How can I rotate a ring around a cyclinder?

Internal Elevator 2.skp (2.1 MB)
I created a rotating elevator, seen here within the rings colored in aqua. However, if you look closely, you can see the side mounting on the vertical rail is not quite perpendicular to the floor level of the elevator. Actually, I need to be able to rotate the elevator within the rings into different positions relative to the track mechanism and the underlying track. How can I rotate the cylinder independently of the rings in all situations?

All stationary things should to be organized inside a container (Group or Component), all rotatable things need to be in another container.

Internal Elevator 2.skp (2.3 MB)
OK, but the problem I’m now having is that I can make the rings a component, and the “track grabbers” another component, but I can’t seem to click my way to combining all of these parts into a single component. Is there a way to edit that into being?

Your model is unorganized, which is one reason you are having a hard time with SketchUp. Here are 2 ways to re-organize a SketchUp model.

  1. Use the Outliner to drag and drop components in-to and out-of other components

  2. Use Edit > Cut and Edit > Paste in place to move components into the correct hierarchy.

You have a component named “Rings and Track Grabbers” but your Ring components are not part of this component.

You have a “Internal Elevator” and a “Main Internal Elevator” component - what’s the difference?

You have faces and edges not in any component just floating around - where does it belong? Delete it if you don’t need it. Make it a Component if you do need it. (i.e. Hand-rails.)

You have an “Elevator” component and a “Complete Elevator” component - what’s the difference?

In the attached model, the “Internal Elevator” component is independent of the outer rings and should let you rotate it.

Internal Elevator-reorg.skp (2.1 MB)

Internal Elevator 2.skp (2.0 MB)
Well, that wasn’t quite right either, but I tried to follow your advice and got it working. I’m sure there are still excess nesting issues in here though. I had problems with components disappearing whenever I tried to move them into other overall components. But now at least I can rotate the rings and everything attached to them, plus the track and cement track segment and tracks, together.

You need to read up on Layers.
You have edges and their faces on different layers.
All raw geometry needs to be on layer 0 and only groups and components assigned layers for visibility purposes. Layers do not separate geometry!

You can successfully put geometry on different layers - but it is simpler if you put geometry on Layer0. I have put geometry on different layers without any issues - and there were additional benefits when it came to visibility. However you have to be a lot more careful.