Betcha Didn’t Know This: Fillets
One time I heard someone disparagingly complain about SolidWorks fillets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not above griping now and then (ahem), but generally not about the fillets. Fillets have to be one of the most powerful functions in all of SolidWorks. They have really worked hard to make this area of the software do what customers want it to do. In the book, fillets should be an entire chapter. It’s not just select an edge and watch it work or fail, there is really a lot to it.
I’m not going to go through everything you don’t know about fillets, because that would take too long. I’m just going to talk about one of the latest additions to the function, and after a recent modeling task, one of my favorites: Asymmetrical Fillets.
To be clear, you’ve always been able to do asymmetrical fillets, but just not this easy. You had to manually split edges to make hold lines, and then you could make your hold line fillet between the edges. The other alternative was to just go old school and totally manually lay in a Boundary feature, or set of them, to build the fillet yourself.
Anyway, here’s how it works. An asymmetrical fillet uses a non-circular cross section, and as the name implies, can be different distances from the selected edge on either side of the edge.
The Fillet Parameters option can be either Symmetric or Asymmetric. The profile can be several things in different situations: circular, elliptical, conic radius, conic rho, and curvature continuous.
Plus, get this, Plus, it can be a Variable Radius fillet on top of all that. Here’s what a Variable Radius, Asymmetric, Curvature Continuous fillet looks like:
Kinda blows your mind, doesn’t it?
You still shouldn’t try to shape your model with fillets. Fillets are really just for breaking edges, and for blending if you don’t need a better way. But still, it’s amazing what they’ve been able to do with this feature. And I haven’t even mentioned setback fillets, partial edge selection, full rounds, hold line fillets, face fillets, constant width fillets, fillet expert or the selection toolbar. Whew! If you need fillets and haven’t looked around at the different options this one has, you should do some exploring.
Here’s the asymmetrical fillet on the sports car:
