Fusion Friday #3: Joints Explained!

Hi folks, welcome to a Fusion Friday. Joints. There's a lot of misunderstanding. I think some of it relates to just a lack of good examples. Let's walk through some joint basics. I'm in a new part. First thing I'm going to do is save it. Joints, example. That way, autosave kicks in. Right click, new component, bar, and activate it. On this bar, I'm going to sketch a rectangle. And with a circle in it, I'll dimension these. Cue to press pull. And we'll extrude that out half inch. So we've got a base, new component activated. Now I'm gonna sketch these out of place so that we focus on standard joints and not as built joints. Stay tuned for another Fusion Friday, we'll get into some more advanced stuff. So C for circle, I always check to make sure I'm on the component I want to be on. I'll click this plane and we'll just sketch a half inch rod up here. We'll make it 7 inches. Let's join these two together. First I actually want to make a duplicate of this rod. So what do you do? You copy, and then somewhat confusingly, you go back up I think to here, and hit paste. Now I can move this around. I think where I struggled was you can't make a copy and paste it if you're active in the component. One of those little things I think gets folks including me stumped sometimes. I want one of these bars to mount into here. So what do we do? Assemble joint. One of my suggestions will be pick the type of joint you want before you start selecting things. I'm actually going to go with a rigid joint here. Think of rigid joint like a weld. In other words, they're not meant to twist, turn, or separate in any which way. So I'm okay with rigid. If you let the mouse hover, it's going to tell you some information. So select location on component to move. And I'm trying to stop comparing Fusion 360 to other CAD software like SolidWorks, but this is one of the big differences. When you're building joints, you're not just picking two things. You're adding sort of that third layer in here, which is powerful and can save you steps. So location on component to move, I'm going to hover over the butt end of this thing and pick this so I get that center coin. And then on the second. piece here. The same thing, I'm going to pick it such that I get the coin right here. It does this little shake thing. Awesome. Remember, when you're doing a joint, the first thing you select gets moved to the second object. While we're on that note, let's make sure we ground our bar, that way it's stable and so when we go to move this piece into our As we get into our slot here, our bar doesn't move around. So, assemble joint, I hate that thing, and this I'm going to do pin slot, so again, hover over, location on component to move, I'll pick this center face, and then if I let it hover on second component, now this kind of threw me, I honestly wasn't sure what to do, but I'm going to go ahead, I want to make sure I pick that center thing, see how if I move the mouse around just a hair, it gets all twitchy on me, hold down, once you see Hold down the control key, and it now limits the selection, and you can move the mouse around without changing to new stuff. Very handy. I'm going to click that center thing right here, and okay. Sort of good, except it's in the wrong direction, so if I change the slide to the y-axis, boom. Click okay. Now, we've got a pin slot. Why doesn't it obey the physical model limits? Go to assemble. Enable all contact, now it does. I wish there was a better way to do that because my question would be, how was I supposed to know to go to enable contact like that? I think when you get more complex models, it will be really taxing to have it calculate all of those, so be wary that that's not always the best way to do it. Again, in a future Fusion Threat Friday, we'll come back to some things like contact sets and motion links. Let's add some guys on the end of these rods. New component, we'll call it the truck. Activate it. R for rectangle, this plane, and we'll build some little carrier trucks that have an offset circle on them, like so. Go back, activate our main thing. Let's duplicate it. Control-C, Control-V. Now controls, or copy here and now paste it. When you see how it has truck colon 1, truck colon 2, that means those two are parametrically related. So if I modify this one, negative .875, they both change. Just FYI. Assemble, joint. I want to do a, not a revolute. Revolute just revolves. We're doing a revolution over a shaft, and that's cylindrical. Kind of confusing. You just got to learn it. Click cylindrical. Hover, with the mouse hover, select Location on Component to Move. I want that center guy right there. And select Location on Second Component. I'm going to scroll around here, and I'm actually going to pick the center here. And what's great is the animation shows you exactly what you want. So now you can see, I can slide that guy around and move it like so. I'll do that again. And right-click with an up-swipe repeats that joint on this guy. Here. Perfect. Now, one of the things I haven't figured out a better way to do that, again, I used to do easily in other software I used to use, was let's say we want these two blocks to always be co-planar and parallel, if that makes sense. So, I think the best explanation I've seen is you can do a modify align, and let's see if this works. Yeah. So, that aligns them And click OK. I don't know if this next, I want to keep them in line as well. Let's see if that works. Modify align here. Yeah, that wasn't working for me, which is frustrating. And in fact, the align there went away. So I either need to learn more or Fusion 360 needs to figure out a way to do that. Because that's actually, I think, an important way to. create assemblies. Once you do get that, what you can do is do a rigid group. So watch this. Assemble, rigid group. If I pick this and this and click OK, no good. Take a look. I didn't want the child components. Now, assemble, rigid group. Let's try that again. Capture the position. We'll leave them there. I want to do this guy and this guy. Click OK. There we go. These will then move together in whatever orientation you've got them in. Again, I want there to be a more parametric way, but I will admit that telling it it's just rigid rather than forcing the software to be continuously computing does have its merits. On the flip side, there's some more to learn, more to come. Let me know what else you guys want to see on joints. I've got some topics I want to cover. Actually, I wanted to do one more. Let's say you want to center this coin between these two joints. This totally threw me. It's actually really easy. Assemble, create a joint origin. And if you click on that joint origin, you'll notice we have a type option. Change it to between two faces. So click this face, click that face, and then you'll notice a new thing pops up and it wants to know where between those two faces. If I click right here and click okay, you can see right now I've got one of the things right in the center, perfect. Now it's pretty simple. If we go to... Assemble joint, and again, we want to click this coin first to move it to the other thing. Now, this is a little bit trickier, because I want to select the center, so if I look at it from the side, I can pick the joint this way, and I'll change it to rigid, pick that one, boom. Now I've got that joint held between those two. Take care, folks. See you next Friday.