Our first paintbrush holder got enough attention that we figured we’d discuss another one we designed and printed. This one has a more-organic shape, holds a few more brushes (and in our opinion it’s easier to get at them), and presented an interesting problem with Fusion 360 regarding patterns on path, and how to make sure you can process edges they way you want. (TL;DR: Press/Pull a bit more than the space you need to take up.)
Side View, Loaded Side View, Empty Front View, Loaded
Patterns on Path
Taking a (modified) version of our “kidney bean” shape we want to create a bunch of “slots” for our brushes:
There’s a quick look at this process in our Youtube Video, or you can keep on readin’.
We’ll use a symmetric direction, so they wrap around both sides of the path at once, use the “Spacing” direction to the outsides of each “slot” are about 0.625″ apart. One thing to keep in mind is that our Orientation setting needs to be “Path Direction” so each extruded “bar” is tangential to the path:
Here’s the thing: even though our original extruded bar is making good contact with the inner and outer walls in the center location, we run into a problem on the sharp inside wall curves:
If we try to fillet the edge of the extruded bar it won’t join with the inner wall:
What we need to do is Press/Pull the extruded “bar” before patterning so it makes contact with both the inner and outer walls, all the way around the path:
Now when we pattern even those tight-radius inner-wall corners will have full contact with our separator “bars”. After patterning we can combine all the separate bodies, and create a fillet the way nature intended: