- The Solidwork's chamfer tool works very similar to
the fillet tool.
And let me show you how to make that work.
So under features right up here under fillet
there's actually a little twirl down here
or drop down here and I can choose chamfer right.
When I jump into the chamfer tool
you can see I've got a bunch
of different ways that I can make chamfer.
So the first one here is going to be the angle distance.
So you're going to be typing in like an angle, like 45 degrees
and something like a half inch, and it's going to be going
in and chamfering that edge.
Same thing over here.
I have a distance distance method
so I can define how I'd like that to be.
I can just break the corner or
or do a vertex cut, which is pretty cool.
And then I got a couple other fancy ones called
like this offset face and so on.
So let's take a look at the very first one here.
So this is going to be angle distance, choose an edge.
And down here, I've got a distance.
So like 0.5 and then my angle.
So it knows I can use the up and down arrows
and I can change what I'm seeing at the screen here
so I can change how that's looking.
I can also flip the direction.
So it's going in the other direction.
So if you want to have some funny
chamfer at some funny angle, you can, but keep
in mind if you're actually going to manufacture this thing
in the real world and you wanted to machine that face.
If you choose some funky chamfer like this one here
at 72 degrees, more than likely is not a tool available
at 72 degrees for you to use.
So you're either going to have to surface that face
which going to be hard and expensive
or you're going to have to build a custom tool.
So I would recommend sticking to those 45 degree
60 degree or 30 degree type of angles
because they're going to be so much easier to manufacture
unless you just happen to be doing something extremely
fancy.
Anyways, that's your basic chamfer there, click okay.
And there's my chamfer, if you don't like it hit
delete on your keyboard, get rid of it.
Let's come back and do it one more time.
Here's my chamfer.
This time, distance, distance.
So choose that same edge.
And right now I'm choosing symmetric
but I can choose asymmetric.
And then you just type in the value.
So I might want 0.1 by 0.5.
There is my chamfer pretty straight forward.
You can also switch the side.
So 0.1 up here, if you wanted to go the other direction.
And by 0.5 and there's my other chamfer.
So that's asymmetric.
You can also go back over here to symmetric
and then just type in the value, which pretty
much exactly the same as the angle distance one.
You're just defining how it is placed
whether it's an angle or you just want to place a distance
or make some kind of symmetric thing.
So couple different options
how you can play with that there.
So there's my other chamfer, pretty nice.
Come back over here again.
This time let's do something fancy.
We've got this one here called the vertex.
So that's just going to basically break that point.
So click on the point itself
and it's just going to take that material off and
just kind of make a nice little triangle there in the
corner so it's not as sharp.
That's pretty handy.
Same thing down here.
If you want to add something like this one
which is an offset face.
This one's a little bit more complicated.
So if you choose something like this, you can say
grab that face there.
You can define whether it's symmetric
or asymmetric down here as well.
And I think you can actually choose some other faces
in here, so you can do all kinds
of different things and bring all that in at one time.
Click okay.
And there's all your face chamfers.
So that's the face chamfer version of it.
Come down a little further.
The last one here is just going to be a face to
face chamfer.
You've got to have a couple faces to do that with
but I can choose something like this top face here
and then let's choose some other faces here
not that edge.
And click okay.
And it say, oh, it's giving us a problem.
We got to actually choose something in like 45 degrees.
Here it is.
And you know what?
Over here we're, it's causing a little issue
'cause we have this.
So let's go back, actually delete those.
So let's get rid of these other chamfers
so we can see this one a little bit cleaner
because sometimes when you
get chamfers stacked on top of each other
they can cause issues.
So let's try that one more time over here under chamfer.
Let's go ahead and choose this face to face chamfer
choose this one up here at the top.
And then my second face I want to chamfer to is that one
over there.
You can see it or you can choose multiple
other faces here and you can see they kind
of follow along.
So now you have a face to face chamfer.
Click okay.
And there you have it.
So as you can see, the chamfer tool does work fairly
similar to the fillet command.
And they're both really handy
My recommendation though is the chamfer tool is great for
breaking the edges of parts.
And it's really easy to do if you're manufacturing your
part using like a machining operation
If you're casting something, then sometimes the fillet
option's going to be an easier or better bet.
Either way it doesn't really matter, but it's much harder to
create fillets in a CNC machine
than it is to create chamfers
And you actually have to have the exact specific tool
for that radius.
Whereas a chamfer you can use something
like a spot drill or some or a chamfer tool and you
can create multiple size chamfers all with the same tool.
So I definitely recommend that
if you're looking for the lower cost option
for breaking the corners of your part.