Finally Fusion-ing

Been meaning to sit down and tackle Fusion 360 (or any 3D modeling SW) for a while and for no good reason I finally started yesterday. Main catalyst: The excellent YouTube tutorial by Taylor Stein: Designing a Lasercut Laptop Stand with Fusion 360. It’s been linked to here in the Forum by at least seven people and I can’t remember who’s post was the one I first saw so I’ll just say thanks to all of you.

So, for anyone who is a little intimidated to sit down and try Fusion 360 (like I was) here’s how it went for me: Watched the video yesterday, opened the tool and watched it again with lots of pauses and rewinds while designing a Phone stand on the fly (pretty similar to the project in the video, but with some variations to keep things interesting), “finished” but with enough issues that I started fresh today, designed Phone Stand II, finished for real, exported to Inkscape to make the cut files, slammed it into UrForge with some unmasked birch, fast glue up, and DONE.

Ugly? Heck yes, but as a learning exercise it is awesome. Here’s the pics of the progression:



In terms of rapid learning and prototyping, it was a great day. Not bad for less than 24 hours and starting with Zero 3D modeling experience.

Still tons of things to work on: The kerfs made the joints a bit loose, my camera accuracy in the UrForge is way off (may need to clean), and maybe a little design style wouldn’t hurt. But I’m really excited about the 3D options this will open up. Will be diving into more tutorials, now.

Hope everyone is having as much fun as I am. :grinning:

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Nicely done! :grinning:

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I didn’t realize that Fusion had an .SVG exporting feature or did you have to do some kind of conversion?

This makes me excited for you. I remember my F360 project well. It was well before we started getting our :glowforge: and there was this thing I wanted to 3d print. I had chosen something way too complex for a first project and ended up scraping three or four files before getting something that would work for a first prototype. I have not looked back since. I love F360 much the way I do the :glowforge:.

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There is not in its native form but there are lots of ways to get there.

My favorites are plugins that you can get for free in the F360 store. One is called DFX for laser, it outputs DFX and that imports directly to F360, the other is the shaper origin plugin, it outputs an SVG directly but since it was written for the Shaper origin it will do your color coding kind of weird and it takes about 3 seconds to fix this once you have it open in Inkscape.

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Conversion. As suggested in Stein’s video, you just create flat sketches off of each component in your finished model, and then save them as DFX files. Then open Inkscape, Import all of them and save the SVG. My little learning exercise only had 5 components so that took about a 2 minutes. Super easy.

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DXF for laser is great. I love that it has Kerf offset in it.

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Very happy for you! Nothing like creating your own!

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Thank you for the training video link! I’ve been wanting to learn Fusion for ever to build stuff with my laser and my 3d printers. :slight_smile:

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great reminder…

I actually got a fan so that I could make a new laptop “laptop” base. have yet to make it happen.

anybody working on getting 28 hours per day anywhere?

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Keep an eye out for posts by @Secret_Sauce. Resident F360 expert and company man. Got a bunch of useful tutorials posted around.

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Thanks for the shout out @wesleyjames.
My latest Fusion 360 video hasn’t been posted on the forum yet. It isn’t Glowforge specific like my other videos, but it does cover a lot of ground and also includes several useful tips & tricks. If you want to watch it, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/l6VOc842G8o
Note: jump to 4:32 to skip to when I get the audio working.

More good stuff on the way!

  • Jason
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