Designing a 3D Printed Pantograph Font | Fusion 360 Tutorial

[@dantadysak5485]

Watching your videos over the past 2 years inspired me to buy a 3D printer. When I was in high school in the the 80’s I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I fell in love with the tool room and architectural drawing classes and took all of them. I really thought I was going to be a tool and die maker but it didn’t pan out. I got a degree in electronic service engineering instead and have been a computer system engineer for the last 30 years. For so many years I wanted to get back to my roots of having a lathe and mill but could never afford them and I didn’t have projects for them until I started watching your videos. That’s when I realized that I could have been doing them the whole time. The 3D printer for me brings in what seems to be the missing element that I could afford doing additive manufacturing rather than subtractive. Anyway thank you for inspiring me and I continue to be a huge fan.

[@AmateurRedneckWorkshop]

Thanks for all the help James. I have printed all of the letters but I am not going to show them until the last video of the series. Keeping the viewer in suspense and all that. Keep on keeping on.

[@Clough42]

Cool. Thanks, Harold.

[@joell439]

Thanks Harold for graciously providing ideas that we all benefit from 👍👍😎👍👍

[@Preso58]

Thanks for uploading the model James. Autodesk Inventor has anger issues with fillets too. "Results may vary" as they say.

[@CCCfeinman55]

Very, very well done! Thank you for sharing this with the community. You could make fusion 3D quick-start videos and charge for them, if you wanted. I for one would buy them! Clarity like this is hard won and hard to find. Either way, thank you and please continue….

[@sharkrivermachine]

Very interesting. It looks so easy when someone else is doing it.

[@unclematt7223]

Just started learning fusion , before I purchase a 3D printer, even though my brain hurts trying to learn this program, this video was really cool seeing all the functions and how fast you can zip right through everything

[@jfl-mw8rp]

Thanks James! You are a gifted teacher/instructor.

[@JBLewis]

This is great tutorial of a number of Fusion360 techniques! And I just happened across that filleting bug myself a week or so ago where I had an oval hollow that I was filleting to reduce the need for supports, and when the fillet would happen to meet in the middle, Fusion would freak out.

[@hrdcpy]

The National Park Service (NPS) signage font only existed as router paths until a group of designers redrew it and released the OpenType format for free.

[@EverettsWorkshop]

Can't say as I've crashed Fusion360 yet, but I also don't know about some of the functionality you do. I have learned a number of new tricks with it from your videos, thanks for including the design processes of your projects too.

[@RRINTHESHOP]

Nicely done James, I have run into the same issue with fillet when fillets overlap using a common edge.

[@joell439]

Awesome tutorial James. I’m always impressed with how much thought you put in prior to a single sketch. Your dedication to assigning variables prior to sketching is definitely a skill you probably use everyday in your day job 😜

[@buildmotion1426]

The amount of details you address is amazing. Thanks for taking the time to deep dive this project!

[@tooljourney]

allthough i dont use fusion all too much, still learning new things everytime i watch

[@outsidescrewball]

“thats all there is to it”!!!…whew! Awesome tutorial…thanks for sharing

[@hossanderson643]

I enjoy your videos as always and appreciate your sharing of knowledge, especially in fusion.

[@jhawker2895]

I never cease to be amazed at your 3D modeling knowledge, but most especially your ability to present that knowledge in a simple, although quick, presentation. Yet another fantastic video presentation.. Thanks for sharing ... Stay safe and well ...

[@JeronimoStilton14]

Stuff like this is exactly where I feel like openSCAD would work way better, but I haven’t delved into that rabbit hole

[@g.tucker8682]

I guess sketch comedy is harder than it looks. Nice try, though! :) Always enjoy the modeling tutorials. Thanks

[@reebgogs]

You asked, so here is my video request. :O) I would love to see your take on thread milling with Fusion 360. I have seen other videos on this subject, but none of those have really solidified the concepts for me. And just for some background, I have successfully milled threads with Fusion 360 but it always feels like a trial and error effort. Keep up the GREAT content!!

[@Clough42]

Ah...good idea. I do plan to do some thread milling soon, so this would be a good tutorial.

[@PCBWay]

That’s really impressive,James! Thx so much for bringing us this 👍👍

[@bulletproofpepper2]

Thanks for sharing! My worst thing I tried to model , was a tap holder fixture to hold the taps aligned as to tap a hole. I’m not sure why the 3D print failed. The tap holder was bought but the alinement jig was 3D printed.

[@mlefe09]

Great tutorial on how to use letters with Fusion360: good job!

[@Hossimo]

I learned a few things today. Also I've totally run into that fillet crash before. Good to know what it is.

[@Clough42]

Glad I could help!

[@azenginerd9498]

I don't even use F360 and this bug frustrates me!

[@MadeInMichigan]

You should teach a Fusion class or something. I kind of know my way around, but I always learn something new when I watch one of your design videos.

[@ElectricGears]

One way to do the kerning is shrinking the witch of all the blocks, then making a set of shims for the different pairs. You don't need 676 different shims since most letters have close enough width that they can share. Another completely automatic way would be dividing each block into maybe 10 vertical positions on each side. Each position would have a projection that would match up with another projection on an adjacent letter. If you picked any two letters, the projections with the greatest *combined* distance would touch and set the correct kerning distance. I'm not 100% certain this would work out and maybe in practice you would only get a few unique distances. It seems like you might need to write a program to work out the best set of distance pairs. It could probably be done in OpenSCAD.

[@MyLilMule]

A nice addition to this would be to include common all caps kerning pairs as a single block, like FA, LT, AY, etc.

[@Raytenecks]

I recently tried to model tire treads in Fusion 360. I found a few tutorials out there, but they all had some problems, and in the end I had some issues that I didn't understand. I think a video on embossing a repeating pattern onto a cylinder would be awesome! I also noticed that some people wanted the pattern on a sphere or torus, which is a apparently a lot harder, but would also be great to know. Thanks for the great video!

[@Clough42]

Oh, cool. That's an interesting challenge.

[@underscorenul]

Great video! The way I think I’d have made the rounded letterforms by using one of the SHX plugins for Inkscape, to create the letterforms and give them thickness where I would be able to control the end caps and corners. Then import the SVG into F360 and go from there. Great to see other ways of doing things though!

[@moki123g]

solidworks has a offset feature that can cap ends. I imagine 360 does too..

[@underscorenul]

@@moki123g You’d think. Fusion 360 is a good minimum but not great, and it misses out on a lot of features.

[@TheUncleRuckus]

As always I really enjoyed this James, thank you for taking us through your thought process. 👍👍 Side note you'd think for the amount of money that Fusion 360 cost they have issues like that fixed. 🤦

[@Clough42]

Fusion does a lot for $500/year. Everything has bugs. That said, yes. It's frustrating.

[@EnergySeeker]

Good video , yes repeating last action if it possible for different parts I saw you doing it when you modified the letters

[@aguycalledlucas]

Thanks James. I needed these!

[@Cenedd]

Regarding the ordering of the letter bodies in Fusion. It's possible to drag and drop the bodies in the list to reorder them. You did say "good way" but I'm not aware of a sort alphabetically option! Obviously it isn't really necessary for this model as you're going to export them without working on the any further but I've had models where it's useful to have the modelled parts in a logical order so you can easily find which one is which. Fusion does have an irritating habit of moving them about if you do anything like split a body though. I think this falls under your "personality" category!

[@Clough42]

Interesting. I'm pretty sure I tried that and it didn't work, but it's certainly working now. Thanks!

[@gregfeneis609]

Another great video, James. How do you get Windows Explorer to show the preview of the stl file that's selected in the list?

[@suzysheer66]

I have not killed F360 in a while, but you may have saved me one experience of it in the future.

[@Engineerd3d]

Awesome modeling!

[@Sam_596]

"Do you know your A B Cs? ...we're going to use that knowledge to help a friend" Sesame Street has prepared for this moment!

[@incubatork]

Well explained and amazing use of fusion, what about a set of numbers to match as sooner or later they will probably be needed.

[@Clough42]

They're in the downloadable files. I just didn't do it on video.

[@sleepib]

Hardest thing I've tried to model is a custom computer mouse shell. I kinda sorta gave up and vacuum formed it on a clay sculpt instead. Was trying to get the shape to be close to a negative of the shape of my hand, so lots of compound curves.

[@douglasdtlltd]

thats exactly the reason car companies still use clay car models in this digital age. So they can understand the car's curves better and easier. You didn't ask, but there was a video i saw explaining this.

[@twobob]

Solid work sir. I am largely terrible in 360, Lofting always goes wrong (I try to use it to "blend" to surfaces and fail) and anything requiring fancy curves being stretched out to another curve with a rail as a guide. Also goes wrong. XD. Hey ho

[@TheCreat]

So this might be a stupid question, but what is a pantograph? After watching the video, I know it's some kind of device where you follow templates somehow with a pen-like thingy, but that's about it. I assume it gets engraved or some other way of machined into some work piece, but just from the video, I don't know. A short / basic overview of what this is for would've been nice. This makes a whole lot more sense after googling that (and ignoring the ones that are part of a train).

[@Clough42]

Ahh, yes. A Pantograph is a mechanical device that uses a stylus in a groove to guide a cutting or marking tool on another workpiece--usually with some enlargement or reduction factor. It's the old-school CNC engraver. Harold is making videos on his build, and Joe Pieczynski made one a while back. I believe Stefan Gotteswinter also has some pantograph engraving videos on his channel.

[@rodneykiemele4721]

Thanks, that was great

[@MicksWorkshop]

Thanks for doing this! I have the plans for Joe Pie's pantograph that I plan on building and was thinking that 3d printing the templates would be the way to go. I had no idea how involved it would be to model them in CAD for this purpose. Did you decide later that you did not want the dovetail ends?

[@MicksWorkshop]

Never mind on the dovetails. It occurred to me that this may have already been addressed in the comments, and it was. Thanks again! You make CAD look so easy.

[@jscancella]

In programming, text is defined in how many W spaced size do you want since W takes the most space. I probably would have figured out how much space a W takes plus the spacing between I wanted and then make all the blocks that size. But there's probably a reason James didn't want to do it that way

[@Clough42]

Harold specifically requested a variable-width font.

[@jscancella]

@@Clough42 if you said that I must have missed it, but yeah I figured there was a reason why you did it this way you did!

[@elanman608]

If you print of the letters as a set of scrabble tiles that should give approximately the right distribution.

[@Clough42]

I looked at Scrabble distributions, and ultimately scaled from an English letter frequency distribution to choose the letters to duplicate.

[@rkalle66]

You will need more pieces of some letters. Think of the word "letter" with two "t". It may be useful to have some pinholes or similar grooves to register each letter on some base ... like LEGO bricks.

[@Clough42]

So print more. The downloadable files contain plates with duplicates of common letters. The dovetails on the blocks are for fixturing.

[@hossanderson643]

Very nice. Thanks for being willing to share the files. I sweet talked Harold into print me your Tig sharpener, I'm pleased with it. Do you have any intentions of creating the files for lower cased letters ?

[@RambozoClown]

I think there is a command to handle the overshoot and edge filets in one go. It was in Inventor, but not sure where in Fusion. Has to do with line end treatments.

[@Clough42]

There are situations where you can offset a line, and it offsets both sides, including rounded ends, but I could not get it to work with the paths from the stroke fonts. That, followed by a rule fillet would have made this very simple if it had worked.

[@Knatte_Anka]

Check if simplify3d support 3fm files that export each body separate but still only one file. Prusa slicer i know handle it perfect 😁

[@Clough42]

Good tip. Though I assume they would all be touching in the 3mf file?

[@Knatte_Anka]

@@Clough42 ya correct. in prusa slicer you can then take them in as individual objects, so auto placement place them in a good place. And then you can save that file as a new 3fm file or export plate as stl.

[@ericsandberg3167]

James....could you do a video on how to model some sheetmetal parts in F360 and then properly format them so the folks at Send-Cut-Send can cut them out...thanks.

[@hotfuzz1913]

Hope Harold is alright after your little experiment

[@NeGRaDiCaLz]

Nice video. I need to start using parameters like this. I find the “create 2D drawing” feature in fusion especially clunky. And when I export a drawing to dxf so I can open and edit in 2D AutoCAD it always never seems to work right.

[@CharlesBallowe]

I've taken to exporting from fusion using 3mf instead of STL - slicers handle it well (at least cura - haven't tried others) and it seems to be a more capable format. Any thoughts on the format? Any reason to choose STL other than habit?

[@chrisj4570g]

One of my main struggles is importing a picture, and tracing over it. Replicating a part, is what I mean. Seems that it would be a really worthwhile skill to be good at.

[@chrisj4570g]

Actually, what would be a more interesting video is what are some good ways of duplicating parts. Tracing pictures, measuring, scanning, etc

[@Runoratsu]

For the dovetails, you can also create them easily using the „Draft“ tool on the bodies. It’s not really made for that of course, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it works… 😅

[@RetoAebischer]

I surface modeled a full suspension carbon bike frame which I'm building right now. The modeling part is all good, but making engineering drawings of complex parts is so frustrating. There are so many features missing.

[@azenginerd9498]

The hardest thing I've modeled? It's my day job designing flight simulators. The individual components may not be ultra complex but keeping the thousands of unique items all playing nicely together takes a dedicated diligence to best practices. Hence, why you cringe when I chime in with constructive criticism 😊

[@thecrazychemist]

What do you do if you're not working with a single line font?

[@tim.garrison]

Bleh, my last comment was deleted, so I'll say it again without the Imgur link. Message me (that's a thing on KZbin still, right?) if you want it. The most complicated model I built is a W12 engine. I tried to keep it fully parametric, but due to the complexity of it, things got away from me pretty quickly. I did get a nice render of the internals that I use as my desktop background now, though. The messiest print that ultimately ended in failure was a filter mask, a sort of DIY PPE for the pandemic, that a friend asked me to print for him. Imagine a shape of a typical construction style dust mask, but printing that as a 2mm wall from the widest part to the narrowest. Now imagine that as 200 degree Celsius plastic. It wasn't really able to build the slopes and curves cleanly, and it was a mess of spaghetti at the end. I also tried to print just the cap end of it, which was supposed to thread onto the main body and hold a cotton pad captive as a filter. Because of the way FDM printers don't do mating cylinders well, it simply didn't work. The cap was too small or the male threads were too big. Some post-processing may have fixed it, but it was more than I wanted to fight with. And yes, supports would have helped with the mask structure, but that would have added tens of hours onto the print.

[@johannglaser]

I'm surprised you didn't extrude along the paths of the letters with a circular shaped profile (plus extra depth+width), and cutting away from the bases. But my experience with F360 is quite small, so I am for sure not a good reference. :-) Also, in the images from the slicer software, the dovetails seem to be missing. And a third topic: Will the layer height and general roughness of the 3D prints provide an acceptably smooth path for the stylus?

[@Clough42]

Extruding along the paths requires sketches for each segment, and doesn't go neatly around square corners. The missing dovetails are due to an unfortunate time travel paradox that I couldn't clean up in editing. My printer produces acceptably smooth surfaces, but I'm sure it's possible to print them with lumps that cause problems.

[@razvanilea]

I think the dovetails are in the wrong orientation but I'm not sure...

[@pepekrozinek]

I'm gonna need that remote brain controller, how much? Asking for a friend..

[@mikepetersen2927]

It looked like the slicer eliminated the dovetails on the letter blocks... or was the slicing done on an earlier, pre-dovetail version? At any rate, nicely done and very informative!

[@Clough42]

I use a fair bit of time travel when producing my videos, and this sometimes leads to paradoxes.

[@thesfreader3068]

@@Clough42 Ah, I think This Old Tony has made a machine for these. Or was it next year ?

[@UncleKennysPlace]

@@Clough42 Isn't more than one paradox ... paradise?

[@Clough42]

@@UncleKennysPlace believe it or not, I actually looked it up before commenting.

[@Andrew_Fernie]

@@Clough42 Because you knew this question would come up of course.

[@repairtech9320]

Harold looks like an older version of Hank in Breaking Bad. lolll.

[@mhoover]

What...no numerals?

[@Clough42]

They're there in the downloadable models. I just didn't show it in the video.

[@notsonominal]

Think you could perhaps set it up as a CAM job and export the stl as shown when simulated to get around extending all the ends of the letters?

[@Clough42]

Hmm...Can you export the simulated CAM as STL?

[@user-dr4px1vg9e]

@@Clough42 Yes, and this is old way for moving complex shape stocks between setups. Now we have built-in feature for that.

[@Mobile_Dom]

how you're mousing around fusion is interesting, how do you do that?

[@Hossimo]

He uses a 3D mouse.

[@HeavyIronRestoration]

If you are referring to how he is "Orbiting" or moving around the view, he is using a 3DConnexion 3D Mouse. They are somewhat expensive but are very nice and handy peripheral for those who do a decent amount of CAD work. I have used them for years and rarely like doing CAD work without one!

[@Clough42]

I'm spoiled as well. I can never go back. I even bought a wireless one to use when I'm away from my desk.

[@RambozoClown]

​@@Clough42 Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. I started with the Logitech Cyberman, then the HP Spaceball 2003, and worked through the 3D Connexion lineup to the SpacePilot Pro. Next will be the Enterprise. No going back, something something about prying cold dead fingers...

[@joopterwijn]

You two are nuts 😂, now do you know the letter collection of USA English (on average how many times each letter is used,.. so how many “E” you have to print ) and the font you have created is close to “Arial rounded MT bold” … and now you have to add 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9

[@troglokev]

There is a print font with constant line thickness… Comic Sans. I’ll see myself out.

[@Clough42]

I seriously considered it, just for the lolz.

[@DmitriyK007]

what mouse are you using for fusion?

[@RambozoClown]

SpaceMouse!

[@DmitriyK007]

@@RambozoClown I know. But which model

[@chrisw1462]

@23:11 Your dovetails disappeared...

[@mrtnsnp]

How on earth do you figure out the work-around for that bottom fillet? Or is that just a Google search away?

[@Clough42]

I write software for a living, so I know how floating point numbers are represented in memory, and I had a hunch about what might be causing it internally.

[@rockroosterfootwearmarketi5378]

Hi, this is Rock Rooster Footwear. We sent you an email just now. Looking forward to your reply. Thank you!

[@taranson3057]

I tried to model pistol grips for 1911 so that I could make them on my CNC router and it turned out to be a huge disaster

[@mackk123]

bad spelling can be dangreous

[@MrRShoaf]

You stopped too soon. The file should print more of the common letters and fewer of the uncommon letters. Next you need to consider symbols and numbers.

[@jasonh3109]

I totally see a vacuum chuck in your future. 🫣. Great channel !

[@mattiasfagerlund]

Nice! I predict that someone, somewhere, will be wondering about numbers. V5? cheers/m

[@Clough42]

I modeled the numbers, too. Same process.