Thankfully professor McKay spent some extra time in class going over this project and I decided to start the design over from scratch. Since I was able to follow along and take some good notes hopefully you’ll notice that everything worked out much better this go around. I still have some questions about projections (and I struggle in the design as you’ll see coming up) but I feel pretty good about this one.
The primarily issue i was able to fix was understanding not to finish a sketch until I’m done AND in order to modify it I have to go back into the edit mode. This little thing really changed design life here. Also it let me discover the dimensions tool that let me set all my sizes properly as well as set up the important constraints I needed. The pictures below will look like the ones in the last post but this time it was all actually the correct measurements.
Now I was able to work on the top now that I extruded my legs. A key point here that really flowed throughout the design was making sure these two legs were linked together. (Copied and not “added as new”). This way I was able to just worry about one leg and it was exactly replicated on the other side symmetrically. For the top, creating a new plane to work on was incredibly helpful and something I think I’m likely to utilize a lot in future designs. Again the dimension tool made me very happy. 😀
Making the holes turned out to be a bit of a challenge. The reason being is that I hadn’t properly extruded the legs and had somehow made them twice as thick as they should have been. I think when I extruded it I set each side of the leg sketch to be the Thickness parameter instead of just one. This was apparent when setting the dimensions for my holes sketch and utilizing the mirror function (with my newfound friend the construction lines) and the holes being set to the same thickness parameter were half the size of the leg thickness. I had to step back several times to fix this one. In the end the following picture made me feel good as all the dimensions fit properly. Extruding downward to carve out the joints in the left and holes for the top was tricky but good note taking helped.
With the top completed I was time to move onto supports. Since I learned a TON from the top board, this was pretty simple and let me use the lessons I learned from that part into this one. I used a new plane and had it offset from the back of a leg, set the dimensions of the support component, mirrored them with the plane, and then cut out the joints in the legs. I got through this part fairly easily and was happy with the result.
So I finally finished this one out. I beveled the edges and it looks really nice. I’m not sure how it’s going to export with those bevels but we’ll hope for the best and maybe modify to a more squared design if the laser cutter doesn’t play nicely. Overall I was pretty happy with this design. There was a LOT of not-so-user-friendly things still with Fusion 360 but hopefully those things will just become second nature as we move forward and get experience with the tool set.
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