Hi Steve, it's going to be quite difficult for the edge-based filleter to figure out how to seal up the holes that would be created by a fillet in that location.
Here I'll try to show you what I'm talking about.
Here I have created a fillet surface using the surface/surface filleting mechanism. I did this by breaking your solid model into individual surfaces and then selecting just two of those independent surfaces and running Fillet. This runs fillet in a different mode which is called surface/surface fillet. It can build fillet surfaces in areas where the edge-based one cannot figure things out:
The fillet continued on for a ways, I cut it back to get what I show above.
Now if you look at these areas where the fillet ends, you can see that there would be some kinds of holes created because the fillet pulls away from the main body of your shape:
If that surface was a plane or something simple, it may have a chance to figure out how to fill in that hole. But with all freeform geometry like you have here, the filleting mechanism is not able to figure out what to do about those holes there. That's at least one reason why you would have difficulty filleting that edge.
One thing that can help a lot is if you make that edge to be made up of smooth pieces, rather than having a sharp corner in it. The fillets for a smooth piece will all connect together smoothly as well rather than opening up gaps that need to be filled in which happens with sharp-cornered things like you have there.
- Michael
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