Introduction: Organize Your Cabinet With Fusion 360

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I am pretty confident that we all are having at least one Cabinet that could be organized in a better way. For me it's one of our kitchen cabinets.

Today I would like to share with you the process how I have set up a perfect solution for our kitchen cabinet with the help of Fusion 360. At the End of this instructable I will share some information about how I built my solution then and how the final product came out.

Supplies

To organize your kitchen cabinet you need:

A Kitchen

Fusion 360

...

No, just Kidding ;-)

For my build I used the following:

Wood:

  • 10mm white coated chip board
  • 48cm x 35cm
  • 35cm x 12cm
  • 34cm x 12cm
  • 20cm x 12cm
  • 6mm plywood

Other:

  • 20mm countersunk screws
  • white edge banding
  • 3D printed vacuum holder

Tools:

  • circular saw
  • router
  • 6mm milling bit
  • CNC router
  • 1mm milling bit
  • iron
  • cordless drill
  • screwdriver
  • knife
  • etc...

Step 1: Gather Necessary Information

Needs:

In our kitchen we do have an cabinet that is mainly used as storage for our two vacuum cleaner, but also holds most of our household appliances. One of the vacuum cleaner is also able to wet-clean the floor, for this task it uses an additional nozzle that needs to fit inside the cabinet. Also the additional Hardware must have an additional space.

It must be fullfil my wifes needs in terms of optics.

Restrictions:

  • The cabinet inside is 42cm wide, 52cm deep and about 200cm in height.
  • In the cabinet is a internalshelf that is at 160cm height
  • On the left side there is an adjustable storage system that is to be preserved
  • 19cm wide, 37cm deep and it starts at 48cm all the way to the internal shelf
  • One of the Vacuum cleaners needs a wall mount
  • The other has a base width of 25cm

Step 2: Set Up the Cabinet in Fusion 360

To start with a design, recommend to create a 3D model of the whole cabinet at first.Therefore:

  1. Create a new Sketch in Fusion 360
  2. Add a rectangle with the inner size of the cabinet and add 2cm in width
  3. That means 44cm x 54cm in my case
  4. Now use the "Extrude" tool to add a 3rd dimension to the sketch
  5. click on the rectangle and push/pull the new body until the desired height is reached or enter the value in the little box, also add 2cm!
  6. In my case that means 202cm in total
  7. To turn the Box into a cabinet, we use the "Shell" tool
  8. Select that tool and mark the front of the Box, set the inside thickness to 10mm and click "OK"
  9. Now we have a Cabinet :-)

Step 3: Build the Enterieur

To add the interieur of the cabinet, we have to start with a new sketch:

  1. Click on "Create Sketch"
  2. Select the inner wall of the cabinet, in my case the left side since there is the storage system
  3. Deactivate visibillity of the cabinet, in my case "Body1" by clicking on the eye
  4. You are now able to add your drawings, the best is, the blue contour of the inner wall is shown
  5. In my case I began with adding a help-rectangle to the top to add the shelf
  6. I then was able to add the 1cm shelf and the contour of the storage system based of my meassurements
  7. Now we can activate the vissibility of the "Body1" again
  8. Use the "Extrude" tool to extrude the top shelf until it reaches the opposite side
  9. I used the Operation "Join" to make sure the ends will intergrate in the "Body1"
  10. looks like a cabin :-)
  11. Now use the "Extrude" tool again to set up the storage system
  12. Here I used "New Component" as Operation to make sure it stays independend from the cabinet itself
  13. Turns out as planned, now you can toggle the visibility of the "Component1" indipendend of "Body1"

Step 4: Fill the Cabinet

To show my wife what I am planning to do, and to see how it would turn out in reality, I wanted to add a Vacuum cleaner.

I searched the internet for a 3d modell that fitted inside the cabinet and that meets the measures of the one we have.

Funny enought I downloaded an STL file of a perfectly fitting one.

To add it into the project you have to use the "Insert mesh" functionality.

Then just move it into position and set the "materials" of the bodies to make them appear real in the rendering.

  1. Therefore right-click on the mesh/body/component and select "Physical material"
  2. Select the best fitting material and drag and drop it onto everything
  3. Select "RENDER"
  4. And enjoy the result


Step 5: Plan the Cabinet Installation

Since the vacuum cleaner takes up almost the entire floor of the cabinet, the space under the storage system has to be used intelligently.

My Idea was to put the second nozzle upright in the corner, which left just enough room to add a little drawer on top.

In the back must be just enough space for all the brooms.

The smaller vacuum can be wall mounted to the back of the cabinet.

I measured everything and once again started with a new sketch...


Step 6: Daw the Installation

  1. begin with a new sketch, but this time on the Z/Y Plane
  2. Draw a rectangle in the size 48cm x 35cm
  3. Use Extrude to make it 3D with 10mm thickness
  4. Add another sketch onto the newly created body
  5. I added the lines for the drawer-pocket and for the crossboards
  6. First I extruded the drawer pocket 5mm into the Board
  7. Then the crossboards were extruded to 12cm.
  8. if you want the component to consist of individual parts, you have to change the Operation to "New Body" or "New Component"!
  9. Add another sketch onto the crossboards
  10. Draw the wall mounted plate with the drawer pocket
  11. Extrude plate, but make sure to select everything
  12. Extrude the drawer pocket from the other side
  13. Finish :-)

Step 7: Create the Drawer

To create the drawer I used the great Add On "FingerJoints" you can find here. It also features a great tutorial regarding the Usage.

To start, you got it, create a new sketch :-)

  1. In the new sketch, you have to create all sides at once
  2. add little "ears" to the bottom part to let the drawer glide in the pockets
  3. Extrude everything to 6mm (depending on the Material you have)
  4. Turn the parts as necessary
  5. Assemble the Box with move, "Point to Point"
  6. make sure that all the files overlap
  7. Now we can add the Finger Joints
  8. Start "Finger Joint" and select two parts to join
  9. Continue for all parts until you are finished
  10. Now you can insert the drawer

Step 8: Get the "go"

With the help of these great tools, I could convince my wife to organize the cabinet like this. So I directly went into the workshop!

Step 9: Plan Hard, Work Hard

In the Workshop I started with a sketch -No, just kidding :-)

I began with the white coated chip board:

  1. For cutting the white coated chip board, I used a table saw
  2. With the Router I milled the groove for the drawer into the big plate and into the wall mount
  3. Then I used clamps to hold the parts together while screwing
  4. I used white edge banding and an iron to finish the white parts
  5. As last step I trimmed the edges of the banding with a knife

Now let's start with the drawer

  1. The plywood was cut by my CNC, but you could also use other tools
  2. With a knife and some sanding paper i cleaned the parts
  3. The assembly is pretty simple, just use wooden glue to glue the parts together


Step 10: Assembly

Now it is time to assemble everything into the cabinet.

  1. First I mounted the crossboards to the wall mount and screwed that into the cabinet.
  2. Now insert the drawer
  3. screw the front plate onto the crossboards and the organizer is done!
  4. Next I mounted the holder to the cabinets back
  5. Finish!

Just put everything back into the cabinet and enjoy:-)

Organization Challenge

Participated in the
Organization Challenge