to modify scale scale this of the body click the body so it's selected there the point doesn't really matter because we're doing a uniform scale and then tell fusion we want this to be 1 10 the size it is now okay and then go down our click inspect again and then verify that now we're at 1.5 inches 1.496 is essentially 0.5 so now it's properly sized let's go ahead and do the sketch that we were looking at earlier i'm going to go and do the line tool and if you see as i uh it's automatically snaps to this edge here i'm going to look for that midpoint icon the triangle that disappeared here click that and i'm doing this to find the center of the part because i want two symmetrical holes um i can go too far into detail on this but i'm adding a midpoint line and then another line to reference so go to create point and find the midpoint of that smaller line i just made and now we have a point um to mirror here click mirror click the point of the object you want to mirror click the mirror line as the reference for center oops i click on both of the objects okay so object is the point the mirror line is this line here and now we have a mirrored point over there so they're symmetrical and they reference each other again you don't have to do it this way we're going to finish sketch and now i'm going to go to the hole tool here and i'm going to click these two points and if it didn't let you click go ahead and from sketch click that option not this one you click from sketch and then click your two points okay as you can see i've already set the sizing for my hole i selected a counter bore because i want it to be below the surface i want the whole time to be simple and a flat cut because it doesn't matter i want it to go all the way through if this confuses anybody on these next steps sorry but it's actually pretty simple so as you see it is going to go all the way through on the settings i wanted here like um there's not enough body to cut a hole like that of that shape which i've defined here in these settings so i'm going to need a thicker so i'm just going to cancel go to extrude i've accidentally clicked that so i'm just gonna click x on that face and i'm gonna click the bottom face add thickness and 0.15 inches is enough go back to the whole command and don't worry it wasn't for not they will save your last settings so go to multiple click the two points and as you can see now there's more than enough body here to cut the size and shape of the hole i want cut and if you have multiple bodies you can select or deselect the bodies that are affected by this feature i'm going to click ok now you can see that is what i intended for the design and now we have created a successful cad file that is editable and all we gotta do is print it now so let's convert it to a file that printers can use so i'm gonna click main body right click go to save as sdl if you want to save simply as a stl file you would not click send to print utility and just click ok which would let you save this wherever you want as an stl file as you can see here um however if you take the time it'll save you a lot of energy in the future go to save as stl click send to print utility and set up your printer settings and then click ok and as you'll see it'll send it directly to whatever i'm using so fusion our flash print is what i'm using for my 3d printer and then i can immediately go in and add the supports and print the file but since this video is on how to edit the files um and add your own features same um you can request and i'll make videos on how to print and my suggested printers etc uh but that's pretty much it hope someone found this useful in the future um i'll probably remake this video because i know the audio is gonna turn out terrible using this really old mic that i had to resort to today but i thought it was cool other people were finding my videos and wanted to make another one so okay thanks guys

Channel: Jared Hanson

Views: 80,212

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Id: BUAVAdAh65Q

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021