Hi all. Im finding my way around sketchup and working out quite a lot on my own but I’m having trouble getting a mitre past the moulded section of this frame. Can anyone explain how to mitre a ‘non flat’ surface please?
Frame moulding pattern.skp (19.9 KB)
Sure thing. Is the bead on the outside or on the inside?
The bead is on the inside
OK. Give me two shakes.
From left to right.
Use the Protractor tool to set a guideline at the mitre angle. Use it as a reference for drawing a “cutting plane”. Note there’s no edges where the cutting plane passes through the moulding.
Select all of the geometry, right click on it and choose Intersect Faces>With Selection. Edges will be formed at the intersection.
Delete the waste.
There’s also this to look at.
Fantastic. Thank you Dave. I shall go and have a go.
My lamb is looking increasingly nervous. And prettier by the pint.
If you need a lot of such cuts, you can have a look at this slicer plugin ($) for speeding up the process…
http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/s4u-slice
Many ways to do the same thing:
{seldom click links - soz Dave}
As I showed in the link. 
Thanks for the help guys. Heres what I’ve been drawing with a separated view of the components drawn to make up the complete front.
Any critique is welcome. Im sure theres some mistakes.
Also, how could I easily resize the components for drawing different sized fronts? Scaling messes with the geometry of the mouldings so they no longer fit together.
framed drawer line kitchen front.skp (184.0 KB)
I had a look at your model. As far as the geometry goes, you did a pretty good job but you could improve the organization and the work flow. Here are some examples.
There’s way too much nesting of components and groups and when you made copies of geometry within the same component. For example, the selection is for the face frame mid rail. I selected the lowest level component. The geometry for the rail in the assembled view was copied to make the rail for the exploded view. If you were to run a cut list, the rail’s dimensions would be reported as the size of this blue bounding box. It wouldn’t make much sense and if you got to the shop and started cutting, you’d probably be confused by those dimensions. There are other places in your model where you did that.
The door stiles are groups but should be instances of the same component.
It is evident from working through your model that you drew a number of parts laying down on the ground plane and then moved them into position to assemble the door and the frame. That makes for mode work than you really need to do. It also leads to errors. Look at the left face frame stile. You’ll see it isn’t aligned with the rest of the face frame.
It was good that you used the same component for both the top and bottom drawer rails but you rotated the top one end for end to make it fit. You also rotated the stiles. A better way to get those copies into the correct orientation is to use Flip Along which is a mirroring operation. You asked about reszing which I’ll talk about later but this Flip Along operation is important to efficient resizing. Building the model with the parts in the right orientation will make the flipping routine much easier to manage.
If you look at the Outliner (on the far right) in the screenshots above you can see it is kind of a mess. I fixed up the model and made all the parts components. I did change some of the names to organize them better for the cut list. I did not change any dimensions of the parts. I also rotated the entire model to align its front edges with the red axis so the standard views will actually make sense. If you want to look at the door from the front, you can select the Front view and it’ll work fine. In your model, to get a front view of the assembly, you would have to select the Right standard view from the Camera menu.
And here’s the cut list from my revision of your model. The face frame stiles probably need a bit of adjustment in length and I wonder about the lengths of the door panel and rail.
Resizing the parts.
As you’ve found, the Scale tool is the wrong tool to use for resizing the parts because it scales the copes on the ends of the rails and such. Instead, use the Move tool. It’s SketchUp’s board stretcher. Open the component in question and make a left to right selection box around the end that needs to move. Then use the Move tool to move the selection. Make sure you get all of the involved geometry selected or you’ll distort the joinery.
If you want to make another door for a cabinet of a different size, copy these parts over to the side and right click on them. Choose Make unique to break their relationship to the originals and follow the instructions below. If you want to make another door that is the same height as the first but a different width, only the panel and rails will need to be edited. Make them using but don’t make the stiles unique. That way you’ll know how many stiles of a give length you need to make in total because they’ll show up as one line item in the cut list. You could make all the doors for your kitchen from this single door.
In the next screen shot you can see the selection on the end of the door rail. I drew a circle on the end of the rail so you could see what happens to the copies. I made an extra copy and rotated it end for end as you had done in your model. Notice where the circle is on that rotated copy. The top rail on the door has been flipped instead of rotated.
After moving the end, you can see that the rotated copy got lengthened on the wrong end. You could live with that and just move the entire component over to the right to compensate but that’s extra work. The flipped component moved in the desired direction.
You can resize the panel in the same way but you’ll need to make an edit to the panel first. Open it for editing and use the line tool to connect the front corners of the panel to the ends diagonal curves where the raising turns the corners. This will divide the flat face at the outside of the raising into four faces. Then you can select the entire raised area and the panel’s edge to move it.
Keep plugging away. It’ll all come.
p.s. If I missed something, forgive me. I’m doing this before my coffee.
framed drawer line kitchen front.skp (202.4 KB)
Can’t thank you enough for your efforts Dave. As I was working on this, I knew there were issues but didn’t know what questions to ask. You seem to have nailed it!
I’ll take my time and process all the info you’ve given me and start to build my knowledge of Sketchup.
Enjoy your coffee.
