Joining parts without Joints

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of fusion 360 live my name is Brad talus and from Autodesk and today's topic I'm going to be talking about lining parts together without using joints and so we're actually gonna create kind of like this enclosure you see on the screen now good news I have my buddy and friend Aaron is back officially he's been gone for about six weeks so Aaron is on the keyboard today so everybody make sure you say hi to him we've missed them he I was actually on sabbatical for about six weeks and moved to Toronto Canada so we're gonna miss them in San Francisco but he's making a new home in Toronto so everybody say hi to Aaron on the keyboard so Aaron again thank you for helping out okay so yeah I can see in the chat everybody's excited yeah we we've missed them I'll be honest okay so what I'm gonna be talking about today is positioning parts in place without having to create a ton of joints in fact I'm gonna kind of zoom up on this corner here and you'll see we're gonna learn about bringing in some 80/20 extrusions some mounting plates you'll notice I even have some some screws in here with their specialty tea nuts that they use that slide in there and believe it or not there's not a single joint in this assembly and you'll you'll see that as we go through so I'm gonna go ahead and start a new design and you might ask like why not use joints well when we're mocking something together like this I don't want to have to worry about specifying all those positions and capturing positions etc etc I just kind of want to mock up the design and then you know this is a rigid structure so there's no movement going on so I really don't really need all of the different joint types you know like revolute and Slyder etc so we're gonna learn a new command under under the modify menu called a line and I'm gonna show the functionality of this we're also gonna learn a couple other tricks and a shout-out to a to Peter he made a funny comment out on the fusion 360 webpage saying I love learning all these new tricks so I appreciate that I'm glad everybody's learning something I've shown this in the past where you can insert a mcmaster-carr component but there's also another real powerful option in here called insert a manufacturer part and when I do this it's gonna bring up a web page of course on the wrong screens let me bring this guy over oops make sure that's working okay um just a second here okay and I want to get back so I can see what everybody's seeing okay so this is bringing in a manufacturer part and you'll notice that it's got a bunch of different products in here different manufacturers I should say so for example at the very top we've got 80/20 you'll see a BB in here and you'll notice some of these I'm gonna play recognize some of these such as for example you know bimba cylinders I think there's a lot of electronic parts in here like under yeah Eaton has a bunch of stuff in here maybe you need like I guess change so you can click on the I over here and here is all of the different I guess products and so I'm gonna show how you can insert this type of stuff right into fusion so I'll go ahead and click on the home and we're going to be using this 80/20 so I'm going to click on 80/20 and it's organized so for example inch metric the two you know Holly tube quick frame etc so I'm just going to go ahead and click using kind of like dig my way down is you can see we can have like profiles fastening options joining plates panels and doors you know floor to frame for example if it has to wheel around or whatever so what's cool about this is we don't have to draw any of it we don't have to design any of it and these are the actual products so for example I'm gonna start with this 10 series and you can see all of the different types of extrusions that they have and these are the ones that 80/20 manufactures so for example let's go ahead and click on this 10 10 and it gives you options and it even brings up a 3d viewer in fact if I kind of rotate her and have to zoom up here so you can kind of see the end profile this is a really long example so that's why it looks so long but you can see that sure enough that's a 3d model of that 8020 extrusion so you can verify it is correct it gives us all the information about it and then you'll notice right here it's a stock length which is 97 I can come in here and say I want to do a custom length I can either drag or I could type it in so for example I'm gonna come in here and do a custom length let's just do a custom length of woops of 24 okay now you'll notice it says okay you've changed something if you want to update your preview you can and it'll update that 3d preview but you'll notice it'll be much shorter a better representation of the actual part so I really like this built in 3d preview so I can verify that yeah that looks pretty good okay then you'll notice right here too Autodesk fusion 360 so I just click on that button right there and it's going to bring up this little dialog that says open this application so go ahead and say open and let's confirm that that's going to work so it's because I have these multiple screens and prep yeah there it goes and I have to bring up fusion and here you can see there is that 3d model from 8020 now it's pointing up and down I want it to lay horizontal so I'm just gonna grab this little button right there and kind of drag that down until I see 90 degrees and so now it's kind of laying flat in the you know the top orientation which is what I want and I'll say okay okay so that's how simple it is I did not have to draw the profile and extrude or anything like that and this is just like any other fusion file so for example I could click on this face say presspull and I could move you know and change the the length of this part if I needed to so by default I brought in a 24 inch part but I could come in and make changes to it just like it was created inside of fusion okay so I'm gonna do this a couple times to bring in some other parts so let me jump back to that page right here and now I want a custom length let's just do a custom length of 16 in this case I'll say to auto best fusion 360 click on that open launcher and I'll just jump over to fusion and you'll see it come into fusion and add it into our current design so there it is okay so I'm going to go ahead and rotate this a little bit and I'm going to rotate it this direction and maybe I'm just gonna kind of sort of get it close to where it needs to go okay so you can kind of see it's sort of floating in space right now I'm gonna leave it where it is I'm just gonna go ahead and say okay and notice my browser I'm gonna go ahead and make this a little bit smaller so here's the two different parts there's the 24-inch part and there's this 16 inch part in fact I'm gonna move the 24 inch part over just a little bit so it's not in the default location because that's gonna make things a little bit more observable in the near future otherwise things would come in perfectly and I want to show that it doesn't come in perfectly every single time and we might need to you know reposition or whatever okay so I've got my two parts now I want to line these up and you might say okay we'll go ahead and use the joint command so I'm going to say joint now when you do a joint command you get all these little markers and stuff to line things up well for example I don't have a sharp corner right here so I really can't go corner to corner in fact if i zoom out they'll you'll see over here there's not a corner to go to and so creating a joint isn't always the best solution so what we're going to do instead is we're going to use the align command so I'm going to click on a line and you'll notice it allows us to align components from and to so what I like to do is I kind of like to get it lined up in three different axes so for example I'm just gonna click on this face eye I could click on these little markers it really doesn't matter but I'm just gonna click on that face because I want to align that face with a face over here so for example this face I want it to butt up against this face so watch what happens when I click you'll see that part slide over and if we look at it from the side from the front you'll notice that those are now lined up so it aligned that face with this face down here now I'm still in my align command and this is what I think is so cool I don't have to do three separate aligned commands I'm just still in the align command maybe I'll say I want that face to align with this face right here and you'll see it snap down so sure enough if we look at from the front we can see that we're aligned against that face and we're aligned against the top and so really the last thing we need to do is say okay let's align that face with this face over here and you can see how it slides that part into the correct location and I'll go ahead and say ok and there it is and now you can really visually see that sure enough we weren't able to line up any corners or anything like that with a joint command it would have been pretty difficult I mean it's doable but I really like the align command I think it's so much faster ok ok so now that I got these two parts where they need to be but I want to join them together so let's go back out to that page and I'm just gonna back up a couple steps and I'm gonna go into the joining plates so I'll click on joining plates and you can see all of the different manufacturer joining plates and I can't emphasize how cool this page is I mean I use mcmaster-carr all the time but this is so powerful with all of the different manufacturers out there ok so it looks like this guy right here I'll go I'll use this one ok gives me again some options tells me what the dimensions are gives me a preview what that's gonna look like in my browser here and all kind of stuff looks good even tells me what other people that were interested in that you know we're as interested in this part it's kind of cool a to Autodesk fusion 360 again I could have sketched this I could have drawn it but that would have taken quite some time so why not just bring in the manufacturers part now it's pointing the wrong direction so I'm gonna go ahead and rotate let's just go 90 degrees that way and I like to get it fairly close so I usually look down at the top view kind of position it where it sort of needs to be and then I'll kind of zoom or rotate sorry kind of to the front view and just bring it down oops a little bit too far something like that I'll go ahead and say okay and now it's kind of floating out in space but it's fairly close where it needs to go okay so let's use the align command so I'll say a line from so I like to get it where it needs to go first so let's just say maybe that face is gonna sit on that face there you see it kind of slide down a little bit then I could say that face and that face there and you see it slide toward me and then finally that face and this face over here and it slides into place notice I'm not having to grab any of these whoops wrong button any of these you know tick marks or anything like that I'm just basically grabbing you know faces I'm saying align that face there with this face here for example it's very very quick I'll say okay and it's now in the correct position hopefully this is making sense it looks like Aaron is uh actively answering questions so okay now let's bring in some hardware again don't need to draw it let's just go out here I'll back up a couple steps and say fastening options sometimes you can do a search and I think I think it's 30 42 we just do a quick search for that is from my notes when I was doing this earlier so if you know like you can see all the different product numbers and sure enough there's 30 42 it's this socket head cap screw I'm sorry not a socket head cap screw but just kind of a button head cap screw it looks like so I can rotate it around see what that looks like I can specify the different threads in here if I need to it's really cool the different lengths I'm just gonna use the default one and say to fusion 360 it'll switch over to fusion okay and again I like to get it sort of close so I go from the top I'll just kind of drag that over bring this down a little bit and the only reason I do that is because I can kind of zoom up on this area and see the oh sure enough the screw is pointing in the wrong direction so I like to kind of get oriented first saal same 90 degrees now I could use the align command but you'll notice I'm in this move command right now it's allowing me to move it around and by default it's allowing me to do a free move where I can just kind of move it around but there's one in here called point to point so I'm gonna say point to point and let's just look at the bottom of the head here and you can see I can grab this edge and it's a little hard to see but there's a point right in the middle right there so if I just click on this edge it's gonna grab that point oops that's my origin point and then the same thing over here I'm just gonna kind of get near this circle and click and it's gonna move that screw from where it was to that new location and because I picked let me go ahead and say ok because I picked you know this bottom edge of the screw head it lined it up with the surface of the plate and it's perfectly lined up in the circle so it's kind of like a free move that we got didn't didn't cost us anything okay now I think I see some people asking questions about is aligned just like doing joints and stuff no in fact if I grabbed this plate or the screw I can move them out of location there is no constraints or joints or anything like that being created as we're doing this that's an excellent question oops let me undo back so it's just basically getting them in the correct location but there is nothing defining that these are you know constrained or jointed together but we're gonna get to that here in just a moment we're gonna learn some tips and tricks with that also okay so we can kind of see this sure enough that's coming down through and maybe I wanted to create a drawing of this or an exploded view later so I want to actually show how this thing is going to get assembled so I'm going to bring in one of their special tea nuts I guess they're cold so let me back up a little bit and I'll go to the fastener let's do this guy and you'll see the different kinds that they have so it basically looks like a special nut that can slide through now I do know that the thread that I brought in was a ten thirty second so I'm going to come in here and change this to ten thirty second and it'll update give me the correct part number etc I'll say that's good let's go to fusion okay thanks Ron I just glanced over at the chat I appreciate that shoutout to Ron Owens B so okay I'm gonna slide this over bring this down okay again getting it sort of close so I can kind of zoom up and see what's going on here well I know I kind of need to rotate it let's just go 90 degrees in that direction and once again I'll use the actually I won't use the point to point because we're gonna see an issue that we're going to run into here if I were to use point to point so in fact I'll show you I'll make a mistake here so I'll say point to point I'll grab that top edge but then I need to select a circular edge here and if I were to grab that edge there you're gonna see that it's gonna sink my washer into our extrusion which obviously we don't want to do okay so I'm just gonna go ahead and leave it right where it is and we'll use the align command to help us out because remember with the align command I can do multiple aligns so let's do a line and I'm gonna do the exact same thing I'm gonna select that top edge right there and I'll select that top edge right there and you can see that it aligned it where it needed to go but let's go ahead and turn off that plate now I'm going to align that face with this face and you'll see it drop down and we're perfectly lined up axially through the center of the screw and now it's touching the extrusion where it needs to be so I'll go ahead and say okay so again you can see that's why I really like this align command okay well what about these other holes well let's let fusion do the hard work okay I'm gonna create a pattern now I could do a pattern on a path but in this case I'm actually gonna do a rectangular pattern because it's kind of a rectangular part so I'm gonna say rectangular pattern now every once in a while you'll get these warnings that say hey some components have been moved do you want to capture the current position or do you want to continue in the previous well I kind of like where it is right now so I'm gonna say capture the current position and so it's gonna tag in my time line okay that that's screw and that washer were positioned where they need to be okay so now I'm in my pattern command what are the objects and I want to make sure I'm patterning you know if it comes up default faces I don't want that I want to pattern components because everything that we're doing right now our components okay so now I can say I want to pattern the screw and the nut at the same time okay what's the direction well let's just go ahead and click a linear direction and when I start to drag we can kind of see a preview and I'll move even further so you can kind of see what's going on there okay we have a distance of spacing or extent well I know that the spacing of these holes is one inch and that's just because I've done this before but I could have measured between those holes but to save time it's one inch and sure enough you can see it positioned those where they need to be well I also want to pattern in this direction but notice I'm getting way too many but that's okay we'll fix that here in just a moment so I know that this distance for the spacing is one inch also and then notice this little suppressed checkbox what that means is every single one of these instances has a little checkbox and I can click on them and turn off the instances that I don't need so I'm going to just click those for that I don't need and I'll say ok and I've just created a rectangular pattern we can see you know did the screws and the nuts however if we look over here we can see that the the nut is pointing in the wrong direction so we need to rotate that around ok easy fix now here's a neat little tip if you just hover over something in your timeline you can see how it highlights it in your browser so I can see that that 3276 and 3276 those are them the two nuts that I needed rotate so I'm going to just click on it and say move and my origin is right in the center of that so I don't have to do anything except grab this guy and rotate it 90 degrees and boom we're done with that guy and then the same thing with this one right click same move and we'll rotate oops make sure I grab the right thing there sorry I'll do that again I'll right-click and say move and rotate 90 degrees and say ok and if I were to do a section analysis now and slice through this we can verify that the nuts are pointing in the correct direction and everything is centered and everything looks really really cool okay now that was with me talking think about how fast we've created you know basically this corner of our enclosure here we've got the mounting plate we've got the screws we got the nuts in location and everything now obviously I want to we use this whole assembly but I don't have it as an assembly right now these are all individual components in my timeline so what I'm gonna do now is I want to start organizing so I'm going to create a new component and I think the easiest way to do that is right click at the top level and you can see it says new component and that's exactly the same as if I were to come up to my assemble menu and say new component but I'm gonna say new component and you'll see sure enough there it is and I can rename it and I highly recommend you rename your parts and your components because it makes things easier to find and deal with later so I want to kind of create a sub assembly of this corner plate so I'm gonna goes call this corner plate assembly there's something like that okay and then I'm just gonna grab all of the parts that have to do with this corner plate assembly so there's the big blue part there and all of the screws and nuts so I'm just gonna highlight all of those and drag and drop it onto my corner plate assembly so I'm dropping it there now like I said you might see this pop up I'm gonna go ahead and capture the position but notice what happened it put all of those components underneath this corner plate assembly and if I were to toggle the visibility on or off we can see that that's almost like a sub assembly it makes it really easy to kind of figure things out okay okay let me go ahead and activate my top level again now I want to start mirroring some things around since I don't want have to keep reinserting I've already got what I want so I want to mirror this on to the other side over here well to do a mirror we need to have a plane or an or something that we can mirror along and I don't have that here so I'm going to create a construction plane and one of my favorites is this mid plane construction plane so I'll go ahead and select that and I'll come over here and grab that face there then I'll come over here and depending on where you move you can kind of see how it's highlighting that face I'm gonna go ahead and click that face there and what it did is it basically sliced it in half and it put this plane exactly in the middle of those two faces okay and I'll do the exact same thing because I'm probably gonna mirror in the length direction also so I'll do a mid plane and let's just grab this end face like so and I'll kind of rotate so we can kind of see and I'll grab that face there and I now have a construction plane that slices right through the center of that long arm okay I hope this is all making sense okay so now that I have what I want with these construction planes let's start using the mirror command so I'll come in here and say create mirror again I want to make sure that components is selected sometimes by default faces is selected so just kind of verify that we want to mirror some components and I want to select the let's do the corner plate and this arm right here what's my mirror plane it's gonna be this plane right here and you can see how that brings that across I'll go ahead and say okay that was fast and again everything is where it needs to be we haven't done any joints or anything like that let's do that again let's go ahead and say mirror components I'll do the two corner plate assemblies now and then this 16 inch piece what's my mirror plane that guy and I'll say okay and there is our top frame basically of our enclosure so we let fusion do the hard work okay like I mentioned before I like to keep things organized and you'll see here when I jump back that we've got a lot of parts into in our structure browser so now we're gonna kind of organize that and make things a little bit easier to deal with because you'll see some of these same mirror and mirror mirror a lot kind of stuff so I'm going to turn off my construction and let's create a component new component and let's just call this top frame assembly okay and then I can move all of these components so I'm gonna just shift select all of them I'm just gonna drag that into this top frame assembly and notice my browser looks nice and clean if I were to expand this open we can see we've got these parts in here well now maybe I want to organize even a little bit better so let's check this out at my top frame assembly all right mouse click and say new component and this is why I like to use the right mouse click is because it's going to create a new component underneath that level right there and I'm just gonna call this let's just call it corner plates assembly and I'll select these four corner plates drag those into my corner plates assembly now I'm just left with the for extrusion pieces the 80/20 extrusions and my corner plate assemblies and what's neat about this is for example I could turn off those corner plates and now we're just looking at the extrusions it just makes things so much easier when you organize them like this to kind of keep things simple okay okay like I showed before we haven't created any joints so everything is separate now obviously we're kind of screwing this thing together we want it to be one kind of like solid thing so I'm gonna use this rigid group command so I'm gonna go ahead and say rigid group and what are the components I'm gonna just select that whole top frame assembly notice it says include child components so it's gonna grab that and everything underneath it no matter what level it's a so I'm gonna go ahead and say okay and this is now a solid group I mean it's a rigid group if I grab on any of it it moves around like it's assembled together and this is what I was talking about earlier where we don't have to use you know you know joints and stuff like that like rigid joints over and over and over and over again we positioned it the way we wanted to using the align command and then we came in and said let's make this a rigid group hopefully that makes sense I see they all gave us a thumbs up I appreciate that so hopefully you're learning some new tips and tricks with this okay let's let's continue on okay I'm going to activate the top level because I'm going to bring in some more components now I want the to come in under the top level and not underneath my top frame so I used to be that used to be active so I just went in here and said activate the top level component and now I'll go back to my web page in fact I'm gonna go ahead and say we just just for fun let's do we'll call this frame okay okay so now I'll bring back that that web page I'll back up a little bit we're gonna bring in another profile the 10 series profile I'll change the stock length to a custom length and I like to let's just do maybe 16 in this case we'll make it a little bit smaller so here's a little tip in fact you'll notice I've been dragging this slider just when I was playing around I noticed something where you notice it says 60 if I come in here and type in 16 this still says 60 if I were to say to Autodesk sometimes it brings that 60 inch length so I like to click somewhere else on here and you can see how it dragged that slider for me and now I'm confirmed that that's 16 so just a little tip there it when you're using this product so I'll go ahead and say to Autodesk fusion 360 because that's the coolest tool out there and we'll bring this in okay yeah I saw somebody said I need that link it's right here it's actually not a link it's under the insert menu insert a manufacturer part and we should probably do another one just on this particular command here because there's so much stuff out there electronic components pneumatic cylinders everything you can think of is under this manufacturer part it's really really cool okay now I'm gonna throw us a bone here I'm actually kind of rotate this and make it come in and a really weird wrong angle okay because sometimes maybe you're bringing in something from another CAD tool or whatever and it comes in in the wrong position something like this for example okay and I just did this again to show the power of the align command so I'm gonna come in here and say a line and I kind of like to do the major axis first so I'm going to go ahead and select on this face and then I'll select maybe on this face right here and you'll see that it straightened that up okay now it's still angled a little bit funny but it's pointing up and down now so maybe I'll come in and say okay I want to align that face with this face here and now you can see that that's lined up and then finally I'll do that face and maybe like that face there and it slides it over so even though that part that came in was in a really weird orientation the align command straightens everything us up for us and there we go okay okay just for fun I'll continue inserting some stuff kind of repetitive but you kind of get the idea just how fast we can do things in here so I'm going to go into joining plates and I want to do a corner bracket so I'm going to do maybe like this inside corner bracket and what you're gonna notice here I'm gonna bring this in and there's going to be an issue so I'll go ahead and say in fact let me zoom out here so you can kind of see what this looks like it's got some alignment tabs and all that kind of stuff it's really cool I'll go ahead and say to fusion it'll bring it up okay and once again I like to get it close so let's just go here in here maybe over to the side just a little bit and then I'll bring it down kind of like so okay now I click - okay too soon I need to rotate it so let's go ahead and select on it I'll say move and I'm just going to rotate that 90 degrees like so okay now I've been showing the power of the align command so let's do that again so I'll come in here and say a line let's just say that face with this face here then I could say for example that face with this face here I'll have to zoom up just a little bit make sure I can grab the right face and then finally I'll say that face with this face over here and it's now in position but if we look at it kind of from the side you'll see that it's not in the correct location and that's because I originally said align this outside face with the outside face here well this piece is narrower it's not as wide as our extrusions so here is where the line command really doesn't help us yet oh I'll paraphrase that so I want to Center this thing and using the align command we're having to go like face to face and there's no face in the middle and there's no face in the middle here so I'm gonna have to take an extra step and that is gonna be by creating a special joint origin so under the assemble menu I'm gonna say joint origin and I'm gonna go ahead and capture the position now it says simple but if I click this little down arrow there's an option here called between two faces and this is an extremely powerful option so I'm gonna say between two faces and I want to go between that face there and that face there okay now if I leave my mouse for a second that says place joint origin on a component and what it's basically asking for now let me kind of rotate around is it's splitting that part in half and you can kind of see that with this I was hoping to not move too much that gray or tan plane and so what it's asking for now is where on that plane do you want this joint origin and I basically want it along this back corner so I'm just gonna click on that edge and now hopefully they'll make more sense it put a joint origin in between those two faces on this edge and you can kind of see this little coin right here that's our and there's a dot that kind of covers it up unfortunately as soon as I say okay it'll it'll make more sense I'm gonna go ahead and just say okay and there's that joint origin it's halfway between those two faces and it's on that edge so you can kind of see it's right on that edge okay so that's cool I've got a joint origin there I'll do the exact same thing with my extrusion over here so I'm gonna say joint origin between two faces and I want it to go between that face there and I'll flip around and say that face there and just like before it's asking where do you want that joint origin to be so if I hover over for example this line you'll see that it's going to split that part in half you know by putting that plane there and then it's putting the joint origin on that line now here's the catch and it's kind of hard to see I saw it before the the coin or the smiley face some people call it it was pointing straight up and down and I want to be pretty careful I want it to be pointing in the same direction that this one is you can almost think of it as like a coordinate system we're going from one coordinate system to the other so I want the solid part to be at the top so I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees and again this will make more sense as soon as I say okay and now you can see that that joint origin kind of looks like a happy face is in the same direction as this joint origin is over here okay and it's in between those two faces and it's right on that edge so check this out now I can come in and say a line what do I want to go from I'm like a component let's go from and all I have to do is get near that I mean make sure I can see it near that joint Orage and I'm just gonna go ahead and click on it and where do I want to go to I want to go to that joint origin and notice what it did it's perfectly centered and it runs along this edge hopefully I can point to it that edge right there that I can't with it can't highlight so by creating those two joint origins it allowed us to line those up so you can almost think of it you know if I have this origin and I have an origin like this we basically lined them up so they match up together okay if this were like this and we said move this one it's it would rotate and try and line up like that so that's why I spent the time to make sure that those smiley faces or those joint origins were pointing in the correct direction okay okay okay let's continue on here now I could bring this back in but let's just go ahead and copy this I'm gonna say copy and paste so I'll go ahead and drag this over I'll rotate it around so it's kind of pointing in the right direction so 90 degrees and now you'll notice that it copied that joint origin with this part so I'll go ahead and say okay I do need to create one more joint origin instead of two so I'll say between two faces I'm gonna go a little bit faster since we're running short on time so I'll go ahead and click there and there I'll grab that little line like so looks like the smiley faces are kind of pointing in the same direction so I'll say okay sure enough they are now you could always come in and edit this you could rotate it around offset it do all kind of stuff so if it's pointing the wrong direction you can always go in and edit that okay let's align those together I'll say that joint origin with that joint origin and boom it's in the right spot there we go and now all I need to do is basically what I did before I want to you know basically copy these or mirror these around well guess what I already have my mirror construction planes so let's just do this I'll come in here and say create a mirror and I'll say I want those three will mirror around that mirror plane I'll say okay mirror again and I could select them you know in my on the screen right here or I can grab them from the the browser so I could grab all of those parts mirror plane here I'll say okay and now we have these vertical stress now again starting to get a little kind of crazy in my browser over here so let's create a new component and I'll call this vertical stretch assembly and then I can just grab all of these parts like so and I'm just gonna drag that into the vertical strut assembly and so now if I were to fold that down you can see we've got this top frame assembly which I can turn on or off and I've got this vertical strut assembly which I can turn on or off and maybe I want to create let's say I want to create a sub assembly in here so new component and let's just call this corner brackets some assembly now here's a neat little trick I've shown this in a previous livestream I've got a lot of parts in here and I want to move certain ones and I know that the ones I want to move are these underscore 1454 so I want to select those so I'm gonna come in here and say select by name okay and you can see I've already done this but I'm gonna type in underscore 1405 t 4 and I'll say find and notice it went through and found anything that had that 1454 in it selected them for me now all I have to do is drag and drop oops let me say okay first drag and drop into my corner brackets assembly and all of my corner my little you know angled corner brackets went into this sub assembly because I did a search for that 1400 54 so it's a really cool way you know if you have a lot of socket head cap screws or washers or nuts or whatever I think this is a great tip on selecting a whole bunch of parts and organizing them into this sub assembly okay okay so now the last thing I want to do is maybe put this top assembly onto the bottom so I'm going to need to create one more construction plane so I'll say mid plane let's grab that guy there and I can click that top face there and you can see it's slicing through the middle there I'll go ahead and say okay let's create a mirror components I'm gonna mirror the whole top frame assembly and the corner brackets assembly so I expand it open my vertical strut assembly and I selected this sub assembly so I'm nearing that guy and that guy at the same time what's my mirror plane there we go I'll say okay and now we have something looks like this so obviously I might want to come in here and rename this to be bottom frame assembly and maybe I want to put these corner brackets inside that bottom frame assembly actually I lied I put them in the wrong spot I want those to go into the vertical stress so you could actually see if I highlight my bottom frame assembly it's highlighting all those angled corner pieces I want those to be part of my vertical strut assembly so I'm just going to come in here and drag that to vertical strut assembly and now we can see all of those turn on and off okay okay we are almost at the top of the hour let me go ahead and turn off my construction now here's something kind of neat I've got my enclosure totally designed let's go ahead and save it I'll say I finished but let's say maybe it's a little bit too tall okay now I don't have any parameters or anything like that so that drives the size of this right because we inserted particular particular lengths 80/20 extrusions we had 24 and I think these were 16 or something like that I can't quite remember but check this out I can come in here look at it kind of from the side and I'm gonna say move now this time I do want to make sure I have faces selected I'm just going to draw a box around the whole bottom of my design here I thought I'll go ahead and rotate a little bit and I want to make sure sorry I had too many things selected select through I'm gonna make sure it's turned on so I'll come in here and say move faces I'm just gonna draw a box around everything and you'll see it'll select all of those parts and faces and now I can tell it to move now sometimes I get a weird result when you do this like parts seem to kind of move out and away and I think that's because of the mirrors and stuff like that that's going on but don't worry about that right now I'm gonna come in here and say I want to move this four inches up and it'll say okay and it's doing all the calculation basically it's moving it's moving the whole parts if it can and then it's moving the faces also so I just changed the height of my enclosure by four inches or shorten that I should say by four says okay I know that was a lot of information a lot of repetitive stuff but the key thing here was the align command I really like it I use it a lot especially when I'm doing stuff like this where things are all connected together you know bolted together glued together like picture frame for example whatever sometimes I helping customers out and I see hundreds of joints and I show that you can do these rigid groups and have minimal joints maybe get the thing together using the line command and then create a rigid joint so key things I really really like this insert a manufacturer part so give that a try you do have to log in for the first time I think you have to create you can see I have my login up there but it's free doesn't cost anything to do this and check out all of the different customers that are in here I mean I can scroll forever there is a ton of them in here so if there's a certain thing you're interested in see if that company exists out here if you're doing a lot of electronic design if you're doing a lot of 80/20 or whatever give that out give that a try so with that I want to thank everybody for attending keep an eye out for our upcoming live streams and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day thank you you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 19,624

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, computer aided design, free software, 3d modeling tutorial, control arm, manufacturing

Id: _W1S5EXHpvs

Length: 59min 13sec (3553 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019