First time here asking for help, relatively new to Sketchup and the concept of CAD as a whole.
This is the first issue i’ve encountered that I can’t get my head around, it’s for making a mounting plate for engine coils and injectors. I’ve made the 2D face/outline of the plate, pushed/pulled to make it a 3d entity, and then managed to “cut” the slope in to it, which took probably longer than it should have. What I now cannot do it delete what currently looks like bridges across the top of the slope. It was one whole roof/face, and by making into sections i’ve managed to delete so much up to what you now see. Guidance, and an explanation of where i’ve gone wrong would be massively appreciated!
How did you create this model? There seems to be a lot of garbage geometry that isn’t needed.
I wound up deleting the edges that extend across the ramped area and then I drew in the diagonals from the top of the ramp to the corners. This skinned over everything except the hole with the ramp. To open up the other hole I selected the top surface and the side of the hole’s cylinder, ran Intersect Faces>With Selection and erased the hole skinning the top.
Just implemented what you’ve explained and reproduced the design as per your images.
Reference the garbage geometry, are you referencing the excess lines placed around the slope/ramp area? These were a result of my efforts to try and delete the roof/areas initially circled in red.
Are you able to explain for me how adding the diagonals to the corners overcame my major issue please? & how did you tidy/remove lines without affecting the component? I’ve just tried the same with the “erase” function but ended up losing faces etc.
The diagonals just encourage SketchUp to fill in the face of the rectangle in this case without skinning the ramped hole. The lines wouldn’t really have to go to the corners but in cases like this (which I find to be fairly rare occurrences in my modeling) I think it’s a cleaner way to do it.
Out of curiosity, what’s it do?
As I side note, since you are modeling for 3D printing, I would suggest you set the model units to meters but enter dimensions thinking in millimeters. So you would model that plate as 3m thick. STL files have no units so it really makes no difference that you are modeling in meters. When you import the STL into the slicer, tell it the units are millimeters and it’ll all be just fine.
They’re (will be 8 printed in total) going to be attached to 40x40mm extrusion and act as mounting points for a spark plug coil & fuel injector. The design of the injector has called for the ramp to act as a seat/locator, whereas the coil has a thick rubber seal which is very slightly wider than the plain hole and therefore gives an interference fit.
I wont be able to attach a photo of it in use, but if you’d like I can upload a photo after printing?
See the above for what it does. It’s a bit of a side project at work. Components like injectors and coils are typically secured with cable ties or similar, this is aiming to produce a selection of reusable plates that also look more aesthetically pleasing than a cable tie.
