In this week’s quick tip, I’ll show some of my best practices while using sheet metal in Fusion 360. While showing off these best practices, I’ll also go over some of the options using the flange tool.

Rule 1

My first best practice is related to Rule #1. Rule #1 was a best modeling practice coined by some of Fusion 360 expert users. This rule improves timeline management, component reuse, and more while designing in Fusion 360. Guess what? Rule #1 applies to sheet metal designs too. While designing sheet metal components, the flat pattern is essential to manufacture your design. In Fusion 360, we can only have 1 flat pattern per sheet metal component. It is best practice to have one sheet metal body per Fusion 360 sheet metal component. This way you can have a flat pattern for each component to create the manufacturing documentation (drawing, CAM toolpaths, etc.) for that component.

Watch this week’s quick tip to see this in action:

Make sure to check out Sheet Metal Gems Part 1 for some more awesome tips.