From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Adding fillets to a part - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Adding fillets to a part

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- In this chapter, we're going to be learning about part modifications. We'll learn how to fillet the edges of your parts to make them smooth and rounded. We'll apply some chamfers, we'll apply draft to the parts, maybe some linear patterns, circular patterns plus so much more. Let's go ahead and dive in. Fillets can be used to round over sharp corners in your part. In this example part I have right here, you can see I've got quite a few different fillets. If I click on them, right over here on the side, in the Feature Manager, you can see I've got fillets here. They go around the outside here, I've got them on the inside here as well as over here. And there's quite a bit of different fillets in this part here. So let me show you again how you might use those fillets. So here's an example part here, and it's got a bunch of sharp edges, so let's go ahead and create some fillets. So my first fillet I want to choose, is a regular, constant size fillet. I'm going to use a two millimeter fillet. And let's go ahead and just grab some edges here. So that edge on the inside there, this one over here as well. Let's use this little sharp edge right there, this sharp edge right there, let's get rid of that. Come over here, grab this outside edge. There is one and here's one more sharp edge down here. Let's take a look at it and there's that edge. Okay, so let's do all those edges, one shot, bam. There's our fillet, pretty nice. All right. Grab another fillet, this time, let's make it a little bit bigger. Let's say 2.5 millimeters, and I can choose one of these bottom edges here, of this part, like this one here and it'll automatically go all the way around the part. In fact I can choose this edge as well. And now it'll flow around the entire part. Click "Okay". And there is our fillet. We can also choose faces. So choose fillet. And this time I'm going to type in 2.0. And instead of choosing an edge this time, let's just go ahead and choose the entire top surface. And it does all the edges that are attached to that face or that surface. Click "Okay". And there we have it. Okay, now let's jump over to a simpler part and actually look at how the Fillet command is actually working. So right up here, under "Fillet", we've already been working with this first style of fillet, which is constant size. We also have the variable size, as well as a face fillet as well as a full round fillet. So the first one is pretty straightforward. We can choose an edge, like this one right here, right? And then type in a value which is something you see right here, and then depending on which one of these profiles you choose is the shape you're going to get. So right over here, if I'm in a circular profile, you're getting a portion of a circle, right? It's about a quarter of a circle right there and here is the size. So it's 0.9. And if you want to switch over here to a different style, like a conic row, then you have this row value and you can put a bigger value or a smaller value to change the shape of that fillet. Pretty powerful. Same thing over here with conic radius, I can type in that value and notice what's happening on the screen there is that fillet is changing based upon the value that I'm putting in there. And then the last one is the curvature continuous, which will smoothly blend one surface into the next. So a bunch of different options how you want to add that fillet. We have a couple of things here as far as setback parameters which aren't used that often, as well as partial ed parameters. But right now let's just go ahead and leave those alone and then add that fillet. Alright. So there's my first fillet, it looks really nice. And now let's jump into the variable radius fillet. So I'm going to delete that one for right now, and come over here and come back up here to fillet. And let's go over to the variable radius fillet. This time I'm going to choose an edge like this one right here and starting my variable radius fillet. I'm going to type in like 0.25 and it's ending over here at 0.9, but I can also choose any one of these intermediate dots here, and I can control it down to there. So notice I'm bringing a quarter inch fillet all the way here and then it's going to expand out bigger. Of course you could change the value in this radius as well. So if you wanted to make it like 0.375, you could do that as well. And then you can adjust how that fillet looks as it goes along the line or multiple lines. You can choose a whole chain if you'd like, okay. Click "Okay". And there's my fillet. Pretty nice. Okay. Let's delete that one as well. And this time, let's go up here to "Fillet" one more time and choose the "Face Fillet" option. Now the face fillet option works, to kind of, as a problem solver fillet. So most of the time you're going to probably try to use the constant size fillet. But if you have multiple faces you're trying to fillet around. Sometimes this face fillet option will save the day. So right over here, items to fillet, I'm going to choose this face right here. And then in my second box, I'm going to choose this face as well as this face over here. Now let's go ahead and make my fillet bigger and bigger and bigger. So what's happening here is, it's going to get bigger and bigger. And as soon as it gets past this one point, notice right here, it's going to jump to that next size, which is right here. A regular fillet would stop there, it couldn't go any further, but because I've selected multiple faces over here, it's going to jump past that, and it's going to allow me to create this much bigger fillet that will work between all those individual faces. So that kind of saves the day. If you have a hard time creating a fillet, sometimes that face fillet will save the day just by choosing multiple faces at one time. Let's go ahead and delete it and then come back here for the last style of fillet, which is the full round fillet. So click on that one there, and we need three faces to make this happen. So I'm going to choose this face first, switch the next box and choose that face there, and then choose the third box and that one there. And it figures out exactly what size circle will go in all three of these, between those individual faces to create a nice full round fillet. Click "Okay". And there is your beautiful full round fillet. So you can see the fillet command is very powerful, there's a lot of different features and options of how you can fillet things. My recommendation, if you're filleting things up, is save the fillets for the end, create your parts, do all the features and the holes and everything else. And then do all the fillets if you can, towards the end of the design process and kind of group them all together, that's definitely a good recommendation for just making your design process a little bit simpler and flow a little bit better.

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