Drilling/cutting circles issues with push pull

Hello world, I have been having issues trying to punch round holes through a simple 3D box. It seems that the consensus is that I should be using the push/pull tool to do this, but I only ever seem to be able to make cylinders never “match faces” to remove the area in question.

My process so far has been this: Make box, make circle, position circle onto box using guides, copy circles into one column, group circles, copy group to cover the box. Each of the circles are supposed to be holes, and I can’t figure out how to drill though the spots the circles describe. When I push/pull the closest I get to looking like I’m going to punch the circle out I get “on edge outside of active”. If I choose that as my push distance than I loose the outline of the circle.

I’ve been watching videos 7 & 10 from aidanchopra, but my circles never seem to act like the rectangles he uses in his examples.

Thank you!

I sounds like you are making nested groups by making the circles a group and then grouping everything. Don’t group until finished.

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Thanks, this helps a lot, especially I spent about an hour convinced I couldn’t make any kind of hole in anything.

Seeing as I have to drill a total of 216 of these holes is there anyway I can make one hole and then copy that hole all the way through? I found another video about components and I was able to make square components that seemed to work… until I realized that I had’t added height to the box and I was just working in 2D. The components that made such lovely holes then got covered up by the box push/pull.

You might consider rearranging the order of operations. See this for ideas.

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The link that DaveR provided is a really neat solution … make the desired layout in 2D and then extrude the result. As noted in the link, if you copy a 2D hole, it makes a hole in the copies as well.

This goes on my “I learned something new about SketchUp today” list :slight_smile:

[added] If you need blind holes, create the circles on the top surface with the interiors filled and then extrude the top surface to create the blind holes:

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Sadly, I can’t seem to get the link to load, it never wants to finish
loading the page. What do you mean by blind holes?

What link doesn’t load?

Blind holes are holes that don’t go all the way through.

This link - Holes - FineWoodworking

Good news, got everything to work like a charm! Thanks everyone! Some of my root problems had to do with selecting too many things at once, and deleting the lines as well as the face of my circles when I was trying to punch holes in the 2-D rectangle.

Can you get the link to work now? I checked it and it works fine for me.

Keep the Entity Info dialog open as you model.
It’s your guide to what is selected and offers editing options as well.

Window > Entity Info