I am seeking assistance in tapering the curved arm of this part. I am wanting to taper it from the block “П” to the circle on the end. If I expand the arm and circle to the width of the block then draw lines to the dimension, I am unable to reduce the amount of material using the Push/Pull tool. Any advice or instruction would be helpful as I am a beginner/novice at this.
light_holder_for_cubical.skp (1.2 MB)
Doing this from my phone so I can’t look at your model at the moment. I would draw a volume as a cutter and intersect it with the arm. Very likely you should scale the model up maybe by a factor of 1000 before doing this.
Thank you for your reply, but can you define that a little more as I am not versed in the terms that you used. When you refer to “volume as a cutter”, is that a block that I can remove chunks with using the Push/Pull?
Sorry. Draw a face above the arm so when you are looking down, the edge of the face aligns with the taper. Use push/pull to push the face down through the arm and use Intersect Faces to intersect the shape. Then erase what isn’t the arm.
I have Intersect with model and selection but no shape. I have my lines drawn and when I remove it show a taper but it does no conform to my arch.
I just got home. Give me a few moments. How narrow do you want it to be at the end. I assume you don’t want to cut the cylinder at the end? Do you want a straight taper or a curve?
Or do you want it to be as wide as the bracket at the other end?
The П is 16 mm wide and the O is 5 mm wide. The arm needs to taper from the outside of the П to just before the start of the O, maybe 1 mm from the edge of the O on the arm
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You will probably print this? In this case I would suggest some minor changes:
- rotate the model 90 degree around the red axis
- move the arm to the printing bed
- taper only the top side of it
With these changes, it should be more stable and can be printed without support material…
I made you a quick video. Essentially all you need to do is pick one edge and move it.
I made a quick approximation of your model.
Push/pulled the middle arm to match the thickness of your “П”
selected the edge of the arm nearest your circle and used the move tool ‘M’ to manipulate just that edge.
Pressing a arrow key will lock your movement to an axis restricting your direction of travel.
For this to work the arm and the circle have to be in separate Groups, otherwise trying to use the move tool will manipulate all connected geometry.
If the end of the object nearest your circle is already the correct thickness then moving just the edge connected to the “П” should work without requiring you to group the arm and the “П” separately. However, if you don’t create separate groups, once you move the edge of your arm to the edge of the “П” you won’t be able to move it back without warping the geometry of the “П” later. If you decide for example to reduce the thickness of the arm by .5mm your geometry will be connected and you’ll have to do a lot of work to recreate what you have here.
FWIW, I showed him “Live” a few minutes after his last post.