Crafting a Seamless Transition Between Tooltip and Shank in Fusion Using Tangent Arcs

Now let's create the smooth transition between our tooltip and our shank. To do that, we're going to create a sketch first. The sketch will drive that geometry.

So first, let's make sure we're in the Surface Tools and go to Create Sketch. Let's create a sketch on the plane that is defined by the blue and the red axis. Right there in the middle.

And I'll orbit to a 3D view and zoom in a little bit tighter. I'm going to go to Create and Project Include and select Intersect. I'll grab that top-angled shank surface and the top face of my tooltip and click OK.

That gives me two purple lines, and they follow those surfaces exactly. Now let's go to Create, and I want to create a couple of arcs that bridge this smoothly. So Create, Arc, and I want Tangent Arc.

So click that, zoom in here a little bit. Let's start with the left purple dot. I'll click one time, and then if you move your cursor around, you'll notice that whichever direction you move, that arc stays tangent to the purple line, which is perfect.

Now we want to aim for the midpoint between the two purple dots, so just find that midpoint approximately and click. It doesn't have to be perfect. Click.

Now I'm still in tangent curve mode, so I'm going to click the right purple dot now. Click once, move my cursor to the left, and find where I left off. A little white vertex.

Now, as close and careful as I was, it's still not very nice in the middle where they intersect. There's kind of a bump there. Well, we can force that to be tangent in Fusion.

Let's hit escape, and we'll use the constraints to do that. In the constraints area, we're looking for tangent. Click that tangent, and then click the first arc and the second arc, and Fusion does its magic and pulls those into a tangent connection.

We've got tangent to the first purple line, the arc is tangent to the other arc, which is also tangent to the other purple line. So that looks really good. We've got that.

Go ahead and click finish sketch. Now let's name our sketches. So that sketch 7, that was our tip divider, and this sketch we have now.

I think I made a space. Let me delete that out. Just keep it clean here.

No space. Tip divider, and our most recent is our transition. Call it transition profile.

There we go. Our transition profile. So here in the surface tools, one of the create options is an extrude.

We'll click on that, and we can click on the little double arc that we just made. I have enable chaining turned on so I can just click one time. I get both arcs of my double arc here and my direction.

I'll change that to symmetric, and let's go ahead and pull it out and see what it looks like. Just pull it across. It's looking really good.

It's making a tangent surface right from our tool tip, right to the shank. It's exactly what we want. We're just going to pull it out past where it needs to go because we're going to have to resolve this opening underneath, and we'll do that later.

So I'm going to take mine to eight millimeters. That should be fine. Then go ahead and click okay, and there it is.

We've got the transition started. Now I need to trim off the extra, so let's go up to modify and let's select split face. We'll grab the two resulting faces, and now our splitting tool will select them.

We'll start with the right side. I'm going to grab every part of this tool that could intersect. So the tool tip side, there's one, two, three faces.

Oops, I clicked on too much. Try again. One, two, and three.

But then I also have the right side of the shank. I'm going to click that as well. Then I want to extend the splitting tool and just orbit around to make sure it indeed is splitting my surfaces.

Looks like it is. I'll click okay. Pretty cool, right? It just traced that line right through my two curved surfaces.

Now I have these extra parts. I can select them one by one, click delete on my keyboard, and they're gone. That's looking pretty good.

All I have left is this little area to fill in. So let's do the other side now. Same process.

Orbit around to the other side. Go to modify, split face. I'm going to grab the two faces.

And then the splitting tool will be one, two, three from the tip and the shank. Extend the tool so they go all the way and click okay. Then we select the two resulting faces that we no longer want.

Select them and delete them. That's perfect. All right, now we're left with these little kind of triangular spaces.

And you might be tempted to use the patch command and just fill that in, but that can create some weirdness. And in surfacing, it's really easy to create a weird kind of non-tangent surfaces. We want to avoid that.

So another way to go about this is to simply delete these faces. There are three on this side. One, two, three, and they're gone.

A little bit scary, but that's okay. We'll delete the ones on the other side as well. One, two, and three.

I have to zoom in for that little guy. Okay, those are gone. Now I can recreate that and do it in a big bold move, which is great in surfacing.

You want to kind of make it as simple and as bold as possible. Now we can go to create and extrude. And I'm going to turn off chaining for this one and select that line, zoom in, and that edge, technically it's an edge, and that edge.

So I've got the three edges, and they're all selected. I get an arrow, and I can drag that, and I'm going to drag it up all the way through. I'm going to exaggerate again.

I'll go to minus eight. Make sure I exaggerate it plenty. There we go.

So eight millimeters. Big bold move all the way past, and go ahead and click okay. Now I have a resulting one, two, and three surfaces.

And you guessed it, I need to trim the top portion away. We'll repeat the process that we used before. We're going to modify, split face, grab the three faces to split, which are the three that we just created.

Splitting tool we'll select. And again, big and bold, we'll do the top surface of the tool tip, both curves, and we'll go to the shank just to make sure we cover our bases. We can extend the splitting tool to make sure it totally cuts through all the way, and then click okay.

And now, if we hover over, we notice we have some extra faces. We can select one and delete it, two, delete on the keyboard, and three, delete on the keyboard. And it cleans up all nice and tidy.

Now we have just one surface all the way up to that curve. Great way to do it. Now let's orbit around to the other side and repeat that same process.

Create extrude. I'm going to turn off chaining, grab all three edges, one, two, three. Drag that up, but exaggerate it.

I'm going to go to minus, I'll do minus 10 this time, exaggerate it even further, and click okay. Now I'm going to go up to modify and going to select split face. I've got three faces to split one, two, and three.

And my splitting tool again will be every part of my tool tip, as well as the top face of my shank. Extend my splitting tool, click okay. And there is that result.

Now I can select these faces individually and delete them one by one. So one, delete, two, delete on the keyboard, and three. Awesome.

I love this. It's so cool. We're creating quite a complex shape here, and yet it's rational, derived by sketches, and we're keeping all of our curves very tangent, very clean.

It's what we want, what we're looking for. So all that's left is to stitch these surfaces together. So I go up to modify stitch and grab my shank and stitch it to my sides.

And then also stitch to my little curved area at the top of the transition and click okay. With that, magic happens. If it all worked out correctly, we have a new body, and it's just a body with a number.

We can rename it and call this Shank. It's all kind of the shank and the tool tip forged together at that point. And there it is.

Pretty awesome, right? We've got a really nice tool. Nice work getting to that point. If it did give you errors, it's often the case in surfacing that things aren't totally touching.

Even if you zoom in really tight, they're not touching. It won't resolve. And so that's why we want to kind of exaggerate, do those bold moves to get to this result.

Alrighty. It's an excellent time to save our Trim Tool 5.