Fusion 360 – What to know about threads.

Fusion 360 is really powerful, I’m glad I decided to go with it in spite of the steep learning curve. It creates beautiful drawings and has so many features, amazing features, the best features, features only found in ‘Merica! But seriously, awesome features. The one I’m going to go over here is the thread feature.

The thread option provides the ability to add threads to the inside or outside of cylinder either custom or one of many possible standards, like ANSI metric, ANSI Unified Screw Threads 15 altogether. It’s found on the Create menu In the SOLID tab.

The tool is applied to the surface of a cylinder or on the inner wall of a round hole. The tool will select the best thread size for the size cylinder or hole and adjust the size if necessary. I decided to do a test print, a simple cylinder with threads on the inside of 1 part and outside of the other. Perfect if you have something small you want to lock away in a cylinder, like your stash, or cash you’re hiding from your old lady or old man.

Here’s an example of a cylinder with threads applied.

This took about 10 seconds to create but it looks a bit funny, more on that in a minute. I created the 2 parts of my threaded cylinder. I made sure the threads on each side were the same. If the hole and rod sizes are different the tool could choose different thread types which wont screw together so make sure they are the same or they may not screw together.

I saved the resulting design as an STL file, imported into Cura and got this …

See the problem? Right, where are the threads? They were there in Fusion 360 but now, nothing no threads! So, I checked with Google who sent me here (the link will open in a new window and take you to YouTube) and I got my answer. By default Fusion puts a picture of the threads on the object, you have to check the Modeled option for it to model the threads. So I went back in, edited the threads and checked the Modeled option.

In Tinkercad making threads is not this easy. It is possible, there is a community supported tools to create threaded surfaces, and you can use it to make threads on the inside as well but this is so much easier. Just select the tool, select the surface, select the threads type and done! Easy peasy.