Discover how to effectively use Fusion's tools to adjust the positions of mechanical joints and components in a design. Learn the importance of placing all components in their home position before adding new joints, and how to use the 'go to home position' feature.
Key Insights
- Before adding new joints in a design, it's crucial to make sure all components are in their home position. This can be achieved through the undo menu or by using the 'go to home position' command in the relationship folder.
- If a 'go to home position' option does not appear when you right click on a component, it means the component is already in its home position. This is a quick way to check the positions of all components.
- When adding a new joint, the 'slider' type can be used to allow one component to slide into another. The minimum and maximum restrictions for this movement can be adjusted for precision.
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Before creating our next joint, let's make sure that all of our components are in their home position. What do I mean by that? If we've been, for example, driving some of these joints, we have two ways to do that. Number one is in the undo menu.
We can undo drag components. Our other option is to open up our relationships folder, find the relationship that is currently out of place. For example, here we are with our neck.
We'll right click, and there is a go-to home position. I'll select that, and it's back to home position. What's interesting is Fusion is smart.
If I right click that same Revolut neck again, there is no more go to home position. Why? That's because it's already in the home position. So one quick way of checking all of our joints is to right click, and if we see the go-to home position, that means that it is off of its location.
We can actually right click on these and just double check, make sure everything is back in that home position. With that and having nothing selected, we're ready to move on. So let's go ahead and add a joint for our stem B. The stem B needs to slide down into stem A. We can see it's already partially there.
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It's halfway or partway down into stem A. Let's go ahead and go to our assemble area and click on joint. Now we want to hide our stem A and orbit so that we're looking up at the bottom of stem B. Keep our origin mode at simple and click that center ring of stem B at the bottom. Click one time.
Now component two is stem A, so let's go ahead and turn stem A on, orbit to look at the top, and I find it's a little confusing. I like to also hide stem B so we can see just the top of stem A and click one time in the center circle of stem A. Let's zoom out to see the result and go to motion. Motion right now is probably set to rigid for yours and if I turn on stem B, we can see everything together.
A couple of things we'll notice. Number one, stem B is popped up too high, right? It's pushed past the handlebars and that's because we locked the top of A and the bottom of B together so they're stacked on top of each other and it's pushed it up. Let's go ahead and fix that first.
Let's go back to our position tab and we want to bring that position down. We'll see this down arrow here. We can drag that down until the ring touches again and that would be 110 millimeters in the Z offset.
Let's go back to our motion tab with everything lined up and let's change the type to a type we haven't used yet. It's called slider and what it does is it lets B slide into A and you might notice that there's a conflict. The ring from stem B is pushing through stem A and that wouldn't work.
We'll find a solution for that in a moment, but for now we want to go ahead and give this some minimum and maximum. Go ahead and check those boxes for minimum and maximum and for maximum we'll type in 150. What that does is it shows the maximum amount that that tube can slide down on itself and notice that the holes line up right at 150.
If I change that to something else like 151 it'd be off. Maybe 153 is more obvious. There we go.
We don't want to go that far. We only want to go to 150. Now stem B can also slide up a bit.
How far? It can go up or sliding back essentially minus 50. If we zoom in here we'll notice that allows that last hole to line up with each other. If we get again try a different amount like minus 53 we'll see it's off a little bit so we'll keep that at minus 50.
With that looking good let's toggle our tab back to position just to make sure that the home position looks good. It does here with that Z 110 offset. We're okay.
Go ahead and click that okay button. Right now in the joints folder under relationships it's called slider with a generic number. Let's call it slider stem B and hit ENTER to lock that in.
Let's also take a look at stem B the component and click the arrow next to the stem B component. Click the arrow to open up the bodies folder and find the ring. We have this ring body and it's in the way.
Let's right click on it and look at our options. We have two options. One is to delete it.
It's hard delete, gone forever, gone from the timeline. If we're referencing it somewhere else that can cause issues. Fusion has kind of a soft delete which is called remove and that removes it after it has been created.
It was pretty helpful. Let's go ahead and try that. We'll click remove and so it's no longer there but if we still need it or still want to find a solution for this ring we can find it in the timeline.
That works for now. That's a quick solution. There just is no ring and now they'll slide nicely on each other.
Let's minimize that and at this point let's go ahead and click that save button.
