Hey everybody! Today we’re going to hump into Fusion 360 and I’m going to show you how to add ribs, or rings, around fishing lures using a new technique I discovered. This technique is much easier than the previous techniques I’ve used so let’s hop into the computer.
BASIC STEPS
So here’s one of the final results I got using this technique and I think it’s really cool. We’re going to be going over how you do this using the pipe command that is in the form menu over here. So we’ll be going over the basic technique I’ve covered in a previous video but less rambling this time. So we have just our normal and basic paddle tail model but this technique will work with any lure body that you want to use, it doesn’t really matter. Once you have your body in place here you want to go to the side profile of it and we’re going to create a new sketch which we’re going to create on the side plane.
Now we want to draw the lines that are going to represent the ribs or whatever features you want. So we’re going to start off with very basic lines just straight up and down. When you create the lines you want to make sure that you select above and below the body of the lure at the widest points. Now, you can draw all of these lines individually, but the way I'm going to do it since we’re just doing a straight line is I’m going to draw the line here. It doesn’t matter how far down it goes, just as long as it goes past. Then we’re going to create a rectangular pattern and we’re going to click and drag this out and then click and raise the number until it looks reasonable. Click OK and finish sketch.
So this area is basically where our ribs are going to be. Now the next thing we do is we’re going to create another sketch on the same exact plane and what we want to do is click create, go down to project include, and then project to surface. Now it’s going to ask us for a surface and we’re going to select our lure body, curves. We’re going to hit select and it’s easy to just click and drag from right to left and it will select them all and instead of closest point we want a long vector. Then we’re going to come over here and click the origin line that is going across left and right. You’ll see these red circles appear around your lure and that is where our pipes, or our ribs, are going to form. It’s a good way to check and make sure you’re doing everything correctly and to make sure those look right. After that, just click OK and click finish sketch.
So now for some reason Fusion 360 likes to leave these sketches on, but I’m going to go ahead and turn them off. You’ll see I have these pink lines that are my projections around my lure body. Now, if I was doing this the old way we would go to create pipe and then come over to click our size that we wanted and whether we wanted to cut. So you could cut out or join if we wanted to and do each one of those individually. That gets rather tedious with a larger bait so I’m going to show you the new technique. What we’re going to do today is we’re going to go to create form and then we create a pipe. This is a totally different pip command, it definitely has its pluses and minuses and we’re going to get into some great pluses in the next example. But right now, the biggest plus is I can click on one and by default it’s a 20 millimeter and a box pipe. You can make this whatever size you want, and then you want to click on the smooth display piece and that’s where you’re going to get the round pipe.
Now you may be thinking, dude that’s the same as what we did last time, but the magic here is that I can take this path and click and drag all of them. That saves me tons of time and you don’t really need to change anything else here if you’re doing basic circles. You just click OK and you have all of your rings there. Now one thing this does is it creates a bunch of bodies but all I need to do is combine them together so I just click combine, I click my main body, hold down the shift key and click OK. We just want to make sure new components is not selected and keep tools is not selected since we don’t need those.
ANGLED RIBS STEPS
This is marginally better than the way we used to do it but let me show you how I found this technique and what drove me to this particular method. I wanted to do angled ribs so something along these lines where you have a rectangular pattern like we did before. We have to select both the top and bottom so make sure you do that. I did about eight of them which I then moved down to kind of the center there and clicked on project include, project to surface and select both the top and the bottom again.
Now this is where the traditional pipe command fails. If I select both the top and bottom, I can’t select both of these and if I click on OK you’ll see we have this kind of weird edge. Depending on how much angle you have in your shape, this will actually separate and won’t even be together. So with the pipe command in the form editor, not only can we have a cool pattern but it’ll look really natural too. By the way, you have to click on these before you can change this to circles, it’s annoying but you can see this intersection here is much more natural and has a nice curve which is what you want. We finish form and then we just join our body back just like we did before.
CURVED AND JOINED RIBS
If we want to use a curve, fit spline in this case, and we’re going to create another rectangular pattern on both of these curves. So I just pulled it until it basically lined up and instead of extent, I’m going to turn it to spacing and that’s going to be my distance. Then I just add my copies and then they’re going to be together then I just click OK and finish sketch. I won’t bother you with the project, we already know how to do that.
So now you see you have this different pattern, kind of likes scales. If I use a traditional pipe command here and hit join, I can only select one of these at a time and get these weird, not so great results. If we do our new pipe technique, it gets really cool. So we’re going to create a pipe and I like to select one and turn the circle thing on and then elect them all. You get a much more natural joining curve and you can make this as complicated as you want. I will say, the more lines and curves that you add, the slower Fusion 360 will go since it has to create more and more objects.
Now there is a downside to this, you can run into and will probably create invalid geometry that you will need to go and fix. It can be a bit of a problem but you just have to fix it. When that happens, Fusion 360 will give you an error and so click return and we’re just going to select the section that’s wrong and delete it. Then we can recreate it and we will create singular bodies here to see if that helps which did end up fixing it. So it will create non-conformant geometry but there’s a way around that.
I hope you find that pipe technique super simple. If you want to see a longer video about how I’ve added details to my lures, you can find it here. All of my tutorials about making molds, etc. are in this playlist here.
Take Care.