Adding fillets to a part

- [Narrator] If you'd like to add rounded corners to your part solidworks provide the great tool for creating fillets on your part. Go up here under features, come over here to fillet and click on the icon there. Now we have a bunch of different ways to create fillets, and the first one here is going to be a constant size fillet, we also have the ability to create variable size fillets, face fillets as well as full-round fillets. So the first one here is just a pretty straight forward thing so click on that one there, click on the item you'd like to fillet is like something like a line right here. And define the type or the size of that fillet.

So in this case here I'll just type in like .25 and notice we got a no preview showing but if I want to switch over here to full preview you can see exactly what's going to happen with my fillet. So pretty straight forward and easy to use, just kind of rounds off that corner. Now if I go back to that fillet, instead of choosing just a line, I can actually choose the entire top surface and it'll fillet all those edges at the same time. You can also come over here, change it again, choose the other edges at the same time, start filleting this entire part all in one shot if you wanted to. You can even choose the bottom at the same time and fillet everything just like that.

Alright, so that's a basic fillet, we've added it all the way around our part. Let's go ahead and delete that fillet now, and try it one more time. Let's go back again, back to the fillet command. The next one's going to be a variable size fillet. So let's go over here and choose this edge again, and notice it gives me a few different points. So if I choose in the sign thing here I'm going to type in .5 and over here I'm going to type in maybe .25. That allows me to vary that fillet from one side of the part over here to the other. Click on okay and there's my variable size fillet.

Alright, if you don't like that one of course we just delete it by choosing it and hitting delete on our keyboard. Come back up here to the fillet command one more time, this time we're going to be looking at a face fillet. What that allows me to do is choose multiple edges to fillet. So I can say hey I'd like to fillet from this edge here, over to this face and that one there. Click on okay and it's going to create a fillet there. Now that didn't do anything that was that cool because it only basically added a regular fillet. But watch what happens if we change the size of that fillet.

So as I get a little bit bigger here, it starts bumping into that next face. So over here it would generally fail if it was a regular fillet but because we're using this face fillet it'll wrap that around and create one continuous fillet, so that's how you can do that. Alright, let's go ahead and delete that one one more time. And then again we'll go back up to the fillet tool, this time for a full-round fillet. So it's going to be asking me for three faces. So my first face is going to be that one there, my second face is going to be that one there and my third face is going to be this one over here and it's going to create a nice full-round fillet between those three faces.

Click okay and there's my fillet. Alright let's try that one more time. Head back over here, fillet, and go back to the original type of fillet. Now once I'm back to the constant size fillet, of course I can choose an edge or a face to fillet, I can also adjust that on the fly to .5 or something like that. And then I also have a few options down here as far as a circular fillet, a conic row style of fillet, I can change to a conic radius fillet, I can change to a curvature continuous. So I've got a whole bunch of things I can do here and modify the way that fillet works.

I don't really have time to go into every single one of those but I do want to point out where they are and how they can easily be used. Basically just go ahead and select one of those, adjust the value and you can see what's really happening here as I click on that surface here. You notice this little corner right here, as I change that it's modifying that edge with the conic row style of fillet. So you can easily switch between those in your fillet command, you can see there's a lot of different options as far as methods for adding fillets and working with them in your design.