G’day aspiring engineers!
I hope you all can understand me when I say that I love to share with you about some of the other great Youtube channels which inspire me with the things Fusion 360 can do. I love to hear about the things you use it for, your hobbies and projects, some of you have told me about things you’ve done for grand-children and others, some have told me about teaching students and the kind of projects the students are tackling.
The previous two issues of this newsletter are on my website and there will hopefully be a lot of them given time, I should be able to publish this thing weekly. I’ve pointed out two channels so far, USSA and John Hackney. I’ll be pointing to more including another today; Kevin Kennedy but let’s get to the most ordinary way to access help, the Help that Autodesk provides via the button in the menu behind your picture or name in the top right of the Fusion 360 screen.
How to get to the Fusion 360 community forums.
You don’t need me to tell you about the knowledge base articles and the search function that you always find there. Software companies used to provide a manual and I can remember downloading the whole manual for various programs I was using, in the form of a PDF maybe ten years ago. But things have changed since then. There was a time when I would go out on the internet searching for user group forums. That was the next big thing in my experience. The way to choose a good forum to belong to was to check the number of subscribers or users of the forum. If there were ten thousand forum members or more you could be sure that there would be between ten and a hundred other people browsing the forum whenever you’re there and someone would answer my question within an hour or so. Often there would be several people offering opinions and experience, some patchy but usually some valuable solutions are shared readily, even for software that is being updated rapidly.
Other Channel Reviews
Kevin Kennedy is a Youtuber and his Fusion 360 channel is named Product Design Online. His videos are well made and the information that he presents is dense and meaty. I’ve always found that he gets it right when it comes to some of the obscure details and I always feel that I made the right decision when I’ve taken the time to watch one of his videos.
https://www.youtube.com/c/ProductDesignOnline/
I first began to refer to him four years ago it was because I could see that he knew how to model a bottle, the classic exercise for an industrial designer. I remember that his subscriber count then was around 40,000 but today its sitting on 141,000. Pretty good growth for four years and that’s proof of the quality of his content. There are nearly 200 videos on his channel and he categorises them into 5 topics; T-splines, 3D printing, Surfacing, Modeling and Woodworking.
You can also visit Kevin’s subscription website where there is a lot more content available for a price. A neat thing about this site is the community where you can interact with other learners.
https://productdesignonline.com/#access
Just a few months ago Kevin has begun another Youtube channel on a different piece of software, Shapr3D which has a reputation for being the easiest CAD program to learn quickly. There are just under a dozen videos now but no doubt Kevin will be building this out in the near future. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyKBJUZDCCl6SFFE-Mvakcg