Angled Modeling Techniques to Create an Accurate Scooter Fork in Fusion Sheet Metal

Now let's create a fork to support this front wheel. The trick if we look at our example scooter is that we are now going to start modeling on an angle. To be precise, a 16 degree angle instead of just going up vertically.

Now that can be a challenge. So let's dive in and have some fun modeling at an angle. Let's begin by going to our sheet metal tab while our top of browser is active.

Then we can select create and new component. We'll give it a name, we will call it fork. And the parent should be our top level of the browser.

If it's not, just click the X, click that top level and we're good to go. We will let it be active and we will keep that same sheet metal rule of steel and click okay. Now we have this sheet metal component called fork and we want to model off at an angle.

To begin, we will create a basic sketch off of the center plane. So let's go ahead and make that center plane. We'll go to construct, offset plane.

We wanna click that central plane right there and we'll go ahead and click okay. Now a couple fun things about planes that we haven't discovered yet. Number one, they are here in the construction folder and we can give it a name.

We'll call this fork center. We can turn it on and off at will anytime we'd like. If we hover over it and hover right over the edges, we can also expand that construction plane.

That's really for visual purposes because what happens is each of these planes is infinite in all directions, X and Y, from their origin. But we can make them a little bit easier to see and to select. Now it's pretty easy to click on because it's big.

So that's our center fork. I'm gonna bring it back down a little bit and we've got that. Now we can create a sketch.

We'll go back to our create menu and select create sketch. We will select that fork center plane and zoom in here on the wheel. If we've been modeling carefully, the center of that wheel is right on one of our grid points, which is perfect because we can start a sketch right there at that grid point and we want to align everything, our fork, stem, handlebars, all in line with that center of the hub of our wheel.

So let's click on the line tool and we'll click right in the center of our wheel. We want to snap to grid right in the center. We'll click one time.

Now we'll move our line up. Now we want to type in a specific amount. So let's do that now, 110.

But this time we will not click enter. Instead, on our keyboard, we'll click the tab. Click the tab key and we want to set that angle.

Now the default angle to go vertical would be 90. And then to get 16 degrees, we have to add 16 to 90, which takes us to 106. It's a little hard to do that visually, so we'll type it in, 106.

And we'll notice the little locks. When we hit TAB on our keyboard, that locks it in. And now we can click enter.

We've got that line and Fusion automatically creates this construction line, which is perfect, with 106 degrees and 110 millimeters going up. Now we need one additional line. So let's start our line command again.

And we'll click one time where we left off. Click once. And if we move our cursor to the right and up a little bit, we should get a constraint.

And it's a constraint right there, looks like a square. Because it's square, it means 90 degrees or perpendicular. And we'll also notice that that perpendicular shows 16 degrees, which is the angle that we want to start modeling on.

Now we need to type in our dimension again. We'll type in 20 and we can click tab. And it's already set to 16 degrees, so we'll just click enter.

So there it is, 110 up, 20 over, all set at 16 degrees, which is 106 degrees from this front axis. All right, with that, we've created two lines and we can click finish sketch. Now we've got our sketches here.

We'll expand that folder and give this a name. And we'll call this fork angle sketch. Fork angle sketch.

Okay, so all we have right now is a line up at the top here. It's not really enough to model on yet. Now we need a construction plane.

So let's go to construct. And this time we want to select the plane at angle. Now plane at angles are really cool because all they need to begin with is a line.

We can click this little 20 millimeter line that we created, we'll click it. And let's orbit around to see what's happening. Right now, it's set at a zero degree angle, which is kind of sideways to what we want this to be.

We can visually rotate it to 90 degrees or just type in 90. And that's what we want. We're creating essentially a little platform up above the wheel to begin our model.

And everything will be based off of this. We'll be going all the way up, up and up with our stem and handlebars. So this gives us a solid foundation.

Let's go ahead and click okay. And there we are. We are all set up, ready to model.

Let's go ahead and click the save button.