Copter Project Week 1

For this project we’re going to be creating a small drone copter. It’s about 6ish inches wide and we were given the dimensions in the picture above and then left to our own devices as to how to recreate this in Fusion 360. When I looked at the design I decided that I looked for repetition that I could duplicate; patterns. This way I could utilize the mirror or rotate tool to simply my work. As you can see the four “legs” of the copter are the same and the central section has several places it can be mirrored.

A few new tools that I discovered in this project were the fillet tool and the trim tool. These became invaluable to make curves and  to turn things like boxes and circles into half circles and divots. The first outer leg wasn’t terribly difficult. Create a few construction lines off of the central axis to get my guiding lines and then all I had to do was properly dimension out rectangles and circles. Below is what my finished leg looked like.

Once that was done it was just a matter of selecting the leg components, the central origin point, and then using the circular pattern tool to loop it around the core. The center section took a lot more thought and consideration. Here’s where I used the trim too and a few dimensioned out rectangles. My first thought was to simply mirror it across to the top half until I realized I couldn’t because it wasn’t just mirrored, it was flipped. In the end I figured it was just easiest to rebuild it by hand.

The final bit was the notched section at the top. This wasn’t terribly hard once I figured that the assigned dimensions didn’t include radius’. This meant I could just create a C shaped rectangle and then fillet it all out to make it rounded.

Since this was just the initial sketch I felt pretty happy with the outcome. i was also able to learn a few new tricks and this project also let me take my lessons and turn them into practical application. I’m planning on creating my own project soon so having the initial dimensions in a sketch helped a lot. I think when I do my own I’ll start with some predetermined and set dimensions to start off with like I did here. New up is to create the box that this thing will be stored in.