LIVE DEMO: Mastering Reverse Engineering

you you let's start again with audio so today in our live webinar we're going to go over reverse engineering using fusion 360 and why reverse engineer something there are a lot of reasons maybe for example you're taking a competitor part and trying to figure out how they did what they did or maybe you're just trying to replace an irreplaceable product so in this particular episode of our live demonstration we're gonna show how to reverse engineer a ski basket or rather a ski pole basket because in this case I have two ski poles that were given to me by my wife two years ago they're absolutely stunning they work just like a regular ski pole but unfortunately I broke it and I can't replace that basket the store is completely out of stock so we're gonna use some skills today combined with huge 360 and we're gonna show you how to reverse engineer that ski basket and be able to ski pole basket and be able to 3d print a new one so let's begin so we actually have our poles we're gonna be using those and taking measurements what other tools might you need besides fusion 360 itself you're gonna need potentially two measuring tape not the most accurate thing out there but in a pinch this will definitely work you want to take one step above you might go and get yourself an engineering grade ruler just like this this is not your ruler that you used in elementary school this is a little bit more accurate and it does have some nice flex to it so it's very useful but if you really want to uplevel your game I think a set of digital calipers would be right for you and you can get digital calipers and all different kinds of grades you could spend $300 on them and you could also spend $25 on them these days so I'd recommend them I think they're very useful and we're going to be using this tool today excellent so we're gonna jump right into our live demonstration of fusion 360 and let's jump right in so on my screen right now you should be able to see I have my ski pole and in this particular case I went through I modeled the entire thing I have the handle I have the strap I have the actual shaft and I have the tip as well as the basket but reverse engineering isn't always about reverse engineering the entire thing it's about doing what you need to get your job done so we're gonna jump right in and get this done using your calipers and taking their measurements right so there are a couple of ways you can get those measurements oh by the way if you really really want to uplevel your game a 3d scanner is a great way to capture data so you canyou you can get a 3d scanner in all shapes and sizes as well you can get one for as low as a couple hundred dollars or spend many many thousands of dollars and you'll get very different results in this file in particular you're going to see here on their bodies I can show that I have some scan data that I took of that basket and if we look up close although I captured the general aspect of this particular design I'm losing a lot of detail if anything I would say that this particular scan is not very good are not very useful so although scanning would be a great way to get your data not everyone also has scanners so today we're going to cover how to reverse engineer the gold fashioned way and in that case you all you're really going to need is your calipers and potentially your phone because these days you have a camera on pretty much every phone that exists so we're gonna go and focus on that in particular so let's go and hide this and see what we have here alright so we have a tip and you can see that I have a threaded area here for that tip and the basket is going to end up screwing on to this and then there's a set screw to hold it in place and so we're gonna go and model this today live and we're going to see how to do that and learn some best practices along the way let's go and make that happen we're gonna start with a new file because like I said earlier you don't have to go in reverse engineer an entire poll including handle and strap and tip just to be able to design the basket or replace that basket you can start and just do the basket itself that's what we're going to do we're gonna go and create a new design and we're going to start off by showing this little lightbulb here next to origin to show the origin itself the XY & z accents as well as the X Y X Z and Y Z planes right the front top and right planes and now we're going to do is we're going to bring in images and we're going to use those images today along with measurements from the calipers themselves to actually go in reverse engineer this particular basket to do this we're going to go to insert and we're going to say insert and attached canvas and that's what we call it when you're bringing in an image that you took whether it's a hand-drawn image a napkin sketch or even an image of an actual thing so we're gonna go and choose that attached canvas I'm gonna go and select the face or plane that I'm going to go and insert it and then I'm going to go and select the image itself and I have here a couple of different images we're going to go with these images here to start and I'm gonna go and choose let's say this one right there and we're gonna go and zoom in and you can see that I have a pretty good image of the basket this being a top view image but this image isn't going to do me any good if it's the wrong size so what I'm gonna want to do is to scale it now I can scale the image directly from this menu right over here I can do that but getting that to be correct can be a challenge so we have a tool in fusion 360 the other thing is really handy if you go into the canvases folder and you find that image that you're going to use you can right click on the image and choose calibrate and this is a really neat feature in my opinion all you have to do is select any two points on your design in this case this is essentially the diameter of the basket itself and go and take a measurement from the real part and actually going it put it so here I have a basket in my hand on my calipers let's go and switch to see me again here we got our calipers and whatever units you want to use are totally fine so I'm going to go here and take my measurement and it appears that this basket is 4 and 3/4 of an inch so that's pretty good let's jump right back into fusion so we're gonna go and type in four point seven five and the image is all of a sudden going to be scaled to be the correct size let's go and zoom out a little bit and you can see that the image is not exactly centered so we can go and fix that as well we're gonna right-click on the image and say edit and then I'm going to choose to use the top view so this will be a little bit easier and I can go and move this image wherever I like and if I use the arrows it's going to move it just in the XY direction and if I use the square here I can move this in any direction I'd like so that's about right it doesn't have to be perfect and we're gonna go and do this one more time we're gonna say insert an attached canvas choose the same plane and we're gonna go and choose the other image this one being the bottom view and again you can see how I could scale this image but realistically it's even better to calibrate the image to get it to be the right size so we're going to go and calibrate this image as well again I'm going to choose the very edge and we're gonna go and choose 4.75 and hit enter now this one appears to be centered or at least really close to sectored so I'm pretty happy with it I don't really have to make any changes there now what I might want to do is bring in a side cross-section because I want to get the curvature of the basket correct as well so maybe I'm going to go and say insert and attach canvas and I'm going to choose this plane the right plane and we're going to go and select an image and this time we're going to go and use a different one here and this one we're gonna go and use this side view let's go and zoom in here we're gonna do the same thing like we did before so we're going to go into calibrate this image and this one I predict is not going to be as accurate as the rest because it's it has a little bit of distortion from the actual whole picture but you can see here that it's pretty decent not so bad maybe I'm gonna go and move this in a position and we're going to use as the origin today the very top center of the basket so that's pretty good I think that's actually going to work out great now another thing that not a lot of people do but I think it's actually a great practice is to bring in an extra there might be an ISO image or some other images reference because unless you have a second monitor it might be a little bit tedious to go and grab another image of what this is going to look like and have to switch back and forth from fusion 360 to an image view or Photoshop or whatever other image editing program you might prefer so now we're gonna go and say insert another attached canvas this will be our last one and I'm gonna go and select an image and I'm actually gonna just bring in this image and this one doesn't have to be calibrated exactly I'm just using it as a reference for what this should look like and I'm actually going to go and move this off on the side so that as I'm designing I could always just go and look at this without having to leave fusion 360 to me that's a really easy way to do things so let's go and start modeling up this particular basket and remember that reverse engineering isn't very different from designing something from scratch except for the fact that you have something to your advantage which is you have an actual part that you can go and take measurements off of to help you along the way so we're going to go in again use those measurements as we go so we have a bunch of canvases in here we're gonna go and hide these and actually don't we'll leave this one up and we're gonna go and start to draw a cross-section of this particular item so we're gonna go and right-click on this plane right here and say create a sketch and we're gonna create the main sketch that drives the shape of this particular basket and let's go again and look at this thing in person so we're gonna go and there we go now you can see my screen I see me rather and I'm looking at this basket I see a lot of symmetry here that's going to help me quite a bit in designing so I don't have to design the whole thing we are going to start off with this section from the sides we're going to be looking at it this way I see that I have a curvature from above I'm using some engineering background to assume and in this case I think the assumption is valid that the thickness of the part is probably uniform or relatively uniform so we're going to be using that I also see that I have a center shaft and it sticks up just a little bit above the top of the basket and then quite a bit below we're gonna go and replicate all of that and of course I have a hole through the middle that's gonna have threads now I don't have to go and model the threads when I'm creating this initial sketch I can do that much later so we're gonna eliminate the threads themselves from this initial sketch and we're also not going to include any of these grooves at least not at the beginning and I think we're gonna be good to go so let's actually jump right back into fusion itself and start to draw our sketch so we have a whole variety of tools at our disposal so if you're creating a new sketch you have entities you can add like lines and rectangles and circles and arcs and you'll notice that a lot of them actually already have shortcuts so if you see that I'm doing something really quickly infusion chances are that I'm using a keyboard shortcut and one of my favorites is l4 line very intuitive makes it very easy to know what you should expect so I'm going to hit l4 line and I'm gonna go and draw a line from the origin straight down and notice as I draw this a little blue icon shows up about two-thirds of the way down my line at the moment and it's telling me that when I click here it's going to apply a constraint to that line automatically so there it is and now I have a centerline I'm going to turn this into construction job geometry and I could do that hitting the letter X on my keyboard or hitting construction over here in the sketch palette and now we're gonna go and actually design the basket itself so we're gonna go on using that line tool I'm gonna draw what I believe to be a rough shape here of the shaft and I'm gonna go and apply some constraints here then we're gonna go and also put in the overall shape of this particular thing and actually before I continue let's go and put in some dimensions now we trick for those readers out there our viewers out there is that if you click on let's say this outer line first and then I click on the centerline all I can put in here is a radius not a diameter if however I exit out of there and we do this one more time this time I click on the centerline first and then this line second before I click a third time to put my dimensioning I'm actually going to right click and change this to a diameter dimension now it makes it really easy to put in that down there perfect so I'm gonna go and take a quick measurement and it looks to me like this part is 0.8 inches and actually this is a good time to talk about units so in fusion 360 you can set your units to anything you want inches metric centimeters millimeters and so on and so forth that being said as you're designing whatever you've selected is really just going to be what it shows you you can always type in another dimension and as long as you put in mm for example 4 millimeter or in4 inches we'll be able to convert it to whatever units you selected to display so right now my document is in inches and all those there are several aspects of my basket that are going to be in inches I prefer to work in nature so I'm actually gonna go and measure this in metric and my measurement on my side is saying that this is about 21 millimeters and I'm gonna go and type in 21 mm 4 millimeter and hit enter and again it is going to convert this into whatever your display units are in this case inches now if you're gonna be putting in metric units all the time then it might be wise to actually switch your display units and we're gonna go and do that right here from inches over to millimeter and say okay and now for the rest of the document millimeter is going to be my primary unit I'm also going to go and take a dimension for this inner diameter here and again right click and choose diameter and now I'm going to go and take a quick measurement here and I'm showing this is about thirteen point nine Siringo and type in 13.5 and we're good to go I can also take a quick measurement of the height of the basket and it looks to me to be about 15 millimeters so we'll go and put that in as well perfect 15 now I did mention earlier that we're gonna set the origin to be at the very top of our basket so for that I'm going to select origin itself I'm going to select this top line here and I'm going to choose coincident as the constraint and notice how now my sketch is entirely black or fully defined or fully constrained and that's a good thing in music you're not going to be able to accidentally move your sketch around and have any kind of results that you weren't expecting so so far fully constrained let's move on we're gonna go and add an arc to this design and I'm gonna say create an arc and I'm going to choose a three-point arc I'm gonna design it from about here I'm gonna move this out to about here and I'm using the image as a background and the image is helping me out to get this approximately correct and looks like I accidentally moved my view so we'll go and fix that now I'm gonna make an assumption here that I believe to be correct and so I'm gonna try to make this line over here we're gonna go and make a construction line and I'm going to set this arc and this line to be tangent very happy I'm also going to add a dimension from the very top of the basket to that arc and I'm gonna go and measure the real one and let's go and show you my camera again and using the pointy part of the caliper you see at the bottom here I'm gonna go take a measurement and that looks to be about two millimeters so don't put that as two millimeters perfect let's go and switch back to our screen and zoom out just a little bit this is looking really good so far so I have my arc and I can change the actual shape of the arc to match but it looks like especially if i zoom in here and I know that the image is blurry but you'll have the real part in real life anyway so we're gonna go and add some more geometry here and we're gonna go this like so I think that's about accurate and we're gonna go and add some more constraints now we know that the entire basket is for 0.75 inches so let's go and put that constraint on right away we're going to go from the center line to the outer line and again right click and choosing these diameters I mentioned I can place this now remember that we switch the metric and I know that this basket is in inches or at least the diameter is so I'm going to type in four point seven five I in four inches and that'll be set so that's looking really good I'm also gonna put some dimensions here based on my measurements and I'm gonna go and put that too I think that's actually two millimeters perfect I'm gonna go and put a 45 degree here now in this case you can measure it in a variety of different ways if you don't want to see this as let's say approximately 130 you can come and switch this to that direction and now it's a 45 and then I'm also going to come in here and I'm gonna put in a dimension for this chamfer which is about three point five and you can see that I still have blue sketches right so this can change quite a bit I can drag this wherever I think is appropriate so maybe now I'm gonna go and get another dimension and that dimension is actually going to be measuring on the basket itself and what it turns out is at the very bottom of the cylinder part of the basket actually lines up with the bottom right here so I can go and select those and say coincident as well and now everything snaps into place now if you're wondering to yourself why am i drawing this not matching the image if the whole point of bringing the image is to be able to match it well remember that an image helps a lot but an image is not going to be perfect so it's all about using the image to help you along the way but at the end of the day you have to make what you believe to be the best decisions and those decisions are always a trade-off on whether you think that image is more accurate or those dimensions are more accurate and more often than not when I use the image for is the general shape and then I use the calipers or the 3d scan data for the xual specific dimensions that I want and in this case as we saw earlier my scan data was not any good so we're gonna rely entirely on my dimensions for my calipers so here I have a pretty decent sketch but we're not done we want a close sketch to be able to turn this into a 3d solid model so I'm going to go and continue just a little bit here we're gonna go and add a horizontal line right over there and remember our assumption earlier was that we're gonna have a uniform thickness so I'm gonna want to take these items here and we're gonna go and add uniform thickness to them as well now there is an offset command here and the offset command is really handy but in this particular case I'm actually gonna do it manually so I'm gonna go and choose an arc and I'm gonna draw it approximately in the right place and I'm also gonna go and draw a line and draw it approximately in the right place I'm gonna select this arc and this one and we're going to make them concentric and it did snap and moved a little bit but you can see now that it's actually matching quite nicely and then I'm also going to take these two lines and we're gonna make them parallel perfect now we're gonna go and put some dimensions between here now here's where again you're going to go and take the actual part we're going to take this and take our measurement we're gonna go with three millimeters and that's looking quite accurate we're gonna go and set that to three millimeters actually there we go so now you can see I set that to three I'm gonna do the same thing over here and now we're gonna combine everything together so I'm gonna say these two are going to be coincident this and this is also going to be coincident and now I have a close profile now if you come from other software like SolidWorks or pro he or many of the other parametric modeling software's you know that many of them need you to be able to you have to clean up your sketches so you only have a single profile to be able to revolve fusion 360 has a very intelligent sketcher and so you can actually leave your sketch just like you see right here and everything will actually work out just fine now if you happen to be a little bit more old-school and you prefer to clean it up that's totally fine too we do have under modify the trim command and I can come in here and trim my sketch and get rid of the extra that I don't need perfect so now this is looking really good let's go and make this into a 3d shape so we're gonna say stop we're gonna go and choose a revolve command we're gonna go and choose both of these regions right here and we're going to select those are access that center line that we drew earlier and say okay and now I have a disk of sorts that somewhat represents the basket that we're dealing with but this doesn't exactly look like the basket that I have in my hands right this doesn't look like this shape so we're gonna need another sketch to be able to make this look the way it does right now and that's where those images that we took earlier the ones from the top of you in the bottom view those are gonna come in handy so let's go right back into our design we're gonna go in hide this particular side view image and let's go and look at our top view there we go so you can see the image lines up pretty well and we're gonna go and take this and we're going to sketch using that view so we're gonna go and one other thing to keep in mind is I'd like to always put a name to all my sketches so that later on I always know what to go back to so we're gonna go and rename this sketch and this is going to be called side view and we're gonna go and make a new sketch this time it's going to be a top view and when we're done with it we're gonna go and name that as well I always like to start off with my centerline so we're gonna go and draw our vertical centerline just like we did there I am going to turn that into construction geometry I'm also going to start to just layout other things that I think are going to be important so I'm gonna bring in a circle I'm using C for circle to bring this in I'm gonna go and draw a line that's approximately following that image and for this outer shape I'm gonna use the actual 3d model so let's go and hide our canvass for a moment I'm gonna go under create project and we're going to project the geometry from the solid model and say okay one other tip by the way right now I'm selecting the edge itself of the MA if you want to wrote a more robust file you can actually change this let's deselect our geometry instead of selecting the edge I'm going to change those two bodies and we're going to select the entire object itself perfect now we're gonna go in hide the body itself and we have that same outer circle showing up perfect if I want to be really accurate I can go here and shrim my sketch this is looking good and let's bring our canvas back perfect and this is a perfect example of where the image itself doesn't perfectly line up with my model can I go back and move that image absolutely so one of the tricks if you want to have it line up with your sketch that you've already created is to take advantage of the parametric modeling that you have in few and 360 so everything that we did here was saved in the timeline in order so the very first image that we're using and we should rename this here as top view is the very first thing that happened but I can actually drag this to be later in my timeline so we're gonna go and drag that so now the picture is actually the last thing that comes in and I can go and edit it look at this from a top view and using the actual shape here that I know is going to be accurate I can go and move this image until I get it exactly where I want it so I'm gonna go and get this exactly where I want it and now everything lines up great and I can go back and take that image and reorder it to the very beginning of the timeline where it started off so now when I go back and edit my sketch again that image is still at the very beginning of my timeline but it's now in the perfect position so let's go and take the circle let's get this a little bit more accurate and let's go and take a quick dimension it's about eleven millimeters so we're gonna go and put in our dimension of 11 millimeters perfect we're going to do our best to line this up in the center of the image because now the image is lining up nicely and we're gonna go and trim this extra sketch here perfect Oh almost hold on I miss selected we're gonna go and select this guy and this one now I could pattern what I've already drawn and I could pattern it all the way around and make this entire basket but one of the other lessons that I want to make sure impart on you is everything that you do in fusion takes resources and the question is how much resources it takes and there are different things that take different amounts of resources and so you should know that patterning is sketch takes a lot more resources than patterning a feature and even then it takes more resources than patterning a body so what we're going to do today is we're going to actually model just this section right here and then we're going to take that and pattern it and then combine it all together so so far everything is looking really good maybe I'm going to put a dimension from the center line to this corner here we'll make that a diameter dimension and we'll adjust that to the truth I mentioned which is 25 and we're gonna go and draw a line from the very center line to this circle and we're gonna basically just work with this region here this is what we're gonna work on so everything is looking really good except I don't have everything fully constrained and so we're gonna put in some additional dimensions I think that it's important when you put dimensions in you put dimensions that are possible to measure in real life so for example if I want to measure from the center of this circle to the center of this one it would be pretty hard because I'd be measuring air right but I can measure however is the inside edge of this circle to the inside edge of that circle so we're gonna go and add a point here and I'm gonna select this line right there and I'm going to go and add a constraint to put it on that circle then I'm gonna come over here and we're gonna add another center line like so I'm gonna go and put this in the very center using a midpoint constraint we're just gonna use this like so I'm gonna make this guy perpendicular to our other line and now I have a mirror plane it's really in a line that I could use for mirroring which also means that I could use that same trick to be able to measure diameter so I'm going to use D for dimension pick the center line pick this point and now change that to a diameter dimension and now I'm measuring something that I could truly measure so let's go and do that sixty-eight point one five that's going to work for me and here I have my dimension now if you truly trust the image more than you trust the measurement that's fine too you can go and put that back to where it was and that'll be perfectly fine now my sketch is still blue it looks like I can move this quite a bit so we're gonna go and put in a dimension for the angle and I believe this is going to be twenty to twenty-five perfect last I mentioned we're going to put in here is going to be from the center line to at this point right here and we're gonna go 27 and now we have a fully constrained sketch let's go and hide our canvas and it's looking really good now remember I'm only focusing on a portion of our design I'm not focusing on everything because I can save time by replicating this in a pattern but again instead of patterning the sketch or patterning the feature we're gonna end up patterning the bodies to minimize the resource is taken by fusion and therefore have a file that's going to be able to solve much quicker and more robust so this is perfect let's go and show our solid body let's go and take this shape right here including the very center and we're going to go into an extrude and one of the coolest things about fusion 360 in my opinion is that whenever you're doing a feature like the extrude you can have this be a cut which is what you're seeing right now you could have it be a join and you could even do other things like make a new body or a new component or in this case intersect an intersect is really going to keep only with intersects between the sketch and what your object is so we're gonna say okay and this is exactly what I wanted and let's actually show you what this would look like if you were gonna jump ahead a little bit so we're gonna say create under the solid drop down and we're gonna make a pattern and we're going to do a circular pattern of this particular object instead of faces we're going to use bodies select this body right here and we're gonna go and choose an axis and rotate it around and I believe they're gonna be eight of these let's go and see what that looks like and it looks like I forgot a step and it's important that you know that everyone is gonna make mistakes including myself so let's go and fix a step actually we can leave this because we'll have it fixed automatically so we're gonna say okay and now I have eight of these halves so let's actually go back one step in our feature tree and before we do the pattern let's go in and do the mirror command so we're going to go and say Mirror we're going to instead of doing faces we're again we're going to select bodies we're gonna mirror using the right plane and say okay and then we're going to combine these two halves together so now I have both halves and we're gonna jump one step forward and I want all of you out there to predict at the same time what do you think you're gonna get if you mirror this instead of what you had before and I think you're gonna be pleasantly surprised you have an entire basket right because before we've only had half we mirrored it around we have a lot of gaps now we have the full shape or at least two halves down across the center line rotate it around eight times and now you have the basket and so all we're gonna do now is go and combine we're gonna take the primary which is that first one as the target and then we're going to select all of these as the tools and say okay and now I have a basket now you're probably thinking to yourself that we don't have everything that we want let's actually go and look at the real one for a second you can see that we're missing these cool v-grooves other than that it's actually looking pretty good we are definitely missing the thread down the center and the hole for the setscrew but those are the three things that are remaining so let's go and work on that we're gonna jump right back into fusion and let's start with a V group now I looked at the actual basket and I thought of a lot of different ways that we could have made that V group and I think to myself the way that they did it and ultimately that's what I want to accomplish I want to accomplish the way that they did I want to replicate it so we're gonna use the fact that we have a parametric modeling software and you can always go back in time change your sketches use the changes for new features right you there are a lot of endless possibilities there so we're gonna go back to our original sketch and we're gonna add some geometry here we're gonna add another arc and we're gonna start it right over here and for now I'm just going to drag this off in space and I'm going to use the same trick that I used over here and by the way we'll go and clean this up while we're at this perfect we're gonna go and add a line from there horizontal we're gonna make a construction I use the letter X as a shortcut to do so and we're going to make this tangent so this arc that I'm drawing is going to be the very bottom of the groove itself so I'm gonna go and take a measurement let's go back here and we're gonna measure what is the depth of this groove relative to the side here and it looks to me to be about 3 millimeters it's going to go back into fusion here and we're gonna go and put a dimension between these two here and we're gonna set it to 3 millimeters actually let me double check that measurement because it looks like it lines up to perfectly with the other and I measured it correctly so I'm glad that we redid this we're gonna go and change this from 3 to 3.5 the fact that it's lower than the original sketch doesn't faze me whatsoever we're gonna go and fix that and we're gonna take this arc and I can move this wherever I'd like now if I'm looking at the original and actually let's bring up their canvas this is a great time to talk about how we made a fourth image let's go and take this one and you can look at this at any point whenever you think it's useful so if I'm looking at this V groove I could see that it terminates the very beginning is what we started right over here and the very end is going to be important as well and the very end appears to me to end up exactly right here so I'm gonna go and take this very end and we're gonna snap it to that spot everything turns black which means fully constrained or fully defined and I like that so we're looking really good now so we're gonna go in the head stop sketch and I promised you earlier that we were gonna rename our sketches so that'll be easier to remember so we're gonna come in here and say this sketch over here is gonna be the top view and I do encourage you to do that and of course we could do the same thing with the canvases so this canvas here I believe is the cross section alright so we're gonna go and draw a new plane and to do that we're sorry' we're gonna draw a new sketch and for that we're gonna need a plane to draw on and so we're gonna go and look at our sketch again we're gonna go and look at this and we'll hide our body and I can see here that I have a line this is perfect because I can go under construction geometry and I could say let's make a plane along a path and I could choose this line as that path the distance here is actually going to be the distance along the path so I like to hit it at zero and you have a 50/50 shot of zero being the right side or the left side of this line so if it turns out it's not the one that you want change it from zero to one and you'll get what you want but in our case zero is great so I'm going to say okay now we're gonna go and click on this plane create our sketch and we're gonna go and make a very simple V group so I'm going to go and use the line come in and draw that V and notice how I did not do a perfect job on that V let's go and zoom in quite a bit that's okay because we have snaps to help us I'm gonna select where I wanted to go that's the bottom of that groove and select the end of this V select okay we're gonna go and add a centerline because I want this thing to be centered perfect we can add symmetry from the left right and that v-groove that's perfect and then we can also if we want go and draw a very top here so we're gonna go and select this bring this down make this horizontal and we're gonna select some dimension for the height and this does not matter very much in this case now for the width of the groove I can choose whatever I think makes the most sense the other thing I can do is I could measure the real one so let's go and take a look at this so if we look at the real body here you can see that the line is gonna cross this area right here and that's going to be important to us so maybe I'm going to want to go and do a projection and we can do a projection let's say this area here let's go and hide our solid for a second this line represents let's go and look at that one more time where this arc crosses this area and that's going to be where I want to measure my V groove so I'm gonna go and make this construction I'm gonna go and add a couple of points here that I think I'll be useful we'll go and set them to match this line just like so and now I can put a dimension of what that width is let's go back to our camera take a measurement real quick five millimeters go back to fusion type in five and now I have a fully constrained based on real-world dimensions perfect so how are we going to use this well we have a cross-section of the V groove and we have the arc that we think it's going to follow and so now we're gonna do is we're gonna use solid and we're gonna go and use the sweep command so I'm gonna go in sweep and we're gonna choose this profile and this guy and we're gonna choose for our path this one right here and it does give me a warning right now that we're creating something that's not visible so let's go and show our bodies and you can see here that we're making a V groove in our part now if I just say cut I don't think I'm gonna be so happy with let's go in hit okay and see I do have the groove itself but one of the things to note is that because the depth of the groove is lower than the model itself it ended up creating an actual cut through the park and that's not exactly what I was intending so maybe I'm gonna want to go and do this a different way right so maybe we'll go back to this feature and I'm gonna say instead of cutting the part we're just going to make this into a new body and that's perfectly fine we can do that no problem and maybe we're gonna go in take just thinking out loud here maybe we're actually going to take this region here this bottom region and we're gonna go and actually we're gonna change things up a little bit we're gonna go make a copy of this part so we're gonna go and say move copy we're gonna select the object and we're gonna create a copy there we go there we go and now we have two of them so this is going to be called V groove and we're going to use this as our cutting tool I'm gonna hide that and then we're also gonna have a V groove and this is going to be the bottom area perfect so one of the cool things about fusion 360 is that it's not just a parametric modeling software is much more than that it is a direct modeling software and it's also sub-divisional modeling software if you're not familiar with one of those terms let's start with direct editing direct editing allows you to model however you like and then change that model directly that's why it's called direct modeling or direct edit so on in fusion one of the most handy commands is this press pull command I'm gonna go and select the bottom face of this V groove and we're gonna go and grab this arrow and increase the thickness and I'm gonna go and use two and a half millimeters as our thickness I'm actually going to change this to a new offset and then we'll go and change it to two and a half and say okay so now we have our V groove just a moment here we have quite a bit going on here so we're gonna go and take let's rename so we can actually see this easily we have our basket and then we have our V groove perfect so what I'm gonna go do here is we're gonna take this area this is going to end up being the bottom of the basket and then after we join it together we're gonna go and remove the top now there are a variety of different ways to remove this area here that's sticking out there are a couple of different ways one of the ways that I like would be to just go and say let's go and modify that original sketch make this really easy on ourselves and we're just going to add an extension to this region right here so we're gonna go and draw this and make it horizontal and then we're gonna go and draw this line here and make this vertical and trim these just a little bit now I have another profile right here so what I could do is I could say take this profile and revolve that we're going to revolve it using this axis we're gonna use it as a cutting tool but we're not going to cut everything we're just gonna cut that v-groove tool so there we go and we have that and you can see what this looks like and now I can go and combine that with the rest of the model now I'm noticing a mistake on my part right because I have this V groove and we did all of this work for patterning and mirroring and things like that maybe I should have done most of this earlier now it's not a big deal in fusion I can come in here and I could move things around because again this software's gonna allow me to do that right it's a parametric modeler and you can go and do that I do have an area here that has a reference that I don't exactly like so we're gonna go and delete this reference really quickly and say okay and I can move this back just a little bit we're gonna take this one and move this as well take these guys move this and we'll be on our way back to where we want it perfect now as a reminder because I don't think I made this clear the reason that we are reordering things is I really want to focus on just this one part and not have to focus on everything all at once so this is a great way to do that and it looks like I'm just gonna do a little tweak and now we're good okay so now that we've done that we're going to go and combine these together so I'm going to say combine we're gonna select our main object I have to move this as well there we go we're gonna do a combined we're gonna select the main object and we're gonna join this V groove together now it's not perfect right I do have some areas here they're just sticking out this is where our direct editing shows really strongly we're gonna go and select these areas they're gonna be able to make these changes really easy I don't have to do any surface modeling all I have to do is hit the Delete key and delete those regions really easily I can come in here to the back side and again hit delete and now everything is merged together and looking really really good now all that's left is to take that V groove cutter and now we're going to do another combine we're going to choose this object the tool and instead of joining it like we did before we're gonna use it as a cutter now we're talking this is looking really really good the only thing that's left over here that I'm seeing that might be an issue is I do have a funny shape right here and we're wondering why is that and it looks like if I go back one step and I edit this I also have to select this other side say okay and now go forward and this is looking great but the v-groove I wanted to go all the way over so now we are going to introduce a little bit of surface modeling I'm gonna go to surface and we're going to choose offset and I'm gonna pick this surface right here I'm gonna say okay and I'm gonna hide the solid object and I can extend this surface very quickly and easily by grabbing all four the edges and dragging this bigger and what we're really doing is we're preparing the surface to be able to do a sort of replace base command and for replace space you do want the face you're targeting to end up being bigger sorry the face you're using to replace to be bigger than so we're gonna go to solid modify and replace face select this one right here select my face and okay and now let's hide that you can see that now I have the perfect v-groove that I wanted I don't need this surface anymore so I could remove it as well as some other objects that I don't need anymore and now this is looking really good let's jump forward a little bit and see how this looks we can do the combine command and notice other combos re the pattern the circular pattern and that actually automatically includes the v-groove because we were doing the body instead of features and then the combine and now this is looking really really good let's go back a couple of steps and maybe add some fill it's where affiliates are appropriate we're gonna go and use f as a keyboard shortcut and choose the bottom of the V groove and we're gonna go with half a millimeter we're gonna go and choose this edge right here we're going to go with a half a millimeter as well we'll go with one millimeter much better and now let's look at the bottom here and we're gonna go and it looks like I have an area here that's not extending again with Deric everything all I have to do is hit the Delete key and it will extend then I can go and add my fill it's where appropriate we're gonna go with one millimeter now it's looking pretty good let's go with two let's go with two and a half and now we're talking this is exactly what I'm thinking I want and if we look at the image from below you can see let's go and look at this from below that we're trying to get this to line up with their image let's go with three millimeters no I think 2.75 is gonna be the magic number today and that's looking great and then we're going now to fill it over here as well we're gonna go with one millimeter and this is looking great haider canvas and now we're talking let's go and add a couple more fill it's that I think would be appropriate we're gonna go and add a fill it here as a millimeter we're gonna have a filler here and here and we're going to only make those a half a millimeter and we're also gonna fill it this edge right here that one and this one we're gonna put that at two millimeters see maybe we'll change that later and we're gonna add a couple of fillings here and I think we will be good to go perfect it's going on a millimeter no that's a little too much we're gonna go and make that half and this is looking great so let's jump forward and see what our patterning shows us and now we have a part that's looking really really awesome we only have a couple more things left before we can call this good let's see we have a thread that's missing that it's very important for this to work so we're gonna go and say create a thread we select this interface and it's automatically going to use the size that it thinks is most appropriate so we can also choose by the way right now it's a cosmetic thread we're going to choose to make this a model thread because I want a 3d print this basket and it does appear to be exactly correct because I measured my basket and it's an m14 and I measure the thread and actually let me turn on a camera for a second one of the things that is important here is I need this thread to be correct now it's really hard for me to get my calibers inside this particular basket to measure that thread but remember that the basket actually came from this pole and so I can measure the actual pitch of the thread right here on this piece and see that it's 2 millimeters and so my designation of the m14 by 2 is actually perfect let's go and look at that on the screen and 14 by 2 and we're gonna say okay and that thread is looking great maybe we're gonna go and add oh we definitely need to add our set screw and so we need to figure out what plane is most appropriate to do that now if we look at the origin here I can go and draw on this plane and that would work just fine but this plane is probably gonna have this set screw interfere with this particular rip so what I might want to do instead is let's look at our top view sketch and it's easy to find it because we came in here and we named it and we're gonna go and add an additional line here and we can pick whatever angle we want in between maybe this is going to be 12 point sorry we're going to make this eleven point two five or if we want an equation we can come in here and select this item and say divide by 2 easy perfect now we also have the ability to just like before saying that we're gonna make a plane on a path we're gonna go and do that right now we're gonna go and say we're going to make a construction plane along a path we're gonna select 0 and it looks like it's already going straight to the inside edge which is where I wanted it I'm gonna say okay we're gonna go and select this plane and create a sketch on it and now it might be wise to show the basket itself again so now you can see it and we're gonna go and zoom underneath here and we're gonna go and draw a circle for our hole put a dimension here we're gonna go and measure the actual hole that I need two and a half millimeters now I want this hole to be centered between the park and also I'm noticing by the way that this is a little bit off I'm not really looking at this right well first of all I'm looking through the model but this end of the basket is in the way so one of the other things I like is to use the slice tool and that lets me be able to see things really well and it looks like I'm lined up incorrectly so I'm gonna exit out of this sketch we're gonna go and edit that top view sketch that we did earlier and it turns out that really I probably should stick with this 22 and a half I think that this is actually more appropriate so I'm gonna go and delete this line and I know that while I'm doing this I'm gonna get an error down stream because when it's making that plane along a path it doesn't know where to put it anymore because that line is gone but I'm gonna go and reassign it so I'm gonna say okay we're gonna go and reassign this plane it says missing the profile that's no problem we're gonna go and look at our top view and we're gonna go and select this edge right a go in select zero and say okay now we're gonna go and rename our sketch this is going to be called said screw hole let's go and show our body let's go and edit our sketch perfect and this is looking perfect so maybe for example I'm gonna go and use the project command and there's a shortcut for it by the way I'm using p4 project and I'm gonna go and select that point right there let's go and hide our body I'm gonna go and draw a line and I can make this snap right to the center perfect we're gonna make all of this construction excellent we're gonna go and bring this line down so it's pretty close with this projected dot and we're gonna say we want these to be horizontal perfect and now we can go and take my circle and say I want this to be exactly in the center of this line and say okay perfect let's go and show our body we're gonna go and take this circle we're gonna take this circle and we're gonna do an extrude cut through this model like so we're gonna add a fill it to this edge of 0.25 and now we're looking pretty good now I'm not gonna bother with putting threads on the setscrew because I could just use a screw that is gonna tap as it goes and at the end of the day this is gonna be made out of plastic so I'm not really concerned about that anyway I could form the threads as I screw in my skirt so the only thing left here is we're going to go and add fill it's to the outer edge the we're gonna select the outer edge on the top and bottom we're gonna go and select this to be call it 0.5 it's looking good and now as you can see I have an entire basket perfect so summary here three 3d scanning is the ultimate way to be able to bring in data and be able to reverse engineering but you don't at least have that access to a 3d scanner and you don't always have access to being able to you don't always have access to being able to get fancy 3d scans in my case I had a 3d scanner but the results from the scan were not very good so you can use measuring tape you could use an engineering ruler and you could use calipers even better than that is combining one of those forms with another which is going to be pictures right so we brought in an image from the top view and an image from the bottom view and we use those images as a basis to being able to draw our sketch and then model it all we were trying to do is to be able to replicate the correct dimensions in the correct shapes and as you start to use 3d modeling more and more and you look at an object like this one you're going to be able to anticipate what kinds of features they were using to make it likewise this V groove perfectly straight or was it following an arc and you can always of course destroy the part to get a really accurate cross-section right you can run this through a bandsaw and then now you have a really easy way to be able to take those measurements but it's not always possible to actually destroy that part so I always like to try to use calipers and images to be able to reverse-engineer my parts this ski ski pole basket is a perfect example so now I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna 3d print this part I'm gonna probably print two of them so this way my 3d prints are gonna be the same color and I'm gonna have the same surface texture and the same properties between the two but I'm able to 3d print a basket that I literally could not get anymore because they're out of stock and will be for quite a while and I was able to do all of that simply because I took pictures measurements and an access to fusion 360 if you're interested in fusion 360 and you don't already own it and you'd like to purchase it you will find a link in the description of this particular video and if you click that it'll just take you to our eStore and have a single seat a few three-sixty in your cart ready for you to purchase if you are not ready to purchase and you're interested in learning more about our product please reach out to us we could be reached out if we could be reached at fusion 360 demo at autodesk.com thank you so much for your time it's been an absolute pleasure you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 11,421

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, Jason Lichtman

Id: l6VOc842G8o

Length: 61min 22sec (3682 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/lf_1]

I watched this demo and it's jam packed with useful information, most of which I didn't know before.

For instance, I found out about the Slice button in the sketch palette which automatically does a section view on your sketch plane. It also made me think of how I can use direct modeling more frequently as it really helps get things done quicker and more cleanly.