Fillet Or Chamfer

just as the trim and extend commands work similarly the fillit and the chamfer commands are also just as similar to each other the Phillip command creates a tangent arc between two lines the chamfer creates an angled line between two lines the processes are similar you start the command you define the arc radius for the Phillip or in the case of the chamfer you define the distances for where the chamfer lines will go and then you pick your lines either command is also very useful for quickly extending and or trimming two lines at a corner or at a vertice
let’s open up the chamfer fill it example file and click open here we have just some completed boxes with squared or round corners and some other lines that just aren’t quite finished now to start to fill a command of course you just type in the word fill it fil le T or you can type in the letter F
the philic command is found here in the modify panel in the ribbon it’s also where you find the chamfer and the blend curves command because they’re all very similar to each other and work in almost identical ways so we’ve started the command and we need to pick our objects click one and then click two and you can see here it gives you a preview of what it’s going to look like and there you go it drew a tangent arc now since this box was a polyline it kept the entire thing as a polyline which is nice
start the Phillip command again hit the letter R for radius and right now it’s set to two units let’s change that to four and press Enter and click on your box
there you go if I hit enter again I can just start going and I will use the last setting for the Phillip radius that was used and since this was a polyline it erased that old Phillip and replaced it with a new one so that’s the Phillip command the chamfer command works in almost the exact way except it’s a squared corner and not a rounded one it’s found right here in the modify panel in the ribbon I can use the settings that already here but I don’t know exactly what they are defining the distances though for the chamfer are a bit more complicated than the filler command there are two distances to define we want to chamfer two different lines in this case these two edges of our box so to define the distances pressing the letter D press Enter right now it’s set to three units and you can make these distances to be the same if you like and the majority of the time that’s probably what you’re going to want to do now the first distance will be along the first line you select so if we pick this line first this distance will be applied then when we pick our second line the second distance will be applied to it let’s start off by just leaving it at the number three for both distances and this will draw a chamfer that’s three units from the endpoint in and then three units from this endpoint in to the right as you can see our preview and this is what it’s going to look like
just puts a nice little 45-degree angle three units in from each end point if we start the command again type D for distance now let’s make the first one to be one unit and we’ll make the second distance to be three as you saw here since we typed in one for the first unit it will default to copy the same value because typically you will want them to be the same but it’s not always the case this is going to be our first line so it’s going to come back one unit here but then come up three units you’ll see in the preview we pick our first line and then we pick our second and that’s another chamfer when you fill it or chamfer lines can abut or go past or not even touch each other let’s look at one of these other examples here so if I go to fill it something with the radius two for example these two lines and don’t even connect but AutoCAD will extend them as needed or trim them as needed same case up here they’re being trimmed so the Phillip command and the chamfer command are both two very useful commands to clean things up now the chamfer commands command alias is CH a press Enter let’s give it a distance of two and two and you can see here it trims everything up nice and neat or in that case extended the lines it cleans it up quite well how many times we don’t want an arc or a chamfer we just want the two lines to meet at their intersections to create a corner you’ll do that a lot you can use either command to do this and just set your fill it radius to zero
you
and pick your points and it makes a radius of zero which is nothing so that means there is no radius chamfer is the same thing set your distance to zero in both cases
pick your two lines and there’s your corner now there’s another way to do this so if your radius is set to four now let’s
this radius to be zero well you can start your Philip command hit radius type in zero and go about creating your Philip or regardless of what the radius is set to hold down the shift-key and pick your two points and now we got a square corner the same trick will work with the chamfer command
try out the blend curves command the blend curves command will create a tangent or smooth spline object between the endpoints of to open curves or lines arcs etc so if I want an arc that’s smooth and tangent its meaning it starts in this line extends out and begins to curve back around comes this way and that’s kind of hard to do I can’t really do that with the fill it or chamfer command but the blend curves command will do that
and it too has a preview so you can get an idea of what it looks like so I can pick two different objects
get what I need
now these are splines so you can go and you can edit them in different ways we’ll talk more about splines in a different section but if you have two objects and they can be lines polylines or arcs and you can use the Phillip command or the acam for command on them to close them up around the edge or put a corner on it