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The trick with holes is to make your negative geometry penetrate past the surface. Meeting exactly on the surface will be too glitchey otherwise with the fast floating-point approximation.

Fillets and chamfers though, yeah. The lack of those drives me away. As Quinn (Blondihacks) says: "Chamfers are what separate us from the animals.", and as This Old Tony says: "When it comes to chamfers, you don't want to cut corners." (And if you don't know who I am quoting, you clearly don't waste enough time watching machinists on Youtube.)




Chamfers can be done by extruding the chamfer shape along a wireframe of the geometry to be chamfered, then subtracting the extrusion from the original geometry. I'm not sure how I'd do fillets in OpenSCAD, though.


You can use a Minkowski sum to give yourself a fillet. I did it once. It worked but was 2x as hard as learning enough Fusion360 to do that whole part and then each design after that is 20% as hard.

I eventually got pretty good at OpenSCAD, but I’d say I now reach for OpenSCAD about 3x/year and everything else is in Fusion.

I wish I’d have switched years ago.


I either live without, or get creative with use of hull, cylinder (including cones), making toroids by radial extruding circles (using the toroid as a cut shape just to get a fillet around a post), or I just open the scad file in freecad, and then apply the fillets in freecad.

It's definitely a weakness in the sales pitch having to work that hard for something you want that often.


All of my scad designs include an o=0.01; or 0.001, and all it's for is for prepending or appending to other values and expressions all over the place so that cuts and joins always overlap at least a little.


As a mechanical designer who has quite a bit of machining experience, I'm the person sounding like a broken record about chamfers when doing design reviews. Blondihacks quote will be going straight into my repertoire of quotes.


Ahhh ToT. Wonder what happened to him, it’s been almost 8 months since he’s released a video.


There was a death in the family, apparently, so he's focusing on family stuff since then.


I thought it was an illness. But yeah, family first.




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