Thursday January 26, 2017 at 10:15am
Applications engineer Chris Green explores converging fillets in SolidWorks in his latest blog post.
Fillets all converging to one point? Try using one of those handy direct
editing tools.
We all know from the Essentials course, if your preview
disappears then the success of a filet is extremely unlikely. This can be
helped in some cases by making the fillet in another feature. However in some
cases you still can’t seem to get what you want. I have recently been modelling
a certain chocolate manufacturer’s packaging and came across the issue where 8
edges all went into the same spot – not once but over and over again. We have
seen this previously on support as well and one of my colleagues suggested a
very neat trick which I took advantage of so I thought I’d share.
My preview kept disappearing no matter how many fillet features I made and how
many stages I did the fillets in:
The
trick is to erase the intersections completely for the fillet command. Effectively just extrude cylinders on
to
the intersections of all the edges making sure these are
merged into the body. This then allows the fillet command to easily do its job
between the cylinders:
Once happy with the fillets I then turned to the
Delete Face command. This tool is very useful especially if you
have
imported parts or want to delete a single face so you can knit another face in.
Delete - deletes a face
from a surface body or deletes one or more faces from a solid body to create a
surface
Delete and Patch -
Deletes a face from a surface body or solid body and automatically patches and
trims the body
Delete and Fill – Deletes faces and generates a
single face to close up the gap
In
this case however we will use it to delete the geometry created to split the
part up. I simply selected the faces
of the extrusions and selected fill so the gap at the bottom
would be filled, effectively merging all the many fillets together with a new
surface.
This process only added a few more features on to my feature
tree and was fairly painless.
By Chris Green
Applications Engineer