make a Shopbot in my machine library?

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I'm fairly new to Fusion 360 so I beg forgiveness for the naive questions:

1. I noticed that there's a machine library but that it only has mostly 3D printers and some nicer milling machines.

Is it possible to model up my old ShopBot and use the Machine Builder function to have that in my Machine Library?

2. Perhaps I should have asked first, is modeling up your machine and having it there for simulations etc even necessary, or is it just helpful?  I'm a furniture maker by trade and I'm looking more seriously at small production runs and wanted to not only have my components for machining, but also to model up the fixtures and even the Shopbot.  

But as I'm new to Fusion360, maybe I'm asking the wrong questions? Any advice here would be awesome. 

Mostly looking for best practices and a good direction to head in. Any advice or links would be great. I'm happy to do my homework!

thanks!

-james

[a.laasW8M6T · Accepted solution]

You certainly can model up your machine and use it in Simulation, but your right to ask whether you need to, In my opinion 3-axis machining can be done perfectly adequately without the machine sim, you can model and include your fixtures without using the machine simulation.

It becomes much more useful for 4 and especially 5axis machining for checking how things will run, although currently the Machine simulation is in its infancy and doesn't check for collisions and a bunch of other stuff.

I have made a Machine Model for one of our mills at work and its a bit of a mission.

so you can have a go but yea, not really necessary

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=MFG-MACHINE-BUILDER-OVERVIEW

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice! You're right, maybe when I've had more practice and want a challenge I'll mock up my machine. For now I'll just continue with the stock floating in space 😉

-J