Creating a CAM setup - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- [Narrator] Congratulations, you've made it through the setup process. You are now ready to begin creating your very first setup. What's important to know about a setup is it's essentially telling Fusion 360 what you want to cut, what material you want to cut from, and give your program a name, or name the set of operations that will be used to create this specific part. You can create a setup here on the left side of the toolbar by clicking the "Setup" button, and you'll notice right out of the gate something looks a little off. Remember I said that the setup defines what you're going to be cutting, and right now, Fusion thinks we're going to be cutting this all at once, and that's not exactly what we want. So I'm going to go ahead and cancel this, and then we're going to go back and turn off all of the components that we are not going to cut. That's where this baseplate home view comes in handy, you can jump back to bring that forward, and now we can focus on this one. Let's go ahead and start the setup one more time. This time you'll notice the stock is much more in line with what we're trying to work with. By default, Fusion automatically selects the start point or the zero-zero point for an operation or a setup to be the top-center of a box. In this case, that's not what I want. I actually like to register off the bottom corner of the box. So, by selecting that, I'm actually in a good orientation right now. My machine is setup so that when I'm standing in front of it, the X-axis runs right to left, the Y-axis runs front to back, and the Z-axis runs up and down. So, the orientation of this coordinate system is right for me, so I'm going to go ahead and leave that. Now, if we look over in the setup dialogue box, there's a couple of things I want to call out. First, is the operation. We're doing milling, but you could change that here. The model orientation could be adjusted. So for example, if, and we'll see this later in this course, if something isn't set up in the proper orientation, rather than just selecting the model orientation, you can choose for example X and Y-axis or Z-axis and Y-plane, Z-axis and X-plane, whatever works best for you. We'll look at that in a little bit as well. And then finally, the model that we're actually going to be selecting. We could have actually selected this specific body, but I find that turning everything off comes in very handy because it just gets in the way anyway. Next we want to go to the "Stock" tab, and generally in Fusion you're going to work from left to right across these tabs. Now on the "Stock" tab, this is going to define what is this transparent material. This is what we're going to be cutting from. Now with the orientation set up properly, we can set it to have zero offset from top to bottom, because I know my stock is exactly 3/4 inch, and I'm going to be cutting from a 3/4 inch piece of wood, for example, so I don't need any offset. But on the sides, I am going to add some offset. I'm going to enter point seven five as an offset, and you can see that the stock updates so that there's a little bit of room running all the way around the part. And the reason for this is essentially clamping. I need to give my table a way to hold this material down while it's being cut. Not holding something down properly can be devastating on a CNC machine, so make sure you got all your material clamped down quite well. This gives us enough room to put a screw in, or a clamp on, without actually running into it with the cutter as we create operations. So after you review the model orientation and the stock orientation, and you feel you have everything set, you can move to the post-process. And this is really just giving your program a name, for example you can call it "One-O-One", and I'm going to call this "Baseplate". Reality is, is I don't keep track of my programs very well, in a corporate environment or a heavy CNC shop, this will become incredibly critical. By selecting "OK" you can see I now have setup seven, and this is just an increment, I've gone through this a few times while recording, and that's why you see seven, you might see one, but it's irrelevant because you can change the name and I highly recommend it. I'm going to call this "Baseplate". And the reason for this is we're going to create a number of setups for each of the things that we're going to cut. And within each setup, there'll be a number of operations that are done in order, in order to actually cut this part out of the stock.