Can someone please look at my model and assist me in getting it to make the mortises under the tenons. As you can see, one worked but all the others won’t go under the surface. I can’t figure out what the deal is. thanks! wishbone7.skp (1.2 MB)
How did you create this component? The surface isn’t flat (notice how the guideline, which is parallel to the red axis disappears into the face) so when you draw the rectangle for the mortise, you aren’t getting it on the face.
Here you can see all the softened edges required to make the surfaces on this thing.
If that face isn’t supposed to be flat, you could draw the rectangle for the mortise above the surface, use Push/Pull to push it through the top surface and use Intersect Faces and the Eraser to leave the mortise.
If that surface should be flat, you should start by redrawing the part.
Ahh, that explains it. I just used the circle tool and added some parts to it. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be flat, but then again Sketchup does weird things on me a lot. I will redraw it then. thanks for your help.
There seems to be a lot of weird geometry in your model. There are also some kind of odd dimensions. Or at least the look kind of odd to me.
Since there are so many horizontal circles in this model, I would start the model centered on the origin to help keep things aligned.
But if it is not flat, how am I able to select that surface as a single entity and it all fills in blue?
I’m not sure exactly what you are asking. There’s enough bad geometry in that one part, I would redraw it from scratch to make it clean and ideally make SketchUp report it as solid before trying to cut the mortises.
Many of the parts in your model have geometry that needs to be corrected or cleaned up. That stuff will get in the way of easy modeling.
A ‘surface’ can be selected in one and all turn blue, as you put it, but that ‘surface’ isn’t a single face. As @DaveR shows, your surface is made up of many faces.
Turn on hidden geometry from the view menu to see them.
As I poke through your model I’m seeing a number of other problems like circles not drawn on axis.
Here I’ve redrawn that part on the right. I used more sides for the circles so that it looks rounder but you can see that it’s flat where it’s supposed to flat.
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Looks to me like you may have moved parts, such the concentric circles after drawing them and so the surface made folds (“auotold”) to accommodate the move relative to the outside edges. Usually you have to press a key to make that happen, otherwise the surface “tries” to stay intact as one face. Picture added to show what I mean moving the center circle and autofolding (not actually that easy to do by mistake) and rotating the result.
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DaveR, can you please attach that file? It looks like you nailed it. What prob took you 10mins took me forever. But I don’t understand, why doesn’t your version have lines going across the shapes?
pbacot, yup, that’s right. I think that’s what I did.
A table lamp from Metropolis
thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment 
Here you go.
wishbone7.skp (2.1 MB)
I kind of echoed the shape of your hoops although I’m not sure what your plan is for assembling the thing.
I’m not sure what steps you took when you were modeling this but in the process you managed to explode the various curves into their individual edge segments. I didn’t do that. I also softened edges that needed it. As I mentioned before, I used larger numbers of sides for arcs and circles to get smoother curves as well.
Thanks so much, this will help me a lot!
You’re welcome.
If you actually use any of my model, you’ll want to check it for dimensions. Yours seemed to have very strange dimensions as I mentioned previously. I didn’t feel like typing all those places to the right of the decimal so I rounded them a bit.
DaveR, sorry to bother you again but I am trying to use your model, and the arches you made are not quite like mine. Mine are a little thicker in places. When I try to adjust them, they get all distorted. Can you please trace mine somehow? The glass dome and slot it fits into need to be the same too because that glass piece is already made by the glassblower. I also for the life of me can’t figure out how to get rid of the white background. Thank you!
Thicker in which direction? It’s impossible to tell from yours what the real dimensions are supposed to be.
There is no slot in your model for the dome to fit into. What are the actual dimensions of the dome and how deep is the slot supposed to be?
It’ll probably be a few days before I have time to do anything more with your model.
As for the white background, you can edit the style or select a different style in the Styles panel.
The middle part of the arches is a little thicker in mine than yours. I know it’s hard to explain. In the big piece below the dome, there is a slot on mine that it slides into to hold it in place. I think yours has it too (otherwise it would be all solid). But it’s ok, I am supposed to meet with CNC guy who will build this later today, so I can use what I have and make some fixes from your input. thanks again for your time and quick emailing.
The shapes I see here are all just drawn outlines that are then extruded --except the bulb like shapes. Don’t manipulate the arches, but instead add to the profile or redraw. If you use components it’s quick to redraw one and have it all updated in the model. Example attached – without bothering to see exactly the shapes you are talking about.
The rectangles are just the cheat I came up with in the moment to give a coplanar surface for what I was drawing. a separate plane in a separate group underlying the object works better perhaps.