Fusion 360 Rotiform Modeling Series - Part 2 - Modeling the Rim Revolve

[@777MAV]

Great series and lots of nice useful details! I've done couple of wheels for my projects, but most of the time those were pretty basic rough sketches :) It's time to do something detailed and parametric.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

I redid it so all the episodes will drop tomorrow. I want to add a more complex wheel design to the series later, but this is a good starting point.

[@MarkSDD]

I have a little trick that can save a bit of time for doing rim profiles with revolve. Instead of drawing a closed sketch with one side being an offset, you can just draw a single line that's at the mid-point between the 2 boundaries and then use the pipe tool with a square profile and set the section size to the thickness you need. The revolve tool can use that pipe to create the rim without any issues and it will automatically take care of all the outer and inner fillets automatically based off what you set in the sketch.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Thanks Mark I will have to give that a shot and see how it works. So you revolve a solid body and combine it and all comes out like a true cylinder? Meaning the cross section works ok?

[@MarkSDD]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Yeah, because you're creating such a small square compared to the rim diameter it can usually revolve fairly smoothly without any overlap showing. At larger sizes you might start to see a slight step appear on the outside where the revolve concludes. In that situation you could create a new sketch and project the pipe profile and revolve that.

[@MarkSDD]

Something just occured to me after typing that and I had to go and check. I tried setting the revolve to create a new body rather than a join, like I've done before, and found it creates a perfectly smooth profile at any size without a step and you can then delete or hide the pipe. The step was the original pipe object being joined to the new revolve. Seems the revolve tool actually just grabs the pipe's side profile automatically, rather than using the whole object, so it works perfectly doing it this way. Annoyed I never realised that before.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

I gave it a try Mark, neat trick! I think that works great if you have a consistent thickness through the rim. And yeah after the Revolve make a new Body and it was smooth. I would say the main limitation is if the profile wasn't an offset which happens with cast "barrels". Thanks for the tip!