Hey everyone! So, until I can get to a sander and more sand paper, I’ll put the pen stand project on hold and talk about something different for a little bit. First up on the list of tangents is Fusion360!
Autodesk Fusion360 is this awesome CAD software that I learned this past year. Previously, I was using Autodesk 123D design (much to the chagrin of all my solidworks-using friends haha). It was a great beginning cad program and gave me a great base for knowing how to create things in CAD! However, it severely lacked in some of the more advanced features that I wanted.
One particular project I wanted to make was a pencil cup, but have it be made so that it looked like the entire cup had been twisted (as if you heated the cup up and turned the top and the bottom halves different ways to create a spiral effect). I had this vision in my head, but didn’t know how to cad it. Until, of course, I learned Fusion360!
Fusion is great because you can start with a standard form (a cylinder, a box, a sphere, etc) and push and pull certain sections of it to give it the look you wanted! So that’s what I did! I started with a cylindrical form, added 8 faces to it, twisted the entire shape, so that the faces were also twisted, and extruded every other face outwards by a small amount. Also, since it was a cylindrical form, it didn’t have a base or enough thickness, so I had to merge a cylindrical portion into it, and I had to thicken the walls to 3d printable dimensions (3mm) That whole procedure came out with this:
This pen cup was exactly what I wanted and had the flowing shape that I wanted! The other nice thing about this shape is that it should print without support! So, I 3d printed it out, and it worked really well.
I never could have done something this complicated in 123D design, so it’s worth noting that different CAD softwares have their perks.
I love doing cool stuff like this, so you’ll definitely see more of it up here every now and again.
John (aka The Mad Printer)
The Mad Printer 