Autodesk Fusion 360 for Furniture, Millwork, and Woodworkers

JEFFREY MCGREW: So this is Autodesk Fusion 360 for Furniture, Millwork, and Woodworkers. So my name is Jeffrey, and I'm a licensed architect in California, a fabricator and entrepreneur. I'm a cofounder of a design-build architecture studio that's been going for over 10 years now, where we do everything a normal boutique, small architecture firm would do, but then we also custom fabricate a lot of elements for our own projects and our own in-house shop using a lot of CNC equipment.

And then I'm cofounder of a new company that we just started called Secret Weapon Workshop, which is all about doing DSMA for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries and also providing high-end fabrication services for complex projects and execution there.

And then I just recently left another company that I was the cofounder and the former CTO of, which was Model Number, a sustainable furniture startup. So have a long history of doing a lot of stuff with digital fabrication and modeling and Autodesk tools. And today, we'll be talking all about the more woodworking and specifically around Fusion aspect of what we do.

So with-- because we can, BWC Architects, this is our architecture firm, we do a lot of office interiors for video game companies. We do interior retail and bar spaces in San Francisco. And we also do some custom elements, like these parklets that you see on the bottom-right there, that, again, we'll design, and then we'll fabricate and build certain elements of this.

So in some of these views, like the millwork, in that bar shot on the bottom-right there, was done by a millwork contractor, and the build-out of the space was done by a traditional general contractor, but the tables and some of the other stuff in that space and the bar itself we actually fabricated out of our own shop.

And then Secret Weapon Workshop is more focused just on that fab aspect. So for example, here's a project where we're working with a client that wanted this complex, metal, panel-folded ceiling. So we helped conceptualize it and rationalize out the design and then actually produced all of the panels, folded all the panels, coordinated the installation, and everything like that.

So if you have any complex builds that you're doing, really hard projects of one kind or another, that's exactly what Secret Weapon Workshop is all about, helping other architects and engineers and construction people get their complex projects built.

And then lastly, the last couple of years, helped start a furniture company that's still ongoing. I just left to focus more on architecture again. But the furniture company's name is Model Number. And it's doing sustainable, parametric, on-demand, customizable furniture with a lot of large-scale 3D printing and other digital fabrication aspects.

And so from all of these different things, I'll be showing a couple of different examples today of things that we've been doing that I've been using in Fusion. We're going to start really basic. I'm going to model a little cabinet, and we're going to talk through how I like to model woodworking projects. I've found certain features in Fusion to be really helpful when it comes to doing woodworking projects.

And then we'll get into slightly more complex things, like how you can use assemblies and some interesting things that you're able to do using Fusion when it comes to modeling and using assemblies, and also some of the downsides of using Fusion, where something like Inventor might work better for certain types of woodworking applications or millwork, especially, that you might be doing.

Then we'll get into one thing that I really love in Fusion, which is about the overall appearances, because Fusion actually has a great toolset built into it for representing actual wood grain in a three-dimensional aspect, so you're able to do some really great stuff there in terms of planning grain direction, which is a huge thing for anybody doing a lot of stuff using solid hardwood and things like that.

Then we'll get into the manufacturing workspace, which is a wonderful thing that Fusion lets you do essentially like a linked Save As, kind of, where your manufacturing model can be represented from your design model, but you can make changes in the manufacturing workspace, including making templates, jigs, and fixtures.

And then towards the end of this, I'll get more into the integrated CAM aspect, for those of you that have CNC here, like we do, and talk through some of the great options that we've got inside of Fusion that are specifically for woodworking, and also, again, talk about some of the downsides of using Fusion for this because the fact that a lot of the defaults in Fusion are set up more for people doing, like, CNC machining for mechanical CAD, like making molds, and working with CNC mills and metal, so there's a lot of defaults and stuff that we have to reset to use for the more traditional woodworking or like CNC routing kind of world.

So to start off with, I'm going to jump over to Fusion here, and we're going to model just a really simple cabinet. And I'm not going to go through this, step through the whole thing of this. We'll do a basic setup. And then cooking show style, I'll jump over to more completed model, and we'll talk through how I did it and the different things that I'm doing. But overall, you'll get an idea of how you can really effectively model simple, standard kind of woodworking projects in Fusion.

So let's go ahead and jump over to Fusion. And I'm just in a basic model here. Let me go ahead and hide this. And we'll jump around a little bit. So the first thing that I usually like to do inside of Fusion when it comes to doing a woodworking project is I usually-- before I even start sketching or modeling anything, I like to set up some parameters for myself to make my life a little easier.

So if you just click on Change Parameters, it's at the bottom of the Modify menu. I pin it to my toolbar here because I use it so much.

But if I go here-- and I'm just going to set up a couple really basic, normal things like, I'm going to set up a width for my cabinet. And I'm going to put, like, 30 inches in there because it's a pretty common cabinet width. And then I'm going to do a height, which, again, would be maybe, I don't know, like-- we could do, like, 34 inches, depending what you're going to be doing. And all of these values we can change after the fact.

So depths-- oops. I'll set this to be 24 inches. And then maybe like a kick height. And the thing is that Fusion doesn't let you have spaces in parameter names, as you can see. So I do what's called camel case, where you capitalize every letter to help sort it out.

And I'm a terrible speller, so I'm sure you're going to see lots of misspellings since I'm kind of doing this on the fly. Kick depth. Oops. And we could do, like, 3 inches there.

And then the last thing, and this is a really awesome thing that I love to do, is to do-- I'll do a plywood thickness that we can use because this is something that, as you know, since plywood can vary in thickness from batch to batch, sheet to sheet-- what's really great about this, because the parametric nature, if we model this correctly, we can actually just come back to this and change our material thickness to be exactly what we measure when the wood actually shows up.

And then have all of our joinery recalc itself automatically, all the shop drawings recalculate themselves automatically, and just have it all work out, which is pretty awesome.

So yeah. Just created, like five, six different parameters here. And the reason I did that is because then it's really easy when I come in here and I start my sketching, and I'm going to start just on my base plane there. And I like to center my stuff right in-- off the origin because then I find that it's really easy later to mirror parts and stuff.

So here, I could type something in. If I just start typing in the name of one of the parameters that I just made-- so if I start typing in width, width shows up there. And I could Enter, and Enter again, and then it will make that width.

And then the same thing here. Oh, wait, actually, I wanted that to be depth. So what I can do is I can double-click on that, and then I can actually change that to be depth because that's front to back there. This is the width. That's really handy to be able to do this with the parameters and such.

And then I can do another line, maybe down here, and set up a dimension. And this could be kick depth. It's like that. And then I'm able to have my little sketch. And then I can hit Finish Sketch. And then I can hit Extrude. And we can extrude this up to the height, like that.

And what I'm doing here is something that I tend to do with some of my models that I know I want to be parametric, is-- what I'm doing is I'm setting these things up to be-- have what I call a master form. There's a number of terms that people use for this. It's kind of like a top-down approach.

So I have one sketch that I created that captures all my basic parameters. And then I have one form that I create that captures the whole model. Some people might do this using construction planes instead, where they'll create construction planes for everything and then they'll start sketching on those planes.

But it's kind of a top-down approach that makes it to where when we change the parameters later, the form will change, which then drags the parts along with it, which then drags the joinery along with it, so you get this kind of like tiered system. And it just makes it easier to get your head around making parametric assemblies that will flex and change.

And whenever you do want to make things where they're going to flex and change, it's always a good idea to flex the model from time to time. So what I'll do is after I do something like this, where this is my basic shape of my cabinet, I might come in here and be like, oh, you know what? Actually, I want this to be 36 inches instead.

Oh, and it change properly. This is going to be 32 inches wide. Instead, see, and it's changing, so that I know, OK, it's flexing properly. I'm not worried. Because a lot of the times, if you change these values and something breaks, if you didn't notice that it broke and you just did an hour worth of work in your parametrics, it's much harder to troubleshoot what broke when along the process. So it's a good idea to just flex the model from time to time.

So the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to model off the side of this. And I'm literally just going to project that form to be the side of my cabinet. Because I want my side of the cabinet to be nice and clean. And then I'm going to extrude that. And see, I'm going to do plywood thickness. But see, it's going the wrong way, right? See, it's going past where I had my master form width.

So what I could do here is you can actually put math into these things as well. So see, I'm just going to say times minus 1. And see, it reverses the direction of it. And then I need to tell it that I don't want it to cut, that I want it to be a new-- and I can say new component because I want that side panel to be its own component. So I'm going to say New Component and then hit OK. And there, I got that.

And then what I can do is I can hide that body, and I can rename this Left Side, you know? And then I could mirror-- and I can simply mirror this component, and I can say that I want a mirror components. And I can grab that and grab this. And then because I've modeled around my center origin, I can just use that to flip that over to there. And then I've got left side and right side. I can rename this like that.

Great. And then I can do my bottom. Let's do our bottom really quick. And we always want our bottom to be equal to that kick because it's going to be above it. So I can actually just grab this bottom here to be where I'm starting my sketch plane from. And then I can say that I want to intersect that and that I want to intersect this.

So again, I'm just hitting I. It's a shortcut that I have set up for project. Where is it? Here. Yeah, projected [INAUDIBLE] for intersect right there.

And then if I snap to these guys here and here-- and I know this is really basic, so those of you that know Fusion really well, just bear with me for a moment because I do promise that we're going to get into some more complex stuff. So there, I've got this panel.

But what I want to do is I want to do something more, which I'm going to do right now, because this is something that I do when I model cabinets at our shop, when we make them. And I'm going to hide these guys and go to the top view here, is-- I like to do kind of a mortise and tenon style. And since we're working off a CNC machine, I can just have the CNC machine do this sort of stuff for me.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make little nubs here. And then I'm going to come in here and do-- we want this guy to be, like, 3 inches in from the end and be about 4 inches deep. And you could set these to be proportional to this overall side so you never have a problem, like even if you make the cabinet really, really skinny. I'll show you an example of that here in a moment. If we make it really-- have no depth at all. And then we set up this side, and then we can use the coincidence constraint to tie this side over to here and this one over to here because they all will stay linked.

And for those of you that are pretty new to Fusion, these colors that these lines are turning when I'm clicking on different things is all about telling me whether the things are constrained or not. So if it's blue, it means it's just hanging free. And if something parametrically changes, it's not going to probably change properly. If it's black, it's been fully constrained, and so now I know that if this flexes or changes, it's all going to change.

And so I'm going to finish this sketch. And then I'm going to rotate around. And I'll turn my sides back on, just so I can see that. And I'm going to edit and extrude this guy. And I want to put him into a new component. And again, I want this to be-- whoops. I typed a little too fast.

I want plywood thickness, but again, need to reverse that. So I can say minus 1 because I want it to go the other way. And I don't want it to join. I want a new component, which is going to be the bottom. I'm going to hit OK.

And then let's turn that last sketch back on real quick and turn these sides off. And I'll rename this bottom, bottom. And then what I can do is I can go into Edit that, so now I'm just inside of that guy, so where I can drill down into a particular component. I'm going to grab these little guys because these are going to be my little tenons.

And then again, what I can do is I can say plywood thickness times minus 1. But I don't want it to go all the way up because then, unfortunately, it would-- you'd see them from the side. I want them to be blind. I want them to be hidden, to go down a little bit.

So what I could do is I can put this into parentheses. And then I can actually type in a little formula that says minus 0.25, which is just kind of the standard thing-- oh, no, plus 0.25 in this case, sorry, because we did the minus 1. So what this is going to do is make that a little down. And then I'm going to hit-- and then I'm going to leave it unjoined because I want that to just become one piece.

And there we go. Now it's one piece. And then I can go back to my core. And then if I turn on these guys, there we go ahead. And turn off that sketch.

Now, one thing is that Booleans, the combined function in Fusion, is awesome. It's really great. So what I can do is I can grab this guy, and then I can grab that guy, and say that I want to cut this out of that. And if-- I just want to make sure that I have this checked, just Keep Tools. And then I hit OK. And see, now I've got my nice slots and slots.

Oh, but it's cutting all the way through, which I didn't want. So see, what I can do now is I can go back to this sketch. And I can go to the top here. And I can hide these guys. And this is one of the things I love about Fusion, is that it's very flexible and incredibly forgiving about going back and making changes to things.

So again, I want to do the same thing here, where usually, we just have these be, like, 0.5, or I could do the same, if we wanted to be exactly right. We'd say plywood thickness minus 0.25 because then we know they're always going to be held back a little bit. And now I've got that.

And another trick that I love to do is to just draw a little line segment snapped off the middle here. Oops. There. So that's parallel and snapped to my center, so now I can use that to mirror things, which-- I'm going to mirror that line over to the other side.

And then I'm going to hit Finish Sketch. And then I can come back to here. And I can edit these little guys. And I can come back in. And I can actually just say that I don't want this part. I don't want that part. I do want that part. And I want that part. OK, great. There.

And see, now I've got that. And then I can, say, revert my position and go back to there. And see, now it's not poking all the way through, and I've got a nice little slot.

So there's a lot of really common woodworking joints. Like, this could have been a-- it could have been a spline. It could have been a long tenon. It could have been all kinds of different joinery, where you can just model half the joint and subtract it from the other side. And as long as you have that Keep Tools, it will keep all your parts.

So let me go ahead and jump over to the full cabinet, which I already have modeled here. And it's the same idea. And I've got things broken down into different groups, carcass. And this is fully parametric, where I've got all of the same things with height, depth, kick, all that. So I can change the width of this to 36 inches, and it will auto change everything.

And you know, I've got my plywood depth, and I've got some drawer heights in there, which we'll talk about here next. And here, I've even got some joinery. This is for my CNC machine. I'd need to have dog bones. So those are modeled in there. And these are my top spreaders and my back spreaders and stuff and my kick.

And then this model-- this model is for our shop. We're making some cabinets for our workshop to go down on the shop floor for tool storage. And on these, I'm going to be using leveling feet and a kick plate instead of a side. So you know, again, we can model things in all kinds of different ways.

And we've got this great timeline here. For an even more complex example, because we just moved our workshop, and so we're in the middle of setting up a bunch of things, is I've got this work table that we're in the middle of building. So this is, again, just one, big parametric model.

And I started it the same way. You know, I started with some parameters that I have for-- this one has MDF and plywood, so I have two different materials. I might have two different thicknesses, so I put those values in.

I have what size I want the thing to be. I've got the holes, these little-- these are little clamp holes that I've got, the offset for those holes and things. And all of that, again, can be flexed parametrically to where you can change the height or the width of this table and have it auto adjust for you.

This one, though, I'm using a tool, an add-on, all these little dog bones, because there's a lot of dog bones in this thing, instead of having to model all of these individually and constrain those little angles and tangents and everything, like I did on the cabinet one-- so if we go to the simple-- if we go back to that shop cabinet like this, and we go in to edit this here, you'll see-- if I go-- if I step through my timeline here back a bit, back a ways-- oh. You go back a little further, hitting the group. Here we go.

So what I've done here is-- and again, this is that top-down approach, where first I model this, and then I modeled this, and then I subtracted this from this, so that way it cut that little mortise for me. And have my little tenon in there.

And then what I do then is I actually will add in, if I go to the end of this little sequence, then I added in all my dog bones. And when I did that, I did it through a different lens here-- which sketch is it? Find it really quick. So just by clicking on these little guys, it should highlight-- there it is. Boop.

And see, what all I'm doing there is I'm just constraining two little arcs. And then, again, I have a radius that I tied to a parameter, so I can change my tooling on this. So this cabinet is assuming that we're using, like, a 3/8 bit to CNC it all out. Instead, you could use-- you can change that to be different bits or whatever.

So you can also do, like, curve sizes, or if you have standard dado blades that you're using, or something like that, again, you can set those up as parameters, so you can just embed those inside of your model in a really convenient way. So you can make changes if you need to on the fly.

So because I'm adding it at this stage, I modeled the joint, and now I'm modeling the finer points in the joint, all of this is cascading in a way that when I make my changes to the parameters, it will make the changes to the whole model for me. And so you can make much more complex stuff if you want to, like this work table.

So this is a pretty basic example. Let's go ahead and switch over, and-- oh, sorry. And then again, this is everything that we just did, but it's much more complex in terms of all this stuff, you know?

And then this last one here-- this is a modern dining table. This is a table that we developed for Model Number where you can change the size and the height and the width, and it's all hardwood and such. And this one is really handy-- a couple other tools that are really handy to talk about that are inside of modeling for woodworking in Fusion.

This one is-- and this is just your very standard table. And I haven't modeled in the hardware. This is the more simple model than our production model that we're currently using.

I did that because this is a model that you could make with the table saw. The model that we're-- the version of this that we're doing at Model Number is also CNCed out, so it has a five axis that we use to make these table legs with.

So this is kind of a simplified example. Hence, don't have the hardware that attaches, like the top to the spreaders here and stuff like that to the skirt. But yeah, you get the basic idea.

And for this, one of the things that is really awesome about Fusion is, again, this is all parametric, where you can change the size and such. And when it comes to doing some more complex models-- here, I'll just page through this one, is what I did is I modeled basically this, you know? I modeled our top, which is going to be rounded.

And again, with our woodworking, this is a nice detail where we're doing this big, beveled edge, which we're doing with the CNC machine, but it's the kind of thing that you could do with a hand router or a template. And then this little edge, we're just sanding around that because we're not getting that proper, full radius, and I didn't want to do some kind of crazy loft or something.

So this is really just where I'm starting with a square. That's our top, which we can tell to be whatever size we want. And I'm rounding that edge. And then I'm defining a work plane along that edge. And then I'm sweeping.

And I'm doing this sweep like this because it better represents-- like, you could use the chamfer tool, but this actually better represents what you're actually cutting. So this is one of the things you can think about when you're doing modeling-- woodworking in Fusion, is you can actually think about these different things as if you're doing different operations, where it's like, OK, I'm going to take this kind of a shape of a router bit.

And I'm going to run it around this edge so I can do a subtractive sweep and have that represent what you're actually going to get in the production. And when we get to the manufacturing tool space, that kind of stuff really starts to pay off.

So here, I've got my top. I've got my skirt. And now I need to model that leg. And so what I did is I simply set up a little axis here. So I just said, OK, I need a little axis around those two points. And then I want a work plane. And then want a work plane that is at a certain angle off of that, which in this case, I think, is, like, a 7 or 8 degree, which is the angle that we want that leg to be at. And then I'm going to do a little drawing off of that and extrude it.

And one of the things that's really great here is with this extrusion, if we take a look at this-- and a little detail, one other thing that I found super handy for woodworking is this To Object. So what this does is instead of just extruding something to a certain length, you tell it to extrude to a certain face. And it will even orient the face to-- orient the extrusion-- the end of the extrusion to the face.

So here, I said, I want a To Object. What I want to extrude to is our base plane here, because I set a table height earlier with a work plane in this model. And I said, OK, I have a tapered leg, but I want it to go down to here, you know? And so what I'm doing there is-- because I said To Objects, see, it actually beveled the end of the leg for me, so I don't have to try to make a more complex model for that. I can just have it in one fell swoop do that with the To Object, which is really nice.

And then what I'm doing here is I'm actually subtracting, doing some subtractive modeling, like I was showing before, where I'm subtracting this part out of this part. And then I'm sweeping and then I'm doing a little extrusion that cuts all of those guys so that this better represents what you would actually be doing in that kind of a corner condition. So there, where it's going all the way through.

And then I'm making components and then beveling and adding hardware and holes to my table. And then the last thing that I'm doing is something that I'd like to talk about really quick, which is a remove versus delete. So let me find it in my tool chain here.

So one thing that we've got is-- let's see. Back to my leg, back up just a little bit more. Or maybe just did a subtract on this one. Oh, I did. Yeah, I just cut the top of the leg off because I wanted that leg to go up to the top there. I just cut it off there. So we'll talk about the remove function a little later, in one of our next examples. OK.

So the last thing that I wanted to show here is the Split tool. So this is also something that I find using all the time when I'm doing woodworking, hence why it's pinned on my tool bar here, is the Split Body tool.

So what this lets you do is it lets you-- by using a construction plane or even just using a sketch line, it lets you separate a model into two-- a solid body into two solid bodies. So what I did here is I created a sketch that's just on the top that just divides this up into equal length widths of boards because this looks like it's just one big chunk of wood, which isn't possible, right?

I know we're going to be gluing this top up from boards that I'm going to be alternating and running through a jointer and all that kind of stuff and gluing up. And so what I'm able to do is I'm able to use this sketch that I made-- here, I'll just show it real quick. So I'm able to make this sketch, which just divides it up into equal parts.

And again, you know, what's cool about that is I'm able to-- if you know the dimension-- sorry, if you know the parameter name, in this case, it's a D97, which is this guy here. So even though this is a reporting parameter, what they call a reporting parameter, it's in parentheses, and that means that it's just reporting a value. It's not actually driving anything.

So I tied this dimension string to the outside edges of my model here, which is being driven by another parameter that I have for the width of the table. And so in this sketch, I'm able to just grab a value by dimensioning off of something. And then I can then-- here, I can just select that and say that I want to divide it by 7. And it gives me that value.

And if you click on any given dimension, or whatever parameter you have, down here at the bottom right, you can actually see where it says D97. So if you need to, you could actually remember that value or write it down to use somewhere else in your model if you don't have a parameter, if you didn't tie it to a custom parameter that you already have set up.

And you have a list of all of those here. You know, like, we can go in, and all of the dimensions and everything that you've done in Fusion gets tied to one of these. So here's that D7 right there, D97. And what we'd be able to do with that is if you want to, you can actually give it a name and make it-- promote it, so to speak, into your model to where you're able to find it again, which is going to become more important here in our next example that we're going to get into.

But basically, by making that sketch, what I'm able to do then is I'm able to use that sketch so each of those lines is body to split, and then splitting tools. I'm able to pick each of those lines, say, hey, I want to cut this top up by just those lines. I don't even need construction planes. And then what it's going to do is cut that top up for me. And then when we get into appearances, I'll talk about how you're able to edit the grain to make this more real, like, in terms of how it's actually going to get made.

So OK. Next up is assemblies. Now, this is one area where Fusion is both fantastic and also really frustrating and bad. [LAUGHS] So we're going to get into assemblies.

And what I mean by this is because Fusion doesn't allow you to do configurable assemblies yet. What you're going to see happens is when we tab back over to Fusion here-- so if I go back to my little cabinet example, and let's go ahead and just revert back to this position. I have a drawer here that I've already modeled. So let's go ahead and open up this drawer.

And this drawer is a parametric model that I made, so you can change the size of it. You can change the width of it, the depth of it, everything like you'd expect, right? So here's my little model. And again, I've done the same thing that I did with that table example, where drawer height, width, whatever, and all that.

So I have this model. And when I go back to my cabinet that I'm making, first, before I can insert anything into here from another thing, I have to save it. So I'm going to save this really quick and just say Example Cabinet.

And then what can do is now can insert this into current design. And I do that. And it comes in. And I can position it. But it's not the width, right? This isn't the width that I need when you take a look at this, right?

And the problem that I've got is now, if I go back to my parameters, it's not in here at all, unfortunately. There's no way to derive it. So I can't link this to this width because its width is being driven by this file here.

So if I go back to this drawer and if I change it here, this is where this gets to be kind of painful. If I change it here, so if I change this width to, like, 30 here, and my tap-- my drawer just changed and I hit Save here, and then I come back over to here to my Example Cabinet, I get this little thing here, which says that, oh, something that I've linked into here has just changed.

So now what I've got to do is update it, and then it changes, right? And that's really painful. I mean, we don't want to have to do that for every single drawer that we have in our project. And we want it to stay linked because I want to be able to just tell this cabinet to be a different width and have the drawer automatically be the width that we want it to be because I'm planning out our shop tool storage, and I'm putting these side by side, and they're going to be different widths and different locations.

So what I need to do is I need to break this link. But if I do that, then any change that I make in this file, in this master file, will no longer impact this guy. So we want to be sure that this model is exactly parametric and exactly what we want because we can't, once we break this link, repush it back into this project very easily. We'd have to delete the old one, reinsert this one, and it just becomes a big pain.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say Break Link. And when I do that, I get this thing on my toolbar where what it did is it actually went through and redid all of the steps that I had from here, so all of this just happened. And it brought it into here. And now, if I go into here and I scroll down, see, I see drawer width. Now, those values, those parametric values, have showed up because essentially when I said Break Link, it recreated that model inside of this model.

So now what I can do under drawer width here is I can say the drawer width is going to be equal to the width because in this, we're doing full face. We're not doing inset. So we want that to be full face. And then what I'm able to do is set up a joint. So we'll just grab a joint. And in this case, I just want to do-- in this simple example that we're doing, I'm going to grab the bottom of this in the center of it. And then I'm going to grab the bottom of this and the center point of the bottom part of that. And now I've got that to that and that to that, and there we go.

But this wouldn't let me go right next to something else because there's no inset on that drawer. So what I can do is I can come back in here, and even though I set that to width, is I can say width minus 0.25, like a quarter of an inch, and then that gives me an 1/8 of an inch on either side. And now that that's joined there, if my kick height changes or anything else changes, my drawer will move with it.

The problem is, though, is that when I want to add a second drawer-- like, let's say I have this drawer, which is going to be a deep bottom drawer. So let's go ahead and adjust my drawer depth to be 20. Yeah, it's 20-- let's do 24 inches. So it's a nice, deep drawer on the bottom there.

And then I want to do two drawers above it that are narrower. If I simply take this and I just copy it and I paste it, what it's going to do is it's going to make these identical to where they're two different components, where if one changes, the other one changes because that's just the default way that Fusion works.

So now, if I change my depth to, like, 18, you'll see that both of them changed. The depth of the thing there changed, which I didn't want, or if I change my height, they're both going to change, you know? And that's not what I wanted because I wanted the bottom one to be tall and the top one to be skinny.

So what I need to do is I'm just going to undo that, undo that, and undo that. So what I need to do is select that bottom one and hit Control-C or Copy here, Copy. And then I need to come to the top up here. I need to right-click. And then I need to do Paste New, not Paste. Paste New takes that and copies it back into our project as a separate object.

But unfortunately, and this is where things get messy, is now it still is using those drawer widths and drawer heights. So, see, if I come into here and I say that I want this to be 6 inches, it's still going to change both of them, and this one's even going to break because it gets wonky instead.

So what we actually have to do to make this work, which is where it starts getting a little painful, is we have to go down here and look at the actual object in here, Shop Drawer 9, v9(1), which is this-- when we said Paste New, it's that object there.

And then here's all my parameters that those things are linked to. So if I come to here-- and see, these are linked to drawer depth or drawer width. So what I could do is instead, I'd have to link these to a different parameter. So I would actually have to come in and find some of these things and change the height of that second drawer versus the first drawer. It gets very messy and a pain.

Supposedly, Fusion is going to be doing something to make this a little nicer and a little easier to deal with, which would be really nice to have because this is, as you can see, kind of a mess when it comes to trying to do reusable components inside of a larger design.

You can do it-- and maybe if you're a real production wood shop, mill workshop, you might have standard drawer heights that you use, like an 18 and 6 and a 10 or whatever, and then you could just be dropping those in. For us, since we're doing a lot more custom stuff, a lot of the times it gets to be a bigger pain.

So one last little thing that I wanted to say about remove versus delete before we get a little bit further in-- so one thing that I really like to do again, you saw earlier, is have that master form. So in this case, this is my master form that represents the outside envelope of my project.

And if it changes, if that master part changes, it changes all the subparts that are coming off of it. But I don't want to always have to hide this, and I don't want it showing up, like when I insert this in to something else.

So what I can do is I can remove. And remove is not delete. So delete-- when you delete something from your model, like if pick something and I hit the Delete key, like if I pick this face and I hit Delete, it removes it from the model as if it never existed in the first place, right? And it will break anything downstream of it that we might have set up in one way or another to be parametric off of it, which is a big problem.

Instead what we can do is we can simply remove it. And the difference is that a remove just becomes a thing on your timeline. So you can actually create reference geometry, model stuff off of it, and then remove the reference geometry, and it won't break your model. And it will just show back up again as you move back and forth in your timeline like you saw. If I move back in my timeline just one step, that master form shows back up.