More STL file editing. How to customize files from Thingiverse for free using Fusion360 Step-by-step

all right hello good evening my name is jared hansen mechanical design engineer that was asked a question of how would you go about making a custom edit to a stl file for 3d printing on a file such as this so um this is in response to a comment on my one of my youtube videos on editing stl files and uh i actually created this discourse people would ask specific questions like this send me links and i could help them out if you have questions feel free to use this link here i'll try to remember to attach that to this video if i upload this to youtube but so this would be a good example i went ahead and tried it yesterday morning and i think i'll do it another 10 minutes without going too far in detail on things i'll try to do this simply i'll use all free software of course i'm using fusion 360 which is a great software for the highest level especially uh because there's a free personal use license that you can apply for or not a platform but you can download and get started today on i'll try to link that as well and let's jump right in so that edit again was to extend one feature while retaining the rest of the model so um i think these units are off so maybe they um had their document in the wrong units when they brought in the model but i'll show why i think that for exciting so it's currently 93.5 they wanted to be 140. i'm not going to use those units but i'll or that measurement but i'll show you how to set it to any measurement you want so the reason i'm thinking that is based on the thing evers link here which feel free to reference this if you want to try this at home you know with the same model i'm using so that doesn't look quite that large man i think 93 millimeters is like three or four inches so yeah so almost four inches so in that space there so i think something's off there but no worries let's figure it out together so first thing you want to do is check your document settings make sure that your millimeters if you're not millimeters let me shrink this camera okay if you're not millimeters i clicked change active units and i'll just verify that i'm in millimeters so okay so next we're at um in our document if you have something else pulled up just go to new design of course and let's go and get started so i'm going to go to insert i'm going to find the mesh file by doing insert mesh i have it stored here on my computer i'm going to go ahead and click that and click open i'm gonna bring it in millimeters as well as you see there and okay so as you can see i have the model here and we're gonna start editing so the first thing we'll need to do is go over to our document right click on the name and then click do not capture design history because now we're going to convert it into a more traditional body so it'll be easier to edit click ok and if you saw there our tabs expanded and now we have more options including the mesh tab but let's go back to the solid tab go to modify mesh mesh to be wrap click the body that we want to convert and if you look under bodies here you'll see that we only at the moment have a mesh body so i've clicked the body i'm going to convert it i can click new component our new body i'll do a new component and click ok as you see we just created this new component which is a traditional uh model and not a mesh body you actually can't see the mesh button anymore because it's turned off but you could turn the visibility back on i'm gonna turn it off i actually usually just delete these but it's your choice okay so that's the biggest step and now we have a more traditional body let's go ahead and do merge and that'll be the last step before we turn back on our design history because we want this design timeline down here but we have to finish using some of the surface and mesh tools first so we go to the surface tab we're going to go to merge i'm going to click a couple faces for this video let's do two at a time to try to avoid uh fusion actually like crashing or something because sometimes you can overbear the system but honestly i think that's far enough for what i'm gonna do for this video because i just want to extend from here to here this area i want to make a change to so really i think i'm just going to mostly use this face so go back to the solids tab right click on the name capture design history so now we have our timeline down here timeline it will be important going forward uh because i think the way i'm going to do this uh we might end up using it so uh you see i'm unsaved i'll go ahead and save by clicking typing control s and saving it as corner person asked for this example file okay all right so let's go in and make this edit and i think my game plan will be to use this face create a reference sketch and then completely remove this part and then draw it in custom but don't let that scare you in that description i'm going to make this pretty easy so we're going to go to click the face and type the letter c for create that'll enter the sketch tap here we've entered a new sketch um click escape and then type p for project okay um so for the geometry i selected this face and i'll show you that face there and i'm going to say okay i'm going to turn the body off the visibility of it or you could turn the component either one just so we can focus on the sketch and now you see that we'll have this in the future but uh again my game plan to get rid of this and then customize that feature so what i would like to do here i believe still debating is i will just go in draw a rectangle click finish sketch okay i'm gonna turn the body back on for reference and just to give you a quick idea of what i'm describing the thought process here so i would delete this i actually prefer to do two object and select a face so if i change stuff later and i start messing with the timeline that reference won't be broken okay so you see i've deleted that face there but i still have the sketch as a reference uh this could be useful for first you could just go back in your timeline and recreate the period in time that that still existed but you could also just extrude it back out if you wanted yeah um but my plan is to ransom the sketch and hide the body for simplicity and now let's go in and start editing so first i'm going to hold ctrl and highlight these lines if it'll let me all things kind of because i'm inside of this rectangle click one line of the rectangle and type x this will turn that line into a construction line so it's not affected and it'll let me select other lines now um as you can see it's the same thing as right clicking and saying normal slash center i'm sorry normal slash construction so no worries let's see i did the same there i highlighted and typed text you can do the same thing by clicking one lines and normal construction right click normal construction right click normal construction okay and that'll make more sense in a second but now let's go ahead and draw out what we're planning for this i'm gonna go to create rectangle three-point rectangle and see here i'm gonna drag it out i'm gonna let's say enter in dimension i'm just gonna make this um 18 millimeters all right i'll click to place that point and oops i did that wrong and i'm just going to select another point for that rectangle okay and i'm gonna right click repeat three point triangle that's a rough way of doing that but it's gonna be fine now let's assign to match this shape so type d enter okay you can see that the thickness here is 1.5 let's reference that what it was before it's also 1.5 so uh no worries and one i'm just going to set this one as the same all right and this is blue but it actually should have been constrained i'm not sure why that is blue let's try okay you'll see it's turned black so it's fully straight now and we now want to make this a body uh first we'll need to set this length so we know that this part worked before and we want to maintain that so let's just drag out a line and i'm going to click these two lines and say that they are collinear which will bring them to the same height so i don't have to assign a length and now we are good to go let's go ahead and turn this line back into a normal line so that this extrude will work sorry that's this is kind of what i was thinking about it might be too far in the weeds but um that's probably a fast way to do this so let's do finish sketch let's check the body okay so our extrude so worked and um now we could go in and just extrude these out the new shape we might run into some issues with those we'll see no reason to worry about it until we have something to worry about and i'm going to click this face here to bring the extrusion all the way to that face fusion is great about having like little intuitive commands like that but you can also do to object click the face yeah and we're enjoying so okay i'll turn off the visibility of sketch and you see we're really close so but jared what about these uh edges i want it to be um i fill it like that so no worries let's handle that real quick let me go to fill it click that edge i'll start dragging and i'm just gonna say match that and you can see did a pretty good match to that phillip and if i put hold control type this one as well you'll see that also matched that top one um it's going to be close you can make them a little bit more accurate by cleaning up this phillip but honestly for 3d printing i think that's going to work out pretty good for everyone um let's go ahead and see what it would be if we cleaned it up well i don't want to merge again because we've already got our timeline going so yeah nevermind i'll leave it and type that oops that let's do start dragging and it's asking for dimension is why we can just click something and it will try to match whatever we click the angle of that so that's gonna be pretty close just click okay all right so but now what about um sorry i just hit my mic there um what if this is the wrong size so no worries now that this has been edited we're gonna go to sketch click it right click say show dimension and now we have this parameter here this dimension that we can just click and say let's go back to 16. uh let's go to 15. so however that is uh however test print it you know test a little piece of it if you want to change change it uh go ahead and just click on this and let's say let's go to 14 etc uh so that's pretty much the process there now let's add the hole up here and clean up this sharp edge so we're gonna go to the fillet again i'm gonna click that edge i'm gonna hold ctrl click this edge and i'm just gonna eye ball this uh oops oops okay i'm gonna use my keyboard let's go 0.75 millimeters i don't like it go that far let's go 0.65 yeah that looks that looks fine maybe 6 0.6 yep great okay now let's add the slot at the top so i'm gonna go to sketch create sketch i've clicked the plane there as you saw uh you can see where our plane is and i'm sorry got a kitten that climbed up set her down all right so we are in the sketch we're gonna go to create slot center point slot is what we're going for but first let's find center i usually just click find center and work down by clicking two corners you see here and selecting that line right click normal construction or you could have typed x after clicking the line create slot center point slot find the center point in that line go uh you see i have the horizontal um constraint popping up on the line there with the light blue icon and i'm going to pull out this slot so you can make the same size you wanted if you want to match the old one what you do is is go back in time let's go back on the timeline so you can do this on well let me assign the dimension first i'll type d for dimension click enter type d one more time our enter okay finish sketch and go to that sketch right click um show dimensions now let's go back in time and figure out what that slot was previously so we can make it the same size so uh you know with this timeline feature uh really you don't have to be too careful when you're modeling uh stuff like this you can just kind of just try it go fast and see if it works out because 99 is going to work out and you don't have to be too detailed at the beginning so so we're back in time let's go ahead and just um see if we can pull a dimension without anything so i'm gonna click i for inspect nope it's not gonna give us a radius with that but no worries we'll just click the face push c for create and then click p for project okay all these features i'm using keystroke for you could find them up here and modify and create let's see like project and include is right there so no worries now i'm going to click type d for dimension and let's see if it will let us pull a radius it's still one no worries uh three point arc click that point at that point and just land on another point this will give us an art click d for dimension find that arc we know that is a 3.5 millimeter radius so um that's great now let's find this dimension here which is 13. so 3.5 and 13. if you have trouble remembering that just take a you know windows key shift s screenshot and just save that off to the side of your computer so you can reference it but it'll be there in the future when we need it so fast forward in time on our timeline here back to where we were a second ago and turn off that previous sketch see there's our sketch before we could actually leave the dimension on if you want to reference dimensions directly and we can make a match so so i guess you don't have to do a screenshot uh let's do radius i'm going to double click and 3.5 to match the other one and then this length needs to be 13 so my 18.5 so i'm going to say 13. okay now you can see our slot matches the old slot i'm going to turn off that sketch and i'll click wait click again and name it reference 2. to size uh typically i will name all this stuff um but i like to be fast for these videos oh my god we're almost 20 minutes okay nevermind i just said be fast so let's get out of here uh all right where you've got that done let's click extrude and just pull through well done i'm gonna go up and click the face just for simplicity and now we've created the part and remember just turn on your sketches here are to change those dimensions while you're still in the model and it should be golden hope that was useful again asking questions you have a lot of fun working on stl files and whatnot and they're all free online it seems like so okay thanks bye

Channel: Jared Hanson

Views: 31,288

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Id: vhlc2yJISN8

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021