Life with Fusion 360 - Copying and Pasting Components in Assemblies

My adventures diving into Fusion 360 continue.

As I've been adventuring into assemblies this week.  I chose a simple wooden table for my project.

The wooden table.  A work in progress.

I chose the project not for the modeling challenge, but as an opportunity to go through the process of building assembling, and documenting.

One of the first things that I encountered was the need to duplicate a part. That including creating a copy of the same part (a new instance), as well as creating a copy of a part in order to create a similar part.

I was pretty thrilled to find out that it wasn't difficult at all.

In my example, I'm going to duplicate the table legs.

To make the process simpler, the process of copying parts are nearly identical whether your creating a copy of an existing component, or using that component as the starting point for a new part.

To start the process, right click on the desired part and choose Copy.

Copying the component.

With the part copied, now it's time to paste the new component.  This is accomplished by right clicking in the modeling screen and choosing paste.

But there are two options.  Paste, and Paste New.

You may have already guessed that Paste will create a second instance of the component.  That is, and exact copy of  the existing component that will change with it's siblings.

However Paste New will create a new part, based on the old one, but it's entirely independent from the component it was spawned from.

But one of the other neat tools to check out are the handles that let you orient the part immediately after the component has been pasted into your design.

You can use the arrows for linear translations, the squares for planar translations, and the arcs for angular rotations.

Give them all a try!

Handles make it easy to position your parts

  There's also the option of typing in distances if you like.

The part after being moved.

Regardless, you can get the part positioned where you'd like.

All that's left to do now is right click and click OK, and then follow it up with precise positioning by joints later!

Hit OK to complete the move.

So that's it for the tonight.  My adventures in Fusion continue.  The deeper I go, the more I like its flexibility.

But there's still a lot more for me to learn, and I'll be sharing that as I go!  Stay tuned!