The first thing I learned how to whittle was a bar of Ivory Soap. Give a 9 year old a pocket knife and set them free to learn. What could go wrong? Teach them to cut away from themselves, get a feeling for the motion, effort, technique, and have less jerky movements as it glides smoothly through the soft artifact they're making. Finally, let it sting real bad when they inevitable cut themselves with a soap covered blade. Those were the days!

Well, I'm bigger now, but that doesn't mean I still can't sculpt soap. Bigger boys bigger toys!

This instructable is really teaching you how to sculpt anything using Fusion 360, a 3d printer, and some basic techniques. I'm targeting people getting into 3d printing, but stuck on Thingiverse and wanting instead to start designing some things for themselves. This really is an answer to a previous instructable where the King of Random made soap from Bacon and Drain Cleaner, but left out how he made the mold. If you want to just skip to the end and make the iconic pink soap I've got you covered too with a premade silicon mold, and a much easier recipe!

Supplies

Fusion 360 (free)

'Fight This' font (free)

Melt and Pour Soap

Pink Soap Dye

3d Print Filament or Silicon Mold (https://silmold.com/'Fight-Club''-Soap-Mold) (the link wouldn't work...)

Cooking Oil Spray

Step 1: Get Into the Ring!

First things first you're going to need to get your gear lined up and have a plan.

Many people don't realize that you can get professional grade tools for free as a hobbist. I took drafting in high school, and mechanical engineering 101 in college, and Fusion 360 felt right at home. It perfectly fits between basic shape based tools like tinkercad, and the math based 'parametric' modeling tools. You get to draw any 2d shapes you want then use advanced molding techniques to turn it into a 3D object. Head to the link and download it for free now. You'll have to create an account, and can't use it for profit/commercial without paying, but you can't get anything better. I searched and even tired half dozen more. Did I mention it's free?

Brown nosing complete (It helps their business model to remain the #1 tool in the industry so that they can sell more professional licenses to their top tier software)

You can use these techniques to sketch up anything you want, but I'm going to be making a soap mold. Whatever you choose it helps to download an image to reference in your model. Go grab whatever you want to make from google now.

You'll also need to download the 'fight this font', unzip it, and install it (what, you're still using the default MS fonts your computer came with? Level up your game, there's something out there for whatever you're making)

You'll also want to get your other supplies ordered while you're at it.

The soap I chose is the best value (surprise), but comes with a good lather, shea butter for richness, and the glycerin that gets stripped out of so many soaps and has great benefits for you and your skin. (We're not making nitroglycerine today folks even if this is fight club soap).

Don't get dye's unless they're made for soaps. You don't want to be dying your hands. You want to clean them!

Step 2: Head to the Center of the Ring to Meet Your Opponent

Remember how I made you go get an image of whatever you're making? The first thing we're going to do is import that into Fusion 360, so fire the program up and lets get started!

- You'll land on a blank screen (4a).

- From there select insert, and canvas (4b).

- Select Insert From My Computer (4c), then select the picture you downloaded (4d), and hit open (4e). This drops the image into your 3d model.

- It will want you to place it on a 3d Plane. We're going to put it on the XY plane by selecting the rightmost plane shown at the origin (4f).

- You can change your view of the 3d environment using the perspective cube in the top right (4g). I clicked on 'Top', but you can drag it around however you want.

Note 1: From there you can resize the image ('canvas') and drag it around using the on screen icons (4h).

Note 2: You'll probably will want to zoom in and out to get the right size. I do this with the middle mouse wheel.

Note 3: I do everything in mm since I primarily work in Fusion to generate things for 3d printing, but you can use other measurement systems too.

Step 3: Fight's On! Throw Some Jabs!

The first thing you do with Fusion 360 is draw a sketch of whatever you're trying to make on a 2d plane just like you would on a piece of paper. I've already got an image in there, so I'm just going to use the built in tools to create a rough sketch of my soap from the top down view. You can make multiple sketches in any Fusion 360 file, but I've done it all in one in this greatest of steps ever.

- Select 'Create Sketch' (5a), and then select the same top down XY plane to draw on as your jpg (5b). You're now in the sketch mode of Fusion 360. You can see your icons have changed to match.

- The first thing we're going to do is draw a rectangle the size of our soap. Select 2-Point Rectangle (5c), then draw the rectangle going from the origin to the top right of our soap (5d).

- That doesn't look quite right. Lets round the corners off. Select 'Filet' (5e), then click on each corner (5f). That doesn't look quite right yet. Lets drag that arrow, or just type in the value of our corner radius (5g). I chose 3.5 mm.

- Next lets add our text. Select the Create dropdown, then click on 'Text' (5h), then draw out about where our text will go (5i).

- Replace the text with 'FIGHT', and choose the font we downloaded before we got started 'FightThis' (5j). We'll need to keep working our font until it looks right. I changed the Height to 17.5, made it bold, and increased the spacing between each letter (5k). You might have to exit the text editor to move the text around. You can double click on the text to get back into the text editor.

- Repeat the same process to get 'CLUB' positioned (5l). You could also choose to trace this to get even more accurate, but for me the speed was worth the cost of having the C and G look a little off. Try using lines, circles, and the 'trim' function if you choose to get things looking just right.

- Finally, we're going to make an outline around the whole thing to turn this into a mold we can pour soap into. Select 'Offset' (5m), and select the border we've already created (5n). I've chosen to offset by 1.3mm. This will let my printer go around the whole perimeter 3 times. That should be rigid enough, and not allow for any leaks.

- Hit 'Finish Sketch' (Top middle, or right side on the popout menu).

Congratulations, you've got the first round done!

Step 4: Throw a Haymaker!

Now that we've got the basic sketch for what we want to build we have to bring it to life. Extruding and cutting will take us to the final bell.

- The first thing we're going to do is get rid of that jpg. It's going to just clutter things up now that we have our sketch complete. Click the eyeball next to canvases (6a).

- Next I'm going to drag my mouse to select around everything (6b).

- With everything selected were going Extrude for the first time (6c).

- This is hard to see what's going on. Grab the perspective cube again and get a better view (6d). You can reposition the screen at any time by holding down the middle mouse button.

- Ahh, that's better. Pull up on that arrow, or just type in 20.25 (6e). That will give us enough room to have a flat bottom on our tray with 1.25 mm (3 layers) of plastic to keep things in. We now have depth to our object. It looks like a boring bar of soap right now! Hit OK to move on (6f)

- Grab that perspective cube again, and flip it over to look up from the bottom (6g).

- Our sketch disappeared! We need to get it back. Click the eye icon next to sketch 2 on the left hand side (6h). (if somebody from Autodesk wouldn't mind changing the sketch to stay up after the first extrude by default that would be great....)

- Click on Extrude again (6i). Select just the majority of the base this time, and drag it up 16mm (6j). This time we want to select Cut on the extrude menu if it doesn't happen automatically. Extrude now will remove that material rather than adding it like we did before with extrude.

- Select the letters by holding cntl while clicking (6k). Now cut those do a depth of 19mm.

That's it! we have our soap mold!

Step 5: It's a Knockout!

That looks really good!

Lets save it (7b-c), and then we need to export it as an STL file (7d-f). This is a pretty universally accepted 3D file type, and will be used if you want to contract out getting a print, begging your friend to do it, or just print it yourself. Seriously I saw an ender 3 for $160 with 2 day shipping. Just get it and get started printing yourself!

I've included my STL in case you just want to grab that and print it, or you can check out my Thingiverse!

Finally, if you've had any troubles following along with the text and GIFs you might have better luck looking at the step file. You can navigate the history by dragging the bar on the bottom left, or see everything in order by pushing play.

For a professional mold you would want to add some tapers, and bevel more edges, etc. but I didn't want to get you toooo bogged down on your first tial.

Step 6: Hit the Showers

Once you've printed that you'll want to spray it with pam or another cooking oil to get your soap back out of the mold.

Cut up your soap to help it heat more evenly, throw it into a microwave safe dish.

Heat it by cycling the microwave on and off in ~15 second intervals until melted. You don't want to let it get too hot, or it can scald (it's mostly oil just like butter - treat it the same way).

Mix in your color. Mine was 15 drops of pink, but it probably could have gone darker. It looked really good, but then I used it to get the suds for the picture and it went more 'bubble gum' pink. Probably would have used some red vs. just the pink and made it brighter and more saturated than needed so it looked good after use. (You may have to reheat a couple times while you get your color right.)

Pour your soap. Ideally you want to pour it when it's just starting to bead on top of the surface of your bowl, but thinner is probably better than too thick to ensure it is gets down into all the letters well.

Tap the mold or agitate to try to get rid of any bubbles you made while mixing.

Set aside and let cool for about 30 minutes and you should be able to just pull it out of the mold.

You're done! You've done it! Now go and make something even cooler!

Step 7: Impress Your Friends!

In retrospect, I think I would go a little more vibrant on the color, and a little deeper/taller on the mold, but I hope you've got at least the basics down so you can start creating cool stuff like this on your own!

I'm just starting out on YouTube, but feel free to check out what else I'm working on here!

Thanks for reading, and thank you Instructables for featuring this project on your homepage!