good afternoon YouTube hope everyone had a happy and safe new year and I wanted to say thanks to
all the viewers and subscribers for 2016 all the great comments and suggestions and ideas for new
videos it's time to get 2017 off to a good start so on this video I wanted to talk about some of
the things I learned in designing this clip for my LED panel light that I showed you in
the last video I used autodesk fusion 360 which you see here to design this part so I came from
an AutoCAD background I did a lot of work with AutoCAD in a previous job in fact about 21 years
ago I was involved with porting AutoCAD from the dos and windows platform over to Silicon
Graphics UNIX workstations so I was working with AutoCAD 13 and also worked with release 11 and 12
before that with my AutoCAD background I used to use the I think they called it the advanced
modeling extension am ii and that's very similar to fusion 360 s create menu here you can create
boxes and cylinders and spheres and do revolves and extrudes of shapes into 3d surfaces but for
this project I decided to do a sketch so that's one of the features that fusion 360 does you can
make a two-dimensional sketch like you would on a back of an envelope or scrap of paper and then you
can use that sketch to create a 3d model from so in this case I used a line sketch and I drew that
line in the XY plane that way the part sits down fly out on the 3d printer build platform and then
extrudes up in the Z direction here so with fusion 360 they've got a pretty neat feature here down at
the bottom you have this timeline so you can see all the steps that you did to create your
model and in this case there were three steps so I have this sketch that I created you'll notice
it's labeled sketch for down there so this is actually the fourth time i redrew this sketch
in this particular model file and I'll explain why I did that coming up here so let's see let's
go to the sketch and what we can do is we'll just turn on just the sketch and I'll go over
here to a top view so here's your sketch that I drew so this is again a 2d model and the way you
draw the out is you just pick the line primitive and then you click all your points where you want
all the turns to be and so I basically built the part off of the dimensions of the panel light so
this is the trim ring flange it's two and a half millimeters thick there is a nine millimeter
recess in the light and then there's this one millimeter thick metal flange or cover on the
back and then I just built the clip to fit around that and to fit inside of the accessory clamp that
I'm using to hold this so that was my vinyl part the initial sketch that I did if you remember from
the previous video just had straight sides here so I basically drew the bottom line there was a
line up to here and then I did all this stuff in the middle came over to here and down but then I
wanted to come in here and add these tabs on the top and I was unable to take this one line segment
from the bottom to the top and break it here to insert this this intermediate point in this step
and I think I tried all of these there's a trim extend break I tried all of those things and I
could not get that line to break into two segments so that accounts for one of the array sketches it
turned out it was just easier to delete the whole thing and start over again and so the second
version of the part I added this ear sticking out or this little tab I came from the bottom
up to here and went over and up and back and that was my second version when I tried to then taper
the sides of the part as I did in my third and final version I ran into an issue with Fusion
sketches they have what they call constraints that are added when you draw your lines and that ties
in also two built-in snap grid where they snap their points to coordinates that are on that
grid so if you draw a line here that's pretty close to horizontal they will assume you want a
horizontal line they'll draw the horizontal line and then they add a constraint to that line that
says that line is horizontal if you draw a line up here that's vertical they constrain that line to
be vertical and then they also constrain those two lines to be perpendicular like this angle
here is 90 this one's 90 that one's 90 and then there's also constraints that for instance this
line and this line or parallel when I tried to move this point in to taper the part it wouldn't
let me do that because this line was constrained vertical and that angle was constrained to be a
right angle so I tried to go in and delete as many constraints as I could see but it just wouldn't it
wouldn't let me do that Oh so I drew the part again and this time I purposely drew this line
vertical and then I was able to move it around because that line and this line
were not constrained anymore and then the fourth time i redrew the sketch was due to the way I had
dimensioned the part i think when i originally drew the part i put an overall height in here of
33 millimeters now what i did to fix that in the last version is I put all of the dimensions inside
here so the overall height is 8 millimeters up to the bottom of this slot and then 25 up to the
top of the clip and in doing that this internal geometry here stays fixed it doesn't move around
if i change the outside dimensions that was the final thing I learned was you really have to be
careful on where you put your dimensions because if you put them in the wrong place things inside
will start changing you know dimensions that matter if they're reference to something that
doesn't matter it can change and the the idea was this clip has to fit around that light and
the light doesn't change size but if I want to make this clip 10 millimeter deep here I want to
make this a little bit wider a little bit narrower that doesn't affect these internal dimensions so
anyway that's kind of the things I learned was really be careful when you're doing your sketch
of if you want things to be constrained make them 90 degrees and vertical and horizontal but if you
don't want them constrained purposely make them not perpendicular because getting rid of those
constraints is pretty hard to do there i added my extrusion height which i made 10 millimeters here
and then i also added a little fill it in here to make the print a little bit stronger and then with
fusion 360 come over here to the make menu and you can click on 3d print so you can you can output
directly to an STL file if you want to do that or you can click here and you can select your 3d
printer or slicer utility I happen to use cura but they have some other options there as well
and then you just select your part and click OK and then that sends your model over to in
this case cura this is the the default height and in fact if we go down here to scale you can see
it's 28 x 33 millimeters 10 millimeter tall one thing to do is go over here to the uniform scale
click that button to go into non uniform scale it's kind of hard to see there's just a slight
bit of the button disappears there but that lets you do then is if you want to make your part say
20 millimeter tall you scale it by a factor of two if you want it 70 millimeter tall put in a
factor of seven and let's see that says it's just short of three hours to print you go up here send
it to your printer and a couple hours later you have a part so that's about all you have to do so
yeah I just wanted to show you a little bit of the design process on this clip and some of the things
I learned in using the sketch feature in fusion 360 really nice program if you haven't checked it
out i would take a look at that if you have any questions or comments about that post up in the
comment section below the video description down here as always thanks for watching