Workflow & Tools for Plastic Moulded Parts

[martin.carder]

Hello, I love the Fusion360 concept.

I see many requests for tools pertaining to developing thin walled plastic injection moulded parts. (shells, split lines, conic radii, draft, snap hooks, snap hook groove, mounting boses, vent, lip/groove, cavity, shut off surfaces, parting line etc...)

It would be nice to see similar approach to Solidworks, they have two toolbars where the tools are combined together.

(i) Mold Tools - http://help.solidworks.com/2015/English/SolidWorks/sldworks/c_Mold_Design.htm?verRedirect=1

(ii) Fastening Feature - http://help.solidworks.com/2015/english/solidworks/sldworks/c_fastening_features_overview.htm

I know Fusion 360 has some of these tools but for example, you are unable to create a split line from an edge (only from a planar surface).

[roambotics_scott]

Seconding all of the above.

There is no built in undercut detection. It's doable by eye or by hand with sketches, projection, etc but would be great to just have them magically highlighted, selectable, and easily fixed.

Fusion has draft analysis - which I use - but almost all of the work to get things drafted has to be done by hand.

The extrude feature will set a taper angle, *but* I almost always want it drafted inward not outward so am constantly doing negative tapers (that's minor but annoying when you do a lot of it).

Making things uniformly thick, getting the right radii on fillets between two drafted walls intersecting at an arbitrary angle is currently a huge PITA and if requirements change midstream (we're going to do a high polish on this face so we can drop it from 5º to ~0.5º or visa versa; we're switching from ABS to PC so have to be more careful with thick and thin areas), we currently have to throw everything out and restart from scratch.

There should be an extrude at angle with uniform thickness so we can get moldable walls in one step without having to do a bunch of secondary operations.

 instead of  in one step (if you can't see the difference, the one in the left is uniformly thick and drafted 10º and the right is vertical)

Vents in one step would be great but a living hinge tool and a simple thing to do hooks would be fantastic (both of those are totally doable by hand with research but they're a lot of detailed work and they have a lot of tunable parameters that depend on material and what you're doing with them)

Clearances and tolerances would be very nice here too. Drafting by hand is merely annoying but properly offsetting faces by a tiny amount to get a loose or a press fit by hand is almost guaranteed to be screwed up

[joelwigton]

 Totally agree.  In my mind, this is one area where SolidWorks is still much more powerful.  The new "Web" tool is a nice addition, but it doesn't have checkmark options to add draft or fillets at the same time, so you create ribs instantly and then a thousand clicks later, you're actually done.  If you can even make them all fillet right, which I've had issues with.   

Similarly, creating a boss by hand is a pain, and I've spent days working on tricky parting lines.  

I can't believe there isn't more support for this!  I think all the votes are spread across multiple people posting the same idea.  🙂

[roambotics_scott]

It's something that most people who haven't made molded parts wouldn't even know is missing and for some reason people are extremely stingy with their votes here, @joelwigton

There are definitely some aspects of this that could be very hard to automate, but if you're designing parts for a two part mold, proper drafting, maintaining uniform thickness, and detecting and resolving occlusions / undercuts and other common issues should be easy.

I've had plenty of luck designing molded parts in F370 but I had to do a lot of advanced planning and extra work, and if I changed the parting line or decided I needed more or less draft I either had to do a ton of work or just start over entirely

[roambotics_scott]

s/370/360/

[joelwigton]

Fusion 370, now with 10 more!  😉

p.s. love the linux ref

[keqingsong]

Thanks for the idea! This is something we'd like to get to, but are focusing are higher priority projects and making our the core modeling/sketching functionality more robust and well round (which paves the way for some of these workflows). We'll keep you posted on our progress. 

[lalit.tesseract]

We would love to have the mold and fastening features.This would really simplify the designing of injection molded and 3d print parts