slbaumgartner
In this animation you will see:
Already stated I have no clue how to erase only the face of the rectangle.
please read what happens when I try to erase only the face of the rectangle.
If the rectangle doesn’t create a new small face on the circle, you didn’t draw it in the plane of the circle or else the circle is in a group or component that isn’t open for edit. Once it is in the plane, you just select the small face and hit delete.
There are a couple of subtle things not written in the instructions list. When doing the rotate of the rectangle you need to see the + next to the cursor, so that you’re making a copy of the rectangle.
Also, selecting the rectangle needs to be a left to right selection. If you do right to left selection it will also select the face of the whole circle.
Correct. Pressing ctrl on Windows or alt/option on Mac toggles the rotate tool between simple rotate and rotate+copy.
WOOHOO!!! THANK YOU EVERYBODY… Figured out to erase the face of my rectangles I needed to dither highlight everything outside the rectangle (the disc face) then use the erase on the face of the rectangle but to me that is ass backwards! Common sense says the erase tool should erase what is highlighted and not the otherway around!!!
Got my disc 4.5 " radius w/ 217 sides… got my 31 holes aligned perfectly .75 x .5 x .125 through the half inch disc and aligned perfectly .25" from the outer edge of the disc. THANK YOU
(but do I need Pro to export this to a fabricator?)
Now for the gears 
The erase tool doesn’t erase faces at all. Usually you delete a face by doing a single click on that face, then pressing the Delete key (or backspace, whatever the Windows one is called). Don’t know how you managed to get it to delete the face that wasn’t selected.
Indeed it is, and that isn’t how SketchUp normally works! Sorry to say, there was something odd about how you originally drew the disc and rectangle. I’m glad you got it sorted. At some point you should go back and retry it to see if you can figure out where you went astray, as learning how to draw correctly will benefit you greatly in the future.
Still something going on that is definitely not right. When the face of the disc above is pulled up you can see the vertical corners of the holes, but in my disc rendering there is no such thing… It looks like it lifted the surface plane with holes in it above a bottom plane also with holes in it such that my rendering literally appears to be hollow. except I can’t see diagonally down through the top holes to the bottom holes.
I can see into the holes and see the outer edge of the lower disc and the inside surface of the vertical of the outer edge of the cylinder and this is not supposed to be.
You mean it appears transparent?
Possibly the bottom face is missing after PushPull?
If that is the case (and it normally isn’t) undo the PushPull, then do it again after tapping the Ctrl key which forces PushPull to leave a copy of the original face, as well as making a new one. Though it may leave the original face reverse side out.
OK Sages, Gurus, and SketchUp Scholars… This is what I get every single time!
What am I doing wrong?
The holes are not defined except at the very opening to the plane of the disc and I don’t think the bottom face is missing or the color would/should be the background green but instead it is a dark grey from the auto-shading feature of SketchUp.
STEP RIGHT UP!!! TRY YOUR LUCK
Click the face inside the rectangle with select tool, it will turn dotted.
Press delete key to delete it.
Do not make rectangle a component.
Finish rectangle circular array
Push pull face up
Then make whole thing component
I just repeated the process again with the same result and a bit more info for you than what is shown in the video…
There are no holes at all in the bottom disc surface.
It created a hollow object which can be looked inside of with the only holes being in the very top surface yet you all saw it was showing the background green when I made them. Now really living up to my forum handle 
The cat meowing confused my dogs.
Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase, look at your own video. The right-click itself has the effect of deselecting the edges you carefully selected, and it selects the face, which is what then gets erased. You need not have selected the edges.
I just did a quick scan back in this topic and (please forgive me if I’m wrong) you have never shared a sample file that we can examine to understand where you are going astray. We try to give clear directions but you repeatedly run into problems anyway. There’s a communication breakdown between here and there, and I don’t know how to bridge it…
SUCCESS!!!
THANK YOU EVERYBODY !!!
You have all been exceedingly generous with your time (and probably had a few chuckles along the way but I don’t mind)…
But back to the title of this thread and a whole new can of worms if you don’t mind…
Where do I get the Gears plug-in and how do I install it?
Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase,
Thought it was necessary in order to define the area to be highlighted (the face).
Did my suggestion work?
I think 1. You deleted the edges of the rectangle
2. You mixed raw geometry with components
Like a Champ!!! I thought they were combining the rectangle sides into an entity and never realized all the were doing was highlighting all “boxed” components.
Thank you!