Dabbling in Fusion 360

Well I think that I have cracked the top of the post but the I need to tweak the cuts outs in the bottom because although they look to be removing material it doesn't show up when viewing the body or on a quick stl file export.






Not really knowing any dimensions for the lamp standard I estimated 10 feet to the top of the post itself and then scaled that to 7mm.

 

Yeah! got it

 

Hi Andy,

I didn't even try to get the right number of flutes on the upright. Because I didn't have any dimensions, it was all guess work to see if, what I thought might work from reading your initial post, would work in reality. I am pleased to say that with a little tweaking the base element worked and was quite easy with the exception that I go my outer circle slightly too small and it took me ages to work out what the problem was. (all will be revealed in the next post when I describe how I did it). For the upper fluted bit of the post, I initially thought of doing a tapered 'cog' type extrusion but couldn't see how I would get the curves out towards the bottom. The answer came to me as I was working on the cut outs for the base.

Regarding large flute + small flute, it's possible (I think) but you have to ask yourself how much is actually going to be visible in 7mm or even less in 4mm versus what I suspect will be considerably extra work to draw it up.

 

Right then, how I did it.

First I downloaded Andy's drawing and imported it into Fusion on the front plane. Then as I said previously, but repeated here for completeness. Because the drawing had no dimensions, I best guessed that the main part of the post would be around 10 feet tall. I was way out as it's only around 6ft when taken right to the ground.

However using the 10ft as the basis, I created my self a User parameter of 1ft/7mm which allowed me to quickly scale the drawing to 7mm to the foot.

Next I did pretty much as Mossy had done in his test example and drew a profile of the lamp base and revolved it.

Then I worked out the middle of the column height wise and created an offset plane.

Then I created a sketch on that offset plane and drew the shape for my cut out

I nloy drew one of the shapes then used the 'create circular pattern' tool to create the other five. As it tuned out initially I had the outer circle slightly under the column sized so when I extruded as a cut it was actually inside the body.
I then extruded using the symmetrical function and cut command so I was going both up and down to get the cut outs in place all around the column.

 

Next I drew a couple of upright lines on the first sketch to determine the width of the base of the fluted section. Which was 8mm on my overscale drawing. Then I created another offset plane this time at the top of the column/base of the fluted section.


Then I created a sketch on that plane and drew a circle 8mm in diameter on the edge of that circle I drew another circle 0.6mm in diameter using these as a best guess for the size of the flute. I then used the circular pattern tool to create circle all around the inner circle. this ended up being 42.


Then on the first sketch I drew the profile of the flute.
I extruded this again symmetrically 0.3mm either way, to give me the 0.6mm thickness that I had determined (best guess!!!) was the flute size. Then I filleted the front edges to give me the round flute

Lastly I used the circular pattern tool again to create the circle of 42.








I even managed to get the render tool to work this morning last night I think that my machine was doing an update in the background and it was running like a dog.

 

Hi Andy,

It probably took as long to write it up this morning as it did to actually draw it last night but I thoroughly enjoyed it and now that I have the dimensions I will have a go at drawing a proper 7mm version because the very top section is also a bit of a challenge.