Apex DesignTube Shop

Sheet 06

Fusion 360 add-in · feature guide

From the tubes you drew to the tubes you weld.

Tube Shop copes, marks, nests, and CNC-cuts tube structures from inside Fusion 360 — the design is the source of truth, and everything the shop touches is derived from it. Below: what each feature does, when you'd reach for it, and where it beats the usual alternatives — standalone tube-fab suites, free wrap-template generators, raw CAD booleans, and generic rotary CAM.

Ordered the way a job flows: cope → features & marks → paper → machine → trust.

At a glance

	Tube Shop	Standalone tube-fab suites	Free template generators	Raw CAD booleans	Generic rotary CAM
Works on your design, in place	yes	re-model	re-type	yes	import
Machinable 2-axis normalized copes	yes	yes	varies	exact only	—
Assembly order & self-locating marks	yes	—	—	—	—
Design-change replay	yes	start over	start over	manual	re-import
1:1 wrap templates	yes	some	yes	—	—
Bend data on calibrated dies	yes	yes	—	—	—
Stick nesting, chuck-aware	yes	partial	—	—	sheet-minded
Rotary G-code + torch simulation	yes	yes	—	—	partial
Feature intent — cut, scribe or skip	yes	—	—	—	loops = cuts
Developed blanks with marks	yes	partial	—	—	—
Fully offline	yes	varies	web	yes	mostly

Comparisons are category-level: standalone tube-fab suites, free template generators and printable wrap sites, raw CAD booleans such as a native Fusion or SolidWorks cut, and sheet CAM with a rotary add-on. Individual products vary; verify against the specific package you are weighing.

Coping & joints

Coping inside the design

Select branch tubes and host tubes, and every branch is notched against the tubes it actually meets — in the model, on the bodies you drew. Hosts are never modified; that protection is structural, not a setting. The dialog reopens with hosts still selected, so you work joint by joint without re-picking.

Use it when: Any welded tube assembly — chassis, cage, gate, handrail, exhaust hanger — that you designed, or received, in Fusion.
The edge: Standalone tube-fab suites make you re-model the structure in their own CAD; template generators make you re-type ODs and angles one joint at a time. Here there is nothing to re-enter and nothing to transcribe wrong — the joint geometry is right because it is the design.

The normalized notcher cut

Every cope is normalized to the square two-axis cut a rotary notcher or tube plasma actually makes — a conservative blend by default, with per-end control when you want it. A weld-gap annotation states the worst-case fit-up gap the chosen blend costs, so the welder knows before the tube does.

Use it when: Cutting on a hole-saw notcher, a 2-axis rotary plasma or laser, or by hand — the machines shops actually own.
The edge: A raw CAD boolean gives the mathematically exact saddle — a surface only a 4- or 5-axis machine, or a long session with a grinder, can reproduce. Tube Shop cuts what your machine can cut, and tells you exactly what that choice costs at the weld.

Assembly-order coping

Pick every tube in the order you would physically install it: the first is the base and is never cut; each later tube copes to everything it touches before it. Work a whole structure in one run, or one joint at a time — and finished joints are never re-cut.

Use it when: Building a complete structure where install order determines who copes to whom, which is most real structures.
The edge: Template tools have no concept of an assembly; suites treat joints as independent events. Here the install sequence is a first-class input, and the step numbers flow all the way to printed wraps and machine-etched saddle marks — the structure locates itself during weld-up.

Multicopes that finish in one run

An end that lands on several tubes is coped against all of them, and the joint comes out clean in a single run. A tube that passes through another is recognized and split into two members before the ends are typed — the cut a mid-span trim cannot make.

Use it when: Clustered nodes, X-braces meeting mid-bay, gussetless triangulation — anywhere three tubes share a neighbourhood.
The edge: This is precisely where paper templates and one-joint calculators collapse. The messiest joints in the structure are handled by the same button as the simplest ones.

Design changes replay

Every joint is a recorded event. Change the design and click once: every recorded joint is re-cut from the current geometry, in order, as a single undo step.

Use it when: The customer moved a crossmember after you had coped half the frame. They always do.
The edge: In an external suite, a design change means re-importing or re-modelling and starting the joint work over. Here the joints are records replayed against live geometry — revision is a click, not an afternoon.

Tab & slot self-jigging joinery

Tick a box and a cope grows a heel tab; the host it lands on gets a matching slot, sized to the tab plus a set tolerance. Disable a slot and its tab is dropped with it — the record never ships half a joint.

Use it when: One-person fit-up, minimal fixturing, or any build where tubes should click into place at the right spot and rotation before the first tack.
The edge: The slots come from the real joint geometry — position, rotation and clearance included — rather than being features you place and maintain by hand in CAD.

Wall features & marking

Wall features that know what they are

Holes, rectangles, slots and cutouts modelled into the tube wall are carried as first-class features, and physical intent is read from the geometry: a through-hole cuts, while an engraved pocket is scribed rather than cut out, so a part number does not become a row of holes. Every feature can be routed cut, mark or skip at the machine.

Use it when: Bolt holes, wire ports, drain holes, logos and part numbers modelled by you or your customer.
The edge: Generic CAM treats every closed loop as a cut and every label as an afterthought. Tube Shop distinguishes cut from scribe from skip per feature — and protects the ones that must never be slit, like a clamp-band footprint that would free the slug it encircles.

A marking layer that carries the build

The machine scribes what the shop needs to know: saddle marks with assembly step numbers, tube IDs, bend specs, clamp-block marks for the bender in either feed direction, and a datum line for measuring rotations after bending. Machines without a marker can cut their marks instead, with the never-cut categories still protected.

Use it when: Weld-up without a tape measure; bender setup without guesswork; any batch where tubes must not get shuffled.
The edge: The marks encode assembly knowledge — which tube, which step, which rotation — not just engraved text. Most CAM marks nothing; the rest mark decoration.

III

Shop paperwork

1:1 wrap templates

Print-at-actual-size wrap templates, as tiled PDF or DXF. Every page carries a calibration square and a scale bar, so a mis-scaled print is caught before it cuts a tube. Host wraps include the saddle marks with their step numbers.

Use it when: No CNC — wrap, trace, cut with a grinder or hole saw. The whole product works hand-tools-first.
The edge: Free template generators do one joint at a time from hand-typed numbers, with no assembly context. These wraps come from the design, carry the structure's own labels, and match the cut list and the G-code because they share one source.

A cut list that accumulates

OD, wall, length, cope angle and depth per end, bevel, and the heel-to-heel clock for double-coped tubes — merged across sessions as you cope joint by joint. Stale rows from undone joints are pruned on demand, never silently. A joint report logs every joint ever cut, with its settings.

Use it when: Ordering stock, quoting, or handing the bench a single sheet of truth for the whole job.
The edge: Cumulative by design: work a frame over three evenings and the list is still one list.

Bend data on your real dies

Feed, rotation and angle tables, apex points, and a per-tube die spec — driven by a shop die library with a calibrated radius per die and springback recorded the way benders think: the angle you hold against the angle you get.

Use it when: Any bent member headed for a rotary-draw bender.
The edge: The drawn bend is constrained to a die you own, so the sheet matches the machine rather than a theoretical centreline radius the bender cannot make. Bender-side suites live outside your design; this data falls out of it.

Per-tube geometry & developed blanks

One STEP or IGES per tube — as modelled, or as a developed blank: the bent tube straightened, cut first and bent after, with the marking curves carried through as geometry.

Use it when: Sending work to a straight-tube laser house, or handing a customer real geometry instead of screenshots.
The edge: The developed solid is manufacturing truth — cope curves, features and marks in blank coordinates — not a flat-pattern guess re-drawn by the vendor.

Nesting & the machine

Nesting that respects the machine

Tubes group by OD and pack onto sticks, rotated so that copes interleave, with the chuck clamp and the machine dead zone reserved and offcuts reused. A tube that does not fit the usable stick is excluded and named in a warning — never silently placed into the clamp.

Use it when: Cutting a whole job from stock lengths and wanting the drop back.
The edge: Sheet CAM nests sheets. It does not know sticks, chucks, or that turning a tube lets two copes interleave. This nester was built for round stock in a rotary machine.

Rotary G-code, verified before scrap

Per-stick programs for the common controllers, with kerf carried through the toolpath as a true geometric offset — a drawn 0.375in hole finishes at 0.375in. Lead-in and lead-out, pierce parameters, height-control zones, feed ramp, per-tube program stops. Then a torch simulation runs the program over the 3D blanks in planned machine time, with an A-axis dial and a cycle clock that matches the estimate.

Use it when: Any CNC rotary plasma or laser — and any quote, since the cycle clock is the estimate.
The edge: The operator can retoggle any cut, mark or feature at the machine without going back to CAM, and the simulation shows the program before the first pierce, on the same numbers the estimate quoted.

Trust & platform

The record checks itself

A fidelity check compares each tube record against the modelled body it came from and flags material the record cannot account for — an unmodelled gusset, a feature that was skipped — so the paper never silently disagrees with the design. Per-body reports say exactly why anything was left out.

Use it when: Always. It runs for you. You notice it the day it catches something.
The edge: Most pipelines fail silently between CAD and CAM. This one is built to fail loudly: dropped features are named, unfit tubes are named, unaccounted volume is named.

Offline, local, one licence

No cloud and no uploads; the licence is checked on your own machine. One licence also covers the standalone Windows app — a studio and shop station that shares one project file with the add-in, so you can push from Fusion, pull at the machine, and design tubes without Fusion at all.

Use it when: The design seat and the machine PC are different computers — or different people.
The edge: Suites in this space are ecosystems priced per seat and per machine. Here the CAD side and the shop side are one product, one licence, one shared record — and the same code computes the shop numbers on both, so the paper agrees with itself.

Every one of these runs on the design you already drew. Nothing here asks you to re-model a structure you have finished.

See pricing

Fusion is a trademark of Autodesk, Inc. Apex Design is not affiliated with or endorsed by Autodesk.