Modeling FINS in Fusion 360 with the Intersect Function!

In today’s video, we’re going to practice using the intersect and join solid tools to create a complex fin shape inside of Fusion 360! You can use this method to create a lot of different kinds of shapes in Fusion 360.

To start off we’re going to model a sphere – the sphere tool can be found in the solid section of Fusion 360. We’ll just drop it right on the origin.

From there, we’re going to use a rectangular sketch and the extrude tool in order to remove half of the circle, giving us a half circle.

Now, what I want to do is create a curving fin out of this sphere. In order to do that, we’re going to start by creating an offset plane that sits up above the object. We’ll use this plane as a sketch reference to create the profile of our fin.

We’ll use the fit point spline tool to rough out the size of our fin – remember that we’re going to draw a 2d profile, then extrude it down through our sphere. Make sure you draw it so that it actually extends past the outside of your sphere. Close it in, then use the extrude tool to extrude your profile down through the sphere. In this situation, you now want to change the interaction of this object from cut, to intersect. This will leave only the intersection geometry from where your profile intersects with your sphere. This means that now we have a single fin body inside our model.

Now let’s use the circular pattern tool in order to create copies of this object around our central axis. I’ll let you decide how many copies you want to make. Notice that this leaves some overlap geometry in the center – don’t worry about that now – we’re going to clean that up in a moment. To clean up our central geometry, we’re going to draw a circle and extrude it through our object. Note though that we don’t want to select the option for cut, but rather the option for join.

This will take our profile and join it with the bodies that it’s interacting with – in this case, that’s all of our fins. It will remove any extra geometry leaving us a nice solid piece. Finally, we can use the hole tool in order to cut a hole right down the center of the object. Make sure that you’ve set the reference point to your circle so that it gets right in the center. You can thread this if you want as well!