Drill a hole in curvy component

[igal]

Hello Community,

I’m back again, with another of my arc/curves question (yeah, somehow working with straights and flats is more intuitively clear). So, here’s what I need to do this time. Attached is a components through which I would like to drill a hole, from one side to the other. The axis and the size of the hole are represented by the circle I placed.

What I tried so far is to pull the circle through the component, so it forms a cylinder and then intersect it with the model.
The trouble is that the intersection comes out pretty bad, some of the faces on SIDE A, do not for good edges with the “cylinder” and when I try to delete outer part of the cylinder, either whole cylinder is removed (so that I see into the component) or the faces of side A are deleter (i.e. the whole faces, not just what’s inside the tube… which I was thinking will then form the “hole”.

Long story short, how do you properly "drill"a hole through the component? Eventually I will need the component with the hole to be solid, so the hole should make good edges with the component, right?

Thanks.
I.drill_a_hole.skp (1.6 MB)

[Wo3Dan]

Intersecting a cylinder with a curved surface can be tricky. The edges that make up the “cylinder” surface may cross the surface edges at close distance, forcing SketchUp to create very short edges.
At this point SketchUp fails to create new faces.
However, in this case the intersection is possible, but…

In this case you have better luck creating a cylinder as a group. And when being inside that group select all its geometry and intersect faces > with model. The newly created geometry will be inside the cylinder group. Delete unwanted geometry. Close the group and only then delete the group to merge with the rest. You’ll still need to do some cleanup.

Here is the solid. drill_a_hole_A.skp (1.7 MB)
The 3D text still needs to be merged with the rest.

[TDahl]

Suggestion: make the geometry a component (if it is not already). Create a copy of the component, located off to the side somewhere, does not matter where. Scale the copy up by 10X or 100X (I use 100X). Open the large-scale copy and perform the intersection/cleanup there. Close the large-scale copy, and delete it. The original component will stay wonderfully in sync with all edits done to any copy.

This technique avoids SketchUp’s inability to create very small edges. Very small edges can exist, they just cannot be created directly.

[DaveR]

Indeed! The Dave Method.

Creating a solid object

This is telling you that you are working too small. SU has problems creating edges smaller than 1mm, so the segments of your curve would be smaller than that. If you work larger it will work. Tiny edges can exist but you need to make them bigger to start. Just scale up by 10 or 100 and it will work. This little gif should demonstrate it better. [image]

[igal]

x100 scaling worked like a charm! Thank you community.