Happy holidays all! now for a question :-)

Are you saying you want a groove that would be cut with a ball nose endmill.

If that is the case you have a few options. If you back up a bit and use a cut sweep instead of all those cuts draw the profile of the groove and make a path for it to follow.

or you could do a full round fillet on each leg of the groove.

or you could do a regular fillet using the bottom edges and half the width as your radius.

or you could do a regular sweep of a sketch that represents the material that needs to be filled and follow the interior contour.

regards Corey

Sweep cut, that was what I was looking for, Doh! I have just upgraded to 2005 and having trouble, finding my way around, lol It was wasn't shown in the features tool bar, so I forgot it even existed! Only four days since I used SW 2004, forgotten how it works already!, lol I must be having a great xmas :-) Hic! Many thank CS.

Corey's got it right with the bit about the cut-sweep. Probably a brain-lock on my part, but I sometimes have problems making a sweep feature go all the way around a part. I end up doing half-way around and mirroring it.

2, Draw a square, (centrally on top face), 50mm x 50mm then extrude cut

3, Draw a square, (centrally on top face), 75mm x 75mm, add a 5mm radius to each corner, select all and offset bi directionally 4mm, change centre lines to construction lines, then extrude cut 8mm, floor tile with square hole in the centre and a groove on the top face. This should give you a groove 8mm wide by 8mm deep with round corners, (looking at the top face).

Now my question, the resulting groove, (looking from the right, left,top, bottom planes), is square, But I want a shape that has a rounded bottom, (not a women, well not right at this min, well ok, if I must!, lol).

A U groove is what I want, but bugger me, I can not find a way to do it!

I know I'm being thick and there is a simple answer, but hey, it is xmas, Hic! Hic! Stagger! Stagger!

Happy new year to all you SW etcha-sketch peeps out there :-)

Watch out for the splines, though. You can't dimension to them and the faces that you would have with straight edges and radiuses end up being one face. They could also cause some problems for CNC work, since they might have lots of little wiggles that the program tries to follow, slowing it way down.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Thanks for the tips Jerry :-)