Refining my Fusion skills for furniture prototyping
I’ve been using Fusion 360 for some very simple designs on my ELITE Foreman, mainly for 3D printing and CNC, but I want to take the next couple of months to deepen my skills. My goal is to eventually tackle prototyping designs for furniture.
So far, I’ve followed a few basic tutorials, but none have really captured my interest or felt engaging enough to stick with. I’d love to hear how you all learned Fusion 360.
Do you have any recommendations for written or video tutorials that you found especially educational and inspiring? Free or paid doesn’t matter—what’s most important to me is quality and engagement.
I started using Fusion (360 then) a few years ago when I bought my first 3D printer. I started making parts for my Woodworker shortly after that, and as others have said, I learned to do what I needed to make the parts I wanted.
Things I do all the time now when designing and machining parts have become second nature. Things I don’t know how to do I find answers and instructions through videos.
One creator I had bookmarked and liked is Kevin Kennedy’s Product Design Online (YT), but there are many others.
We didn’t use Fusion, but another very high end CAD program.
I’m dating myself here, but I was use to hand drawings and converting them into 3D with a T-square, circle jig and triangles (remember those tools?). Due to an emergency, I got thrown into learning CAD with a brand new program and had to teach myself (after a 3 day professional course), with a huge manual. I learned it 1 page and 1 tool (icon) at a time. It took me 6 months of mostly 80 hour weeks, but I got good real fast.
Much later whenever I got a new designer in the dept., for the 1st week, I told them to draw simple shapes over and over and over, and draw them a different way every time, (dimensions & annotations too), and to memorize those shortcut keys. That got them use to using simple tools. Also to also draw them right, no crooked lines, everything connected, etc.
Then I had them add 1 new tool a week including learning the shortcut keys.
As they did this, I also had them working on simple projects. As they progressed I gave them harder and harder projects.
By the end of a year, most were really good. By the end of 2 years, they were experts, but that’s also in a production environment where you were drawing at least 30 hours a week.
There are some good YT channels out there and have also done classes with linkedin learning. They have fusion classes specific to different use cases that i found helpful. Im lucky i have a subscription through my day job so not sure what the value/cost is but the classes are pretty good that i have taken.
Looks like are 32 fusion courses available
Also a lot of trial and error. I have drawn and redrawn projects from scratch and each time you learn something to take to the next project to be more effecient.
I agree with the recommendations for Kevin Kennedy’s channel. It is called Product Design Online. He has a couple of playlists named something to the effect of, Learn Fusion in 30 days, that you may find helpful. He also has at least a couple of videos specific to woodworking and CNC.
Check out his website that links to his own community. The community isn’t that active yet, but I think Kevin jumps into ensure that most questions receive an answer.
Thanks for all the stories of how you got into it. I have followed some of Kevin Kennedy’s Product Design Online tutorials and while they are great I still struggle when things are a little more complex and I’m flying solo. Many a time I have tried to do a particular shape and not been able to get it exactly right.
Anyways - THANKS! for all the great input. If anyone out there has found other great sources of information feel free to link them here.
@thomatrix if you can share some specific examples of problems you are having maybe someone here could help. You can even share a link to your design so others can see what you are seeing rather than try to describe it in text. For example, I attached a Fusion360 design in the following forum topic.
When I got my X-50 Woodworker (a little over two years ago), I tried a number of different software packages to create my projects. It was my experience that Fusion 360 was by far the most powerful and versatile tool for designing my CNC projects. Admittedly, there is a steep learning curve, but in my opinion it’s worth sticking with. When I started, I Googled “Fusion 360 - getting started.” Numerous YouTube videos came up, most of which were quite helpful.
After that, every time I needed to create something, (simple or complex), I Googled “Fusion 360 - how do I” followed by whatever I was looking for. In every case, I was able to find a good video that showed in detail what I was trying to do.
Over time, I found myself needing less and less help, although I still rely on YouTube from time to time.
I wish I could give you specific videos that I watched, but there were so many, and I didn’t keep track of which ones I used because they were so readily available online.
I also found that posting in the OneFinity forum is a good way to get help on just about anything CNC related.
Hey thought I’d chime in. I also like Kevin Kennedy, but have to admit some bias for learning from Justin Geis. I started with him on Sketchup years ago and then he was on to Fusion about the same time as myself. Check them both out!
I took a slightly different entry into Fusion by starting with an existing furniture project known as Open Cabinets. It’s a FB group and somewhat haphazardly organized around a core parametric cabinet design. The models are very good and I learned a lot by making changes to those models to start with. I learned what skills I needed as I went.
By doing so, I was able to bring in the first dopamine reward of a successful project and keep going instead of being overwhelmed with the design on top of the manufacturing aspects. I’ve now cut two different cabinets, a garage bench and a bathroom vanity.
Between design, modeling, prepping for production and iterating steps that may need it, it’s a somewhat long chain of skills. It becomes a lot easier to focus on your interests once you’ve done them all at least once. And you have a pretty incredible group of people here who will have your back if you get stuck!
p.s. One of the things I look for in tools is to have as few of them as possible. When I can reuse a tool for multiple tasks, my experience with that tool grows for free. I also do additive, Fusion can do both. My kid uses TinkerCAD, and a lot of the techniques carry between the two. Fusion is a bit of a lift, but I think it’s been worth the months of investment…