SolidWorks 2011 Assemblies Bible - Matt Lombard [101]
For example, look at the assembly from Figure 11.1. First, the Feature Scope was changed to just include the plastic housing parts on the outside, so the cutaway now appears as shown in Figure 11.3.
FIGURE 11.3
The Feature Scope altered to include only plastic housing parts
Next, you select the Propagate Feature to Parts option in the Feature Scope box to enable it. When you do this, the assembly still displays the Cut-Extrude feature at the bottom of the assembly FeatureManager, but now each part included in the Feature Scope also gets an in-context Cut-Extrude feature. If you delete the assembly level feature, the feature is also deleted from each of the individual parts.
While this is a nice shortcut, it is not something you should do on a regular basis. In this particular assembly, it caused errors with about a dozen mates.
This kind of functionality also exists with the assembly fillets, chamfers, and the Hole Series functionality with Hole Wizard holes, where you specify hole locations in the assembly, and the holes show up as features in the individual parts. You can read more about the Hole Series feature later in this chapter.
Making Fillets and Chamfers in Assemblies
New in SolidWorks 2011 is the ability to make fillets and chamfers as assembly features. Once parts are assembled, the corners are sometimes filed, sanded, or machined to round them. Figure 11.4 shows a stack of plates that have been filleted and chamfered in the assembly.
FIGURE 11.4
An example showing fillets on an assembly of stacked plates
This book sometimes uses examples that don't look very realistic so that you can learn about the limitations of a feature from simplified geometry. The first thing you can learn from this particular example is that large fillets started on one part do not carry over (overflow) to other parts where you have not made a selection. First, notice the large fillets on the top corners. The fillets are larger than the thickness of the plates and are not tangent to the horizontal edges at the top.
A second thing to notice is that when you are creating these fillets, they do not automatically propagate to tangent edges of other parts, as fillets in parts do. If you want to fillet a string of edges, you have to select each edge individually.
A third thing to notice is that you can use assembly fillets to add material as well as remove material. Therefore, this goes beyond the intention that assembly fillets will be used just for filing, sanding, or machining sharp edges. This is the realm of body filler putty. Basically, it's like anything else. SolidWorks gives you capabilities here that you may not have in the real world, and what you model in the end is your own responsibility (in other words, pay attention to what you are doing).
Finally, you may notice that on the third part from the left in Figure 11.4, there is a fillet that undercuts the edge. This shows that filleting between parts does not work the same as filleting between features that are merged together into a single body. This fillet would add material instead of removing it if this were a single part.
Notice that here you also have the option to propagate the fillets to the parts.
Assembly fillets do not give you all of the capabilities that you have with individual part fillets. You can only create constant radius fillets (with and without a multiple radius option) and face fillets. You cannot create variable radius, setback, hold line, or curvature continuous fillets in this way.
Not everyone will find a use for this feature, but it does offer an alternative to the workaround options that users had to