Add an opening to a hinge on a digital toolbox base using software. Through the use of Construct, Offset Plane, and Create Sketching tools, the article offers a detailed step-by-step guide on how to make your digital creations more realistic.
Key Insights
- The process begins by making the toolbox base the Active Component, then hiding the toolbox lid for a clearer view of the base.
- Using Construct and Offset Plane tools, a work plane is created on the face of the hinge, named Hinge Face, and a sketch is created on this hinge face. This process involves creating lines at precise measurements to form a triangle shape.
- The final step includes the use of Extrude to select all parts of the triangle and drag it to the left, automatically cutting it to create an opening. Once completed, the toolbox lid can be unhid, and the toolbox top level activated to see the result.
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Our hinges are looking really good, but let's take one more step to make this more realistic. Let's add an opening to the hinge on the left to make it easier to assemble the lid to the toolbox base. Let's begin by collapsing our folders, and let's go to Toolbox Base and make it the Active Component by clicking the Activate Component button.
We'll click away and see the result. Our toolbox base is now solid color, letting us know it is the Active Component, and our lid went to Transparent, so it's no longer the Active Component. We'll take this a step further and temporarily hide the toolbox lid, so we just have the base.
Now let's zoom in a little bit on this left hinge here. Let's go to Construct and select Offset Plane. We'll click on the face of that plane right there.
It looks like a Q. Click one time, zero offset distance, and click OK. So here is that work plane, right at that face. Let's expand our folders here and expand Construction.
We'll give this a name and call it Hinge Face. We will click away so nothing is selected, and go to Create, Create Sketch, and select that hinge face. Fusion orients us to a flat view.
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Let's orbit around a bit and zoom in on that left hinge. Let's go to Create again and pull that down, and go to Project, Include, and select Project. We're going to grab this center circle, click on it one time, and click OK.
That gives us our purple circle and a purple dot we can use to draw our actual line. So let's go back to Create and look for Line. We'll click one time on that center dot, pull our cursor away, and type in a distance this time of four, but don't hit ENTER.
Instead, hit TAB on the keyboard, and that jumps us over to the number of degrees. And let's type in exactly 130 for 130 degrees. And now we click Enter.
Locked in, we've got a four millimeter at 130 degrees. Let's start our line command again and start at that center point of the circle again. We'll zoom in a little bit tighter here.
I'll click one time, I'm going to move my cursor down, and let's type it in again. Four for the distance, Tab, and 130,130 degrees, and Enter. And now I have these two lines.
They're both 130 degrees and four millimeters long. I'm just going to pull my dimensions out for clarity, make it easier to see what we're doing here. We are now going to connect this dot to this dot, the upper to the lower, with our line command.
So L for line, click the upper dot, and then that lower dot. Make sure I get my blue square, though, letting me know that I am connecting the dots. If I'm successful and it creates a solid profile, you'll see it turns a faint blue on the inside.
And that's what I'm going for. Essentially, I just want that triangle, and that's it. So I'm going to go ahead now and hit Escape.
I'm done sketching, and I click the Finish Sketch button. Let's open up our sketches now, and we'll find that final sketch here. Let's rename it, and we'll call it Hinge Opening.
Enter to lock it in. And now let's make sure we zoom out and click off in space so nothing is selected. And now let's go to Extrude, or E on the keyboard.
And we will select all parts of this triangle. So there's the outer part and then the inner part. We'll grab both.
We want that full triangle shape. And then we'll use this blue arrow and drag it to the left. And we'll notice it's cutting automatically, and that's fine.
Let's go to minus 6, and we'll add a tiny bit more. 6.25. So minus 6.25. Everything else here looks good. And the operation to cut, that looks good too.
We'll go ahead and click OK. Now this hinge is kind of open on the side, and we can click in the hinge from that lid. After first inserting the bottom hinge together, we'll click the top hinge.
So it's kind of just a mechanical way to get that lid to assemble. Let's go ahead and collapse our folders here again. And we will unhide our toolbox lid.
And let's activate our top level. The very top level. We'll click Activate Component and see the result.
Pretty neat, right? We've got our two hinges working well. We've also thought about how to assemble these. We can push the bottom one together and then slide the top one in.
And it comes over just a little bit, hoping it will just click in just a little bit. Alright. With that, our top is looking pretty good.
