Recreating a real-world item

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to fix a broken garage door remote by replacing the broken buttons. The problem is that these buttons have a pretty "organic" form.

I want to recreate the blue part in Fusion360, add some extra parts and 3D print a replacement button that will not break like the original one did :).

My question is: What is the best way to retrace such an object as a sketch in F360?

As you can see above I scanned it and tried retracing it in Adobe Illustrator which I have done before. As a test I just printed it and the outline fits the original button pretty well. But now I am struggling with importing it into Fusion. Illustrator can export as dxf or svg. But (ignoring the fact that working with DXF feels counterproductive in F360, because I can't just import it into a sketch) both dxf and svg have the wrong size after trying to get them into fusion. I know I can scale the sketch, but scaling something a lot bigger to be 19.4mm has resulted in rounding errors, so it doesn't fit as well anymore.

How would you do something like this?

Or is there a better way like tracing directly from an image file inside of Fusion360?

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

Fusion has an option Attach Canvas you can use it as a background to trace with a spline.

After inserting the picture you can calibrate to get the right size.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the quick reply. I looked through the "Insert" features, but didn't get the difference between decal and canvas - especially not that you can calibrate the canvas.

Now I have to rescan the object with some graph paper for easier calibration 🙂

[HughesTooling]

Decal is applied to a surface, more for visuals. When you use Canvas you are prompted to select a plane then just click OK. When you have the Canvas find it in the Browser and right click, you should get this menu, then just pick 2 points on the image, it will show a size then enter the real size and you should be ready to start tracing.

Mark