Boat Design With Fusion 360

In this Instructable I will show you how I designed a simple hull of a dinghy/rowboat.

I needed a model dinghy or rowboat for a whirligig I'd seen and fancied having a go at building one, my first stumbling block was I could not for the life of me find one online or anywhere, there was one which would have been ok but it must have been coming on a slow boat from China as the delivery date was far into the future.

Thinking cap on? My wood working skills are not the best and to mess about trying to build out of wood would be a waste of time, so I thought I would look online at possibly making one and 3D Print it! sounds like a plan.

I looked at a few Fusion 360 Youtube tutorials and these were far too complex for my man in a boat, I just needed a basic open dinghy/row boat to which I could add a seat etc out of wood or something.

Anyway so this Is how I went about sketching the boat in Fusion 360.

Fusion 360

3D Printer

1.75 PLA

Open up Fusion 360 and create a New Component, then create sketch and select the top plane.

The dimensions for my dinghy are 250mm in Length 100mm Wide and 55mm Deep these will be perfect dimensions for the whirligig idea, bearing in mind this dinghy will have a propeller of some sort attached to it at some point, something too big soon turns into a weapon:(

This will be a flat bottomed boat, making it easier to secure attachments to and doesn't need to be anything else for this purpose

So initially we make a 75mm Vertical Line centred, then a horizontal line from the centre 250mm, another guideline vertical line @100mm in the centre of the horizontal line.

Now using the spline tool and some good imagination of what a boat shape should look like from the top, start at the top of the vertical 75mm line and create the shape we want click on the centre vertical line and the end point.

This now gives us one half of the top section of the dinghy, we can now using the mirror tool, select the back of the boat line and the curved part of the sketch and for mirror line we click on the centreline, Voila, top sketch complete,

The depth of the boat is 55mm in this case, so we need to create an offset plane from the top plane, we now have to create a new sketch using this plane.

To start we need to make the bottom of the boat narrower to create a draft so we can sketch a vertical line along the existing 100mm vertical line(Turn off the 100mm sketch for now will make manipulating this line easier) I made this line 55mm and centre it, then create another horizontal line, I made this line 3/4 length of the top of the boat line, this will give us a draft when the front of the boat is sketched, pure guesswork here ok.

The original vertical centre line was 100mm I am making this line 60mm, and then we do the same process as the top sketch, using the spline tool, click on the top of the 75mm Vertical line and then the centre vertical line and then the new centre line. Mirror this sketch as we did for the top sketch of the boat, then I deleted the centre horizontal line and Centre vertical line as they are not need anymore.

We can now go on to using the Loft element of Fusion 360:

Select the solid tab and select Loft, then highlight the top sketch and then the bottom sketch and Voila we have a solid body, we now need to to use the shell element of Fusion 360 shell will take as much as we want to take out of the inside of the boat, I went on this occasion for 2mm, this in turn will leave the dinghy 2mm wall thickness.

And there we have a basic boat shape, from here and looking at a side view of the boat we can create new sketch, select the centre plane and draw a 3 point Arc the full length of the boat, then select split body and, select the boat as the body and the line as the cutting tool, this creates another body delete the top part to leave you with a fine looking dinghy.

There are quite a few options using this method, you could do your own version of a Benchy or something.

Creating another sketch you can project the top of the boat then off-set to say 5mm then extrude this down 2/3mm to add strength to the design to create a Gunwale(Gunwale being the Top edge of a boat, I looked it up!)

You don't have to opt for a flat bottomed boat either, any shape you can dream up really.

Well for my purpose this basic little design works well, once painted it will look the part, great for Whirligig projects or similar, any other components can be either 3D printed, a Rudder/Tiller can be added etc etc, even a sail.

You are of course restricted with size on a 3D Printer but if you make the back of the boat flat you can print it vertically, I've done it and it worked fine on the Creality CR-10

As always I hope you enjoyed this Instructable and its given you some ideas etc. Thanks for looking in.