How do you go from making something like this to something like this? We're going to go through this beginner tutorial, making this manifold also covering 24 tips that every beginner should learn coming up.

Hey, this is Tyler Beck with tech and espresso down in the comments below. Let me know if you're you're learning Fusion 360 for your career, or is it a personal project? And if this video is helpful, hit that like button hit subscribe. It helps me grow this channel. When I was just starting out with CAD modeling, something like this would be really intimidating. When I look at it, it's got all these crazy features and I start trying to think of one feature that could solve all this, and that can be overwhelming. So instead, if you can break it down into simple shapes, first, your simple solids, that's not as hard, right? That's a revolve.

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And then a simple boss, some cuts patterns, adding additional features. And yes, there's some tricky parts to this, but we can do this. So let's run through as well as calling out 24 different beginner tips that hopefully will be helpful for you. So let's get started. So I got this from the SolidWorks model mania. If you want to check out this drawing, I'll be referring to it throughout the tutorial, but it's a great exercise. And it's something that actually can be done incredibly fast, like in minutes with a, with a lot of practice. So this is a good one to work through.

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Okay. The first thing I want to do is make sure that my units are set correctly. So I'm going to be working in inches on this example, it looks good. Starting a sketch on the front plane. I'm going to sketch a line and I'm going to use a construction line. There's a lot of ways you can turn this to construction by selecting it right, click and choose construction. I hit X on the keyboard. I'm in the habit of doing that case. I'm going to start sketching line arc by dragging. So I was about to draw a third line and I drag it out and it creates that line to arc. That's a tangent arc. Next let's use the offset command. I'll use the S key offset.

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Okay?

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Okay. So I'm going to offset this entire shape. I am changing the selection. That's fine. It looks like it's extended this. So I'm going to go ahead and finish this out. Use the line command to connect that and connect that. And we don't have to trim it, but it's not. It's a good practice to clean up your sketch esky. I'm going to use the rectangle.

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Okay. You'll notice that my entire sketch just scale based on the first dimension that I dragged in. And why is that? Okay. So when you go to your preferences, there's one I love to use. It's the scale entire sketch. And I've got a tip out there for that as well. Okay. So let's do some dimensions dimension to the construction line and it is sensitive to the order. So Judah dimension from the center line, construction line first to the edge, right? Click. I'm gonna do a diameter and I'm a dimension out. So it's doubling it over so that I know that it's a revolver and that lets me avoid having to do that math, but also it's going to make it a little more clear down the road when I'm kind of editing this design or working with it. Okay. Hitting D on the keyboard, K dragging this around, that starts to expose to me what's missing in our design and the dimension from the construction line to this outer edge, right? Click diameter dimension, and the overall height go from the edge to the point, dragging it in. It's finished off our dimensions. Okay. Next, I want to make sure that this arc is defined and you'll notice the center points are often space. There's a number of ways I could solve that. But one way is I'm going to select the center point and the construction line and have them line up or coincide make them coincidence. Right?

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Okay. So one thing I just noticed is I messed up and this is going to happen. If you didn't intend to have this sketch entity here, I don't want to revolve these shapes, this bottom boss. I want it to be open. So how do I get rid of that? Well, if you try the trim command, there's some gotchas here. When you start trimming, you'll start to lose some dimension sometimes with Fusion 360. And so it can be problematic to trim away some of these entities. So, uh, another option is to just select the things that you want to keep, but not use those objects for the feature. So I'll turn those to construction. So hit X on the keyboard and it turns these two construction geometry, right next let's serve all a hit S revolve doing a solid revolve. So what do you have to select first for the revolve as the axis? And then you can select the entities. I'm going to select this shape here, hold control.

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It's like fat as well. You can see it's revolving the entire object. So I'm selecting two profiles cause they were too close profiles. I love that and Fusion 360 that you can do that. All right. So I'd like to start a sketch on the front plane. You'll notice that the planes are missing or excuse me, they're underneath the object there. So one option is to just simply select it, hit V on the keyboard and it'll hide it or you can select from the tree. So if I select it here, we can hit the sketch. And now it's sketching on that. Another thing I've love in Fusion 360 is this slice option. If you had slice, even though we're working on a point that's right in the middle, it's going to section at forest. So it makes it easier to understand what you're sketching. I love this. I'm going to begin by sketching a line and I'm going to start by sketching this vertical line and make it for construction. I'm going to attach three different circles.

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And so now, because I've constrained those circles, you can see they're connected to that line going forward. All right. So what we want to do is start adding some constraints and I'd like to constrain from this arc to the top here. And I can't seem to get these to connect some time. So what do you do? You can use, what's called projecting. You're leveraging a past body or sketch. So in this case, what I'd like to do is project the entire body. I select it hit. Okay. And it projects. And now I have these edges and lines to work with projecting a body's great. When you've got kind of like a rounded object where there's not always a solid edge. So if I select this arc and this arc, okay. Make those tangent and I'm going to make these circles right. Click make them equal.

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Okay. So these are the dimensions I'm trying to hit. When I dimension to a full circle, it wants to do a diameter, but I'm going to right. Click and choose radius just cause that's what I happen to know from the drawing. Next let's place this, if we know that as a radius, we can put that in again. We could do day a matter, either one, whichever, you know, love that in Fusion 360 that you can just set it up, how you need to place it. Okay. So this is over defined. And why is that? Because these are already equal to each other. Okay. So I'd like to line up this point with the origin, so right. Click and make those vertical with each other. Great. And then let's add the final dimension. Okay. Next let's update this dimension. I think I typed that in wrong. And then we need to finish off these sides. So I need some tangent lines between the arcs. So let's try that again. So when I'm sketching a line between arc arc, and if I do want it to create the tangency, I see click and snap, you can see there is the tangent little icon happening there. So it did add a challenge into here so we can select the line and the arc do tangency and that cleans it up. It's selecting these and adding the relationship.

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There we go. Great. So instead of doing this again on the other side, let's mirror, but a mirror, this entity and this entity holding control or command on the keyboard and a mirror and cross this construction line, it's like that. There we go. Great. Now I don't have to trim this all up because Fusion 360 great at using multiple contours. He on the keyboard E for extrude. Okay. So the extrude, we can come in and just kind of collect these by selecting on them. And I love that it keeps the dialogue open and it's just selecting all 10. Is there a faster way I could try the box select it grabs all 10, which terrific. I tried selecting outer edges. It didn't really grab it, but I'm doing a new body. Or am I joining in this case? I am joining the geometry and I want to go out a certain distance.

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We can't see it because of the slice that's happening. If you go back and turn that off, but let's do 2.75 and you can see now it's updated. Even though that visual is kind of a little misleading, but that's cause I asked it to slice. It's kind of doing what I told it to do. And now let's do the cuts and I separated them on purpose. It makes it easier to edit after the fact. So I'm going to start a sketch on the front point, select that plane hit sketch, and I'm gonna start sketching a circle. Now I'd like to leverage that existing arc. So there's some different ways I can do this. I can I go arc and select this arc and make them concentric. Then it's going to align them. I could also use a construction line as well, and I'm going to draw or sketch a circle up here. Same thing. If I select the arc and the arc and make those concentric, it makes them align. Or again, you could just do a construction line, finish that circle.

New Speaker (11:09):

All right. So first thing, these two circles are equal, right? Click equal. And then I'm going to dimension that. So what's missing the distance between these and it shouldn't be missing. I know that this is concentric with this arc. Okay. So let's cut these holes, holding controls, selecting those. I could do a distance. Now what's the challenge with that? The challenge is that it's not intelligent and necessarily tied to the depth of this. If I were to ever update this step value of that boss, that'd be a problem. Right. And I'd have to update both. And instead I can make this intelligence simply by having it do cut all the way through. So it always cuts it. Or instead I could do to the object and then set a distance. We'll do a through all. It's going to always cut that out. Okay. The next thing I want to do is I want to add another boss and it looks like it's the boss with the holes that match this as well as around circular boss with a hole in it.

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And we'll tack that next cool key. So the next thing we need to do is this same type of extruded boss. And that looks like a pattern to me. It looks like we need to pattern this whole object, including the cutouts. Okay. So I'm going to talk about the strategy of this order here in just a minute. But for right now, we're going to do circular pattern by typing esky, circular pattern. And one thing I love about Fusion 360 is you can select all these different ways of patterning. But the first thing you have to decide is what are you patterning? Faces can be a little confusing when you have some complicated geometry and a lot of faces to select. So bodies can be helpful when you have multiple bodies, but in this case, we're just doing one big body joined together, one component. So I'm going to be features and the features are down in the tree and I can select them here. I'm doing the extrude and it's cut out, right? Both. So two features and those are going around this circular axis or this rounded face rounded face. All of those would work. Or I think this axis in here would also work great. So I can select any of those things, but we're going all the way around. That's fine. But we could just go at an angle 45 degrees. And how many do we want total meaning including the original. So we'll do two

New Speaker (13:51):

and I think I want them coming. I want it coming in other side. There we go. So negative 45. It looks like it's solving. Okay. So look at that pattern. It looks like that. Does that cut? Doesn't go all the way through. So maybe if I do an adjust,

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it looks like that solved it. It's now cutting those through. That's good. Cause it's resolving the cutouts. Alright, well that's good. But one thing I know I'm, I'm kind of anticipating is we're going to have to cut all this stuff out after we get that last boss in there. So I guess we'll deal with that later. I try to do my cuts after I've done all my solids, but because this part has some complexity with patterns and I'm with these three bosses that intersect, this might be the best strategy let's keep going. Okay. The next thing we want to do is tackle this boss. And so it looks like it needs to be at a point of 45 degrees as well as kind of dimensioned off at an angle, begin by a pointed an angle. Okay. Next thing we want to do is tackle this boss.

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Okay. The next thing I want to do is add an angled plane. So I'll do a plane at an angle. I can use this axis as a reference point and then it's 45 degrees. So I don't know if it's going to be off to that direction or a negative 45. So when I look at the preview, it's telling me where to go, okay. That looks like the right direction. Terrific. So there's our angled plane. So I can select that and start a sketch. I can also select it from the tree. You can see it's now construction geometry. Okay. So now that we need to do this sketch, there's lots of ways we can tackle it, some tricky dimensions on it that I've noticed if we slice it, that can make it a little bit easier to work with. I'm just going to sketch a line often space, and this is construction.

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It's at an angle and I'll start adding the dimensions that I know. So I do know from the bottom to the end point is going to be 2.35. I also know that it's coming off at an angle. So it's using this edge or the centered circle of the whole boss as a dimension. So will dimension from, we can actually dimension from that reference angle. Um, or if, if you're more comfortable, if you don't want to do that projection, we could just do a construction line, right? So there should be snap to the midpoint construction line, six degrees, and then I'm going to do a rectangle. I'm going to try a special rectangle three-point rectangles start at, start at this end point quick, somewhere down, along the line and it drags up a parallel rectangle. So I love that one. Okay. So I did construction didn't mean to do I'll hit X on these and turn these back to solid. Okay. So these are solid. And what I'd like to do is dimension across. So back to that trick, it's like the construction line outer arc, right? Click to diameter place. That it's 1.2. What are we missing the length? And so by looking over the drawing, I think it's inferred that this is actually 2.4 from end to end and horizontal distance.

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And so if we now revolve that it's a solid,

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okay, there we go. There's our evolve can notice the interior's all kind of a mess. We're going to get to that in just a minute. And we can reuse the sketch from past and cut that out. If I start to sketch on this face and sketch that whole dragging the dimension 0.82. Okay. So how do we want to do this? Do we want to cut until the end of that body? Or should we do it from the end of the extrusion? So we can extrude the cut and we'll do up to I'll pick the other side and it cuts it all the way through. And so it's intelligent, tied to that feature. Okay. One embarrassing thing that I forgot about this whole time was just saving. Right. I tried to hit save right when I get started. Okay. So the strategies to this part, we've cut out the underlying area, but I noticed there's some conflicts here. Um, there is this kind of boss sticking out where that whole should have cut it as well as I think this is kind of still has a little bit of material left there, even there as well.

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Right?

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Right. So how do we remove some of these one tool I love is just the ability to delete and patch faces infusion. So if I select this face, I can hit delete on the keyboard. It tries to delete and patch it. And that did a really nice job. That's awesome. Next this hole I hit delete and patch and it, for some reason, it's going all the way through, through, uh, through the rounded boss. And I think it's because it doesn't know where to finish because that is a rounded face at the top. So how do you reuse this geometry instead of starting over and sketching a line and an arc and a bunch of circles. So I'm gonna start a sketch on this face and I'm going to select the face, hit P for project and I'm using these faces hit. Okay. And it redraws everything I've loved this tool I'm in SolidWorks. We use something called convert entities, kind of very similar experience. So if I now do my extrude, I'm gonna do these three and these are holes. So they're cuts now, how are we going to stop it at the right location? Right. So we could come to this point or the origin that looks like that's where I actually need to stop is right in the center.

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Okay. So if we want to pull, fill it from toolbar, I'll search, it's like these edges, it's got those and this is amazing actually in fusion. It does such a great job of solving all of these faces, even though we should have to select them in the right order. In a lot of cat systems, you have to do the rounded fill it's on one edge, one side first, then the next, where there's convergence, but fusion does such a nice job of solving these anyways. So I was just able to select them and do those rounds.