Create construction planes

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Create construction planes.

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In this video, we’ll create an offset construction plane.

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In Fusion 360, we want to get started with the supplied data set, gear reduction housing solids.

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This dataset has a few more parameters namely Gear_Thickness, Idle_Gear_Thickness, Housing_Wall_Thickness and Gear_Gap.

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We're going to be using some of these values to create some offset construction planes.

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I also want to note that our origin is based on a Y Up orientation.

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Now there are settings in Fusion 360 that allow you to model with Z Up.

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So it really depends on what your current settings are and whether or not you're modeling in the Y Up or the Z Up orientation.

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Whichever one you choose, it won't really matter in the end for this design,

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but we do need to make sure that we are selecting their correct planes to offset.

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So let's get started by going to Construct and selecting Offset Plane.

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The plane that we want to use in this case, if you're modelling with Y Up is going to be our XY plane.

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If you're modelling with Z Up, you'll likely be selecting your XZ plane.

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From here we want this value to go backwards and in this case, you'll notice that that's a minus 15.

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So with this correct orientation, we're going to enter a minus and we're going to begin typing our gear thickness.

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As soon as we start to type in gear, you can see that we have Gear_Thickness,

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and then we're going to subtract the value for our Housing_Wall_Thickness.

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And the reason we're subtracting it is because we're going in the negative direction.

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So now that we've created this, it will represent our back plane or the back plane of our housing.

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We're going to create another offset construction plane.

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Once again, in our case we’ll be selecting XY.

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This time we're going to be going forward a distance of our Gear_Gap.

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The Gear_Gap is a distance between the front and the back gears.

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We know from our parameters list that our gears are generally going to be 8 mm thick.

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What we need to do is we need to account for things like the bearings that are going to be used inside of them,

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and any housing thickness that needs to be between them.

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Remember we have a drive and a driven gear in this center section.

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We have some idle gears that are connecting everything together.

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Next we're going to create one more offset construction plane and this time we're going to continue to use the XY,

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but this time, we'll be using our Gear_Gap.

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So we'll start to type in gear, select Gear_Gap and we'll add our Gear_Thickness.

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We’ll hit Enter to accept that.

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And now, if we rotate this around, we should see that we've created three new planes.

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I'm going to hide the origin for now and simply go to a right hand view.

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We now have a plane that's representing the back of our housing, the midpoint of our housing and the front of our housing.

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So when we go into our folder and we select these, Plane 1 is going to be our housing back.

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So let's go ahead and rename it.

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Plane 2 is going to be our housing mid.

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And Plane 3 will be our housing front.

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Now that we have these three planes renamed, let's navigate back to a home view and make sure that we save this design before moving on.