In today’s video, we’re going to discuss the hole tool – Fusion 360’s tool for cutting holes, adding threads, adding countersinks, and more!

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One of the things you’ll be doing a lot of when working inside of Fusion 360 is cutting holes in objects. You’ll do this for a variety of reasons, including creating fasteners, openings, and more. Now you could just draw a sketch circle then extrude it through an object and use the cut interaction. This is a totally valid way to cut holes and that’s not a bad thing. However, if you use the built-in hole tool, you get access to a lot more different tools and functions than if you just cut a simple hole using an extruded circle. When you first activate the hole tool, you have two options – you can create a single hole, or you can select multiple holes based on different points in a sketch.

Let’s take a look at the single hole placement option first. It’s going to ask you to set a plane from which you want to create your hole. So for example, in the case of this box, you’d select the top face. Whenever you click on the face, you’ll get this red preview of where the hole will be. Notice that you can drag the hole around to place it on any particular face. It will also inference to any points you have in your body – for example, for this box, it inferences to the natural center point. You also have the ability to reference an object in your model, like an edge, and set a distance from that object using the reference selection.

Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at the multiple holes option as well. For that one, it’s going to ask you to select sketch points from your 2D sketch as reference points. If your sketch is like mine, you may have to click the “flip direction” button to get your hole to be cut in your object. Now let’s take a look at the options for actually creating your hole. You can adjust many things about the hole you’re creating – the simplest being the size and diameter. These can be changed either by clicking and dragging the arrows or by typing values. A lot of the time, you’re probably going to just drag your hole depth, but type a value for the diameter. If you don’t want your hole to go all the way through, you can also set it so that the end of the hole comes to a point.

You also have the option to recess your opening for a counterbore or a countersink type screw head. If you’re designing for a certain kind of screw or bolt, you can actually cut holes designed specifically for certain kinds of screws and bolts by selecting the “clearance” hole tap type. This will give you a list of different fastener types to choose from to dial in your fastener selection. The “tapped” option will actually add threads to your hole.

One thing to point out about this is that it will give you an option for actually modeling the threads in 3D down below. While this is cooler, and is probably what you’d want for some outcomes, it will create a lot of extra geometry inside of Fusion 360, so use sparingly/only when you need.

Finally, you also have the option to add a point to your hole that you’re drilling. Usually you’d use this if you aren’t cutting a hole all the way through and object. Note that you can create holes by aligning with planes and points as well.