 In my Fusion 360 weekly online class we recently went through a series on print in place hinges. And I thought I would highlight some of those lessons here and we'll start with this print in place chain. Now the inspiration for this design came from this MakerBot model on Thingiverse. I thought it would be fun to try and recreate a similar watch band. I remember this design from the early days of consumer 3D printing where most hobby machines were MakerBots. This model along with Emma's stretchlet brings back some happy memories. Alright let's jump into Fusion 360 and design this from scratch. Now if you enjoyed this tutorial and want to learn how to use Fusion 360 to create your own designs then check out my links I have below to my online courses where I do provide you with a much more structured path to learning Fusion and creating your own designs. So check that out if you're interested and also consider becoming a Patreon supporter to my channel. Oh and speaking of I will be uploading the Fusion 360 file of this design we're going to make to my Patreon page. Okay to begin I'm going to first go down here to my grid and snap button here and then I'm going to click and select grid settings and I'm going to make sure my fixed radial button is checked and I'm going to change my major grid spacings here from 10 to 5 and my minor subdivision is set to 1 and I also want to make sure that my snap to grid little check mark there is checked. Now I'm going to begin a sketch here and I'm going to choose my XY plane and you'll see the reason I did that is it's just going to make it easier for this particular design to create sort of a general shape because I've got each grid setting here set to 5 or the grid spacing I should say and it's going to allow me to snap to these corners. So let's begin by starting with our line tool so I'm just going to grab my line tool under the create menu you can also just hit L for line I'm going to start at the origin here I'm just going to go up across over come across to come down one and left down and then come back to the origin and you can see I'm left with this sort of tetris like shape for those of you who are old enough to have had a Game Boy. So okay now we have this shape here even though I snapped to these corners there are no dimensions set so nothing is really locked you can see I can move this up and down but now that I have the basic shape in place I can come in and add some dimensions so D for dimension I'll start with this vertical line here I'm going to go with 5.3 there hit enter and these dimensions here are just kind of what I settled on after experimenting with this design a bit you can obviously come in and make them whatever you want so I'm going to keep going 5.5 for this horizontal one for for the next vertical one here I'm going to make this top line 9.5 and for the next dimension here so not going to mention dimension this line here because this next one is actually very specific and important so you see this line here what I want is this line to be lower than this line here and I need a spacing in between them so I'll hit D for dimension click this left line and then click on this right one and I want that to be 0.3 millimeters and that's going to be the clearance that I'm going to need okay one more dimension to set and that's going to be this bottom line here and I'm going to make that 9.5 millimeters all right we can see that this sketch is fully constrained because all our lines here are black no blue lines and we'll hit actually we're not going to hit finish sketch here because I want to show you something even though the approach I'm going to take here is extrude this part and then create a body and mirror that body I want to kind of give you a little sort of roadmap of where I'm going so let me mirror this sketch and then I'm going to undo that but let's go to create I'm going to go to mirror I'm going to select this whole chain here by double clicking I want this bottom line to be my mirror line so I'm actually going to click on it to deselect it and then go to mirror line here and then click that line there and that now is my mirror line and I have my mirrored sketch here I'm going to select that mirror line and hit X to make it a construction line and what I'm going to do is double click the top hold the command or control double click the bottom section right click go to move copy here click on create copy and we're going to take this arrow and just drag it to the right but right here and click OK and this is what I want at the end I want this profile in this profile to be able to sort of overlap and have this clearance in between them the spacing there so that's the idea that's what I want that's why I created the you know that section there to have that that clearance and I've got another clearance here but I just want to show you where I plan to go with this so that's that's why the approach here so I'm going to hit escape command Z to undo I'm left with just this shape here and I'm going to finish that sketch now I'm going to select the E for extrude let's go up five millimeters and we have this shape here okay next we need to create the geometry here where they snap together so we'll do a male and a female in here what I'm going to do is create a sketch on this surface P for project let's project that outline there click okay I'm going to untangle bodies here I'll be left with just a purple outline here I'm going to draw a line so l4 line it's going to be a diagonal line from point to point select that line make it a construction line and then I'll grab my sensor diameter circle there notice let me redo that it's kind of quick I'm going to find that midpoint constraint there that triangle that's going to snap that circle right to the middle I'm going to give it a diameter of three millimeters finish that sketch go and bring bodies back into view I'm going to select that profile I'm going to extrude that out 0.6 millimeters and give it a taper angle of negative 20 millimeters and there we have it so now I have this little part that is going to snap onto this section when I pattern it and so then I have to create the mating surface here so I'll create a sketch on this surface I'm going to approach it the same way P for project project that outline and we don't need to see that other sketch so I'll toggle these l4 line I'm going to grab again my diagonal line selected make it a construction line grab a circle snap it to the midpoint here and we'll go three millimeters finish that sketch bring bodies back into view and also that sketch that we need to see I'm going to select just that profile I'm going to this time go negative 0.6 millimeters and a taper angle of again negative 20 and there we have it and now we have this which will allow once I mirror it this part will snap right into here okay so now what I'm going to do is a mirror this so I'm in front of you I'll go to create down to mirror select this as my body make sure your type is set to bodies my mirror plane here click to select it choose this surface click okay with operation set to join and there we have it so okay now that we have this part what I need to know is the distance I need to move this so that this circle aligns with this circle here so I can grab my inspect tool click on this circle in this circle here and notice it gives me these two diagonal lines which match the inner circle to the inner circle now or to the outer gives me that dimension however that dimensions kind of useless to me what I want to see is the sort of the horizontal or x distance from here to here straight across and you can do that if you just click on XYZ Delta here a little check mark and you'll see you get the x direction and the y distance there so this tells me that that's 9.5 in the x direction you can also see it here 9.5 so now that I know that I can take that information and then right click go to move copy select this body put my widget right there click on create copy and move this over 9.5 millimeters and there we have it so now if I do a inspect and go down to section analysis I can select this top surface go down say negative 2.5 put a set right at the midpoint and I can see that these portions align perfectly right a little nub there and aligns right inside that extrusion and that's perfect however there is a problem because this edge rubs right against this edge here so I don't want that right I don't want them to touch but it gets a little complicated because I can't just simply go ahead and you know extrude this in to give me the distance I want because if I extrude that it's it's basically extruding this side as well I basically want one body to be repeated so that one body that has to be the same geometry throughout I can't affect one body without affecting the other so the way I'm gonna approach this is I'm gonna go back I'm gonna actually I can just since this is the last item in the timeline I can just click and delete that move item without it affecting anything else and there's also this copy here and so I don't need those but I'm going to approach this sketch a little bit different here and the beauty here with the power of the Fusion 360 timeline is I can take this and just drag it back right before that mirror so I'm just left here and I'm gonna go back to this sketch right here so I'll double click on the timeline there to edit it and here you can you see the the the reason why you want to understand constraints and how to go back and modify your sketches so you may be tempted to come in and say okay let me just delete this circle and redo this because what I want to do is move this circle actually it's you know to make it a little easier to see let's just do this untaggle bodies and I want this circle to be offset from this center line 1 millimeters now like I said we can delete the circle and recreate everything but you don't want to do that because later after this we have an extrusion and then it's gonna lose those references so but here's what you can do you can just say you know what that midpoint constraint gonna delete that and that's gonna free up this circle so it's no longer no longer has that relationship and I can reset the reissue these constraints I'm gonna say grab this horizontal constraint constraint this is midpoint hold shift and you can find that midpoint of that line there there it is now this is constrained I could move a left or right but not up and down so we've got that horizontal constraint and then I can just come in with a dimension so D for dimension and I'm gonna set that to 1 millimeter boom now I've got this circle saying so I want you constrained to that midpoint but I want you to be 1 millimeter set to the side here and so now when I click finish sketch notice the extrusion here so my timeline moved over one but here's the beauty if I bring back that body it moves that extrusion over I didn't have to sort of remake that extrusion and that's the beauty with making changes infusion 360 sort of won't say the secret but sort of yeah the secret sauce here if you make changes to a design and you notice it breaks your model or make change to a sketch and everything falls apart the key there is knowing how to tackle these constraints because if you can come in and just reissue those constraints without changing your geometry you know things tend to work out nicely so it is important to understand how these constraints work so you have that your sketch constraints here really understanding and getting to know them and how to use them really improve your workflow infusion 360 so that's why I created a free constraints cheesie it's a downloadable PDF that describes all these constraints and what they do and there's an image in a little description of how to use it recommend downloading that if you haven't yet and printing it out or just kind of keeping it on your desktop to reference and that's really gonna improve your design flow okay so now that we have this moved over we can actually you know if I go back and drag this mirror over here we can see that now if I go to inspect and I again choose like the distance between these two circles now that's a 10.5 I'm at a back view so it's giving me a negative so but same idea 10.5 is the distance there so if I were to go move copies select this and go over go first click on create copy and drag this over 10.5 you see now I've got the clearance there that I want so okay we know that works I'm gonna undo that and I'm gonna drag again my timeline back before that mirror there because I have a couple more changes I want to make before I actually make that mirror tool you know and I'm kind of going back and forth here because I want to show you my thought process as to how I kind of approach this design instead of just giving you the beginning to end without kind of seeing the you know the things I was kind of thinking through so okay this hole here is a little too close to this edge and plus I want this to kind of be rounded out so what I'm gonna do is create a sketch on this surface here and I'll go ahead and grab a three-point arc here and I'm just gonna snap from this edge to this edge on the top here come in so you get that it'll snap right to where it's a half a circle there and you'll see you'll get these tangent constraints there and those are important if you don't have them go ahead and then add them in but if you snap to the center should give you the tangent constraints I'm gonna do the same thing to this line here but let's go ahead on toggle actually it's P for project and we're gonna project this edge right here click okay and then I'll untaggle visibility there of the bodies and then I'm gonna grab my three-point arc tool again and I'll snap from the bottom edge here to this there are those two points I should say snap to that mid that center you know half of a circle there and you'll see you'll get these tangent constraints again finish that sketch bring bodies into view I'm gonna take this profile here and I'm gonna drag it up gonna change distance to object that this is my object to the surface here and click join as my operation I'll do the same thing to this other side here except I'm gonna do a cut so grab this profile extruded distance to object this surface is my object operation is cut click okay and now I have this here in the untaggle sketches so we see it a little clearly so we have this curved surface on both these sides this edge is a little sharp for me so I'm gonna go ahead and apply a fillet to that I'll grab these two edges here I'll do a 0.5 millimeter fillet and then I'm gonna repeat the fillet to this side these two edges here here in the back so I'm out of five fillet grab this top edge bottom edge and we'll do the same thing with these two here and for these I'm gonna do a 1 millimeter fillet and you can see that there okay click okay and basically that's what I want for this part now again the really cool part with the timeline is if I drag this back over to that mirror to include that mirror so I'm going back to the future there it takes all the changes that I made and mirror those as well because it knows that that reference was that body so whatever change I made there went ahead and got mirrored okay so what I'm gonna do here now is right click go to move copy again choose this grab my create copy go over and the distance is going to be 10.5 and I have perfectly spaced that's the perfect spacing that I need there again you can do a section analysis there so if I go to inspect section analysis let me just go from the bottom here go up negative 2.5 you can see how that looks and that it's exactly what I want so I've got that spacing I set there spacing in the back and the side so that these will print and they'll be locked in place but they will not fuse together so untaggle analysis and let's go back to let's go to a top view so basically I'm just using the move tool here just to test one instance of it but let's say I want to you know print out a chain that's 15 of these so I'm gonna delete the the move tool normally you don't want to delete things in your timeline but when it's the last item it's okay because there's nothing else that references that item so it's fine to hit the lead I'm gonna delete these last two items here that move in that copy and I'm gonna go to create down to pattern I'm gonna do a rectangular pattern type is gonna be set to bodies I'm gonna choose this body the direction or this is my object and then I'll click on direction choose my x direction here the red line and I can start moving this over and you can see that the foster three instances I'm gonna change first you want your distance types to be set to spacing and I'm gonna change that spacing make that 10.5 which we measured and a quantity if I want 15 of these I'll just click 15 good answer and there we go I've got 15 links of chain here and so it can you know I don't know we can make this whatever you want I can make this into a bracelet I can have it be a chain that I can connect to a motor and you know to include some type of robotics project wherever your imagination takes you but the neat application here is this sort of print in place technique that you can use to create these types of designs so okay 3d printing this how would I approach this because there are multiple bodies you want to send to your printer you do not want to go to utilities making 3d print you want to instead right click on the top level of your browser here go to save as mesh and I'm gonna send it straight to my 3d print utility so I have that checked and you can see that I've got that set to my Prusa slicer so I'll click okay and Fusion will open a Prusa slicer here and throw the chain right on there and you can see this will fit nicely there so if I center this the neat thing is I can print multiple rows of these and snap them together you know and I could even unsnap these and join them you know in different lengths that I want and if I need another section that's just maybe five of these I can just go back to my rectangular pattern here all I do is change 15 to 5 there you go I now have five to print your first one what I would do is just print two of these and test the fit and you may have to adjust that clearance right if they're fusing together you may want to come in and make it bigger and if it's too loose just make it smaller but good idea just to print two of them first just to test it and then you know print to your heart's content all right guys that's basically what I wanted to show with this design show you kind of the approach I took in my thought process for creating it hopefully you enjoyed it and learned a few things any questions leave them down in the comments below and I did go pretty quick through this tutorial but if you want a slower paced more intro to Fusion 360 and how to approach your designs check out my quick start course below it's great for beginners with a bunch of projects that I go through introducing tools and techniques slowly and at a much more easier pace to follow so I highly recommend that if you're a beginner if you are more advanced users take a look at my website for my other courses all right I will be back with another tutorial soon