How can I make a hole through a round bar?

SketchUp
1

Folks,

I have been having tremendous difficulty making holes through a rectangular cuboid. I draw a rectangle, pull the top surface up to make a solid object, draw a circle on the top of it, push the circle down through the solid, but I never see the colour distortion that people speak of. If I continue to push, it makes a bar sticking out of the other side of my solid, but at the point that the hole meets the bottom surface, something changes - the circle around the bottom of the hole appears to go more solid. It still leaves a selected circle, however, and if I flip the model over, there is a circle on the bottom side, but I can’t see through the hole. If I now delete the selected circle, which is coincident with the bottom side, it deletes the entire bottom side - so that’s apparently what I was seeing at the bottom of my hole - the inside surface of the bottom of my cuboid. If I flip it over, it looks like the inside of a shoe box, with a tube attached to the top surface.

Well, after a lot of fiddling about, I eventually got the four holes I wanted, but I got to wondering - if the bottom of the hole was not parallel with the surface it is piercing, what then? What if I make a cylinder, and want to make a hole perpendicular to its longitudinal axis (in other words, a hole through its diameter)? In that case, the bottom of the hole could not be parallel with the either the entrance or exit surfaces, because they are both curved. I looked for variations of “hole through a cylinder” on this forum, but it didn’t get any hits. Is it even possible with Make? (I know the pro version has a lot more capability).

3

One way to do it (bore a hole through a cylinder perpendicular to the cylinder’s long axis) is draw a line perpendicular to the cylinder from a point on the cylinder where you want the borehole centered, and draw a another circle centered on the end of this line, perpendicular to the cylinder diameter. Then push-pull the new cylinder through the first cylinder so that it protrudes from the other side. Then select the new cylinder and Intersect Faces with Model. Delete both protruding ends of the new cylinder and you’re left with a hole through the first cylinder.

4

Here’s a quick demo of one way.

3 Likes
5

See this tutorial model for ideas:

6

Gentlemen, that’s brilliant. I had such difficulty making holes through a much simpler solid that I didn’t think this would be possible, and I also tried searching for holes through prisms and the like - but didn’t get a single hit. I couldn’t find it covered on YouTube either. I guess this method would work for all solids - including the simple ones. Now, at least, anybody searching the forum for this will find an answer. I’m going to play with this a bit just for the intellectual exercise, though I don’t need to do it yet for my project. I have never worked with other CAD packages, other than MS Powerpoint - and that’s hardly a CAD package - but it seems to me that SU is truly a remarkable package to be offered free.