[EDITED from the original, in the light of experience developing the components. This post contains the latest two, which work as expected.]
I’ve done some work on making Kreg pocket hole components, in the end settling on two variants.
They replace my former 3D Warehouse Kreg pocket holes and screws components, with greater ease of use, and have been uploaded there in their (hopefully final) current form.
The final two versions, each contain eight separate Kreg pocket hole components, one for each of eight finished size board thicknesses.
Board thicknesses range from 19mm to 44mm (almost exactly 3/4" to 1 3/4").
To use these components, OPEN either, explode and delete any size you don’t plan to use, leaving up to eight separate components. You can save them to a component collection, or just copy and paste them into your model, as needed.
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Basic pocket hole component, which will Glue to Any face, and Cut Opening. After placement, with rotation if needed, you can explode it to merge its geometry into the board but that isn’t necessary and may not be helpful. It will not expand the bounding box of the board, whether exploded or not, and this variant should be used (unexploded) if you want to use a CutList extension to list board and fixing sizes and quantities in a full model. Each component contains a Kreg pocket hole, and a low poly 3D Kreg screw head, but no screw shanks.
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The same pocket hole component, this time with the addition of four lengths of Kreg screw, with the same 3D screw head, and 2D Face Me screw shanks of different lengths. The screw length is selectable by R-clicking on it, then choosing Dynamic Components/Component Options from the context menu, then selecting the length from a drop down list of lengths: 30mm (1 1/4"), 38mm (1 1/2"), 51mm (2") and 64mm (2 1/2"). You can also choose not so show any screw parts, or only the head. This one can’t usefully be exploded. It is useful if you want to show an X-ray or cut-away view of the Kreg jointed assembly, and/or to check whether the screw length you have chosen will fit within the board it is screwed into. But it will expand the bounding box of the board it is inserted into, which will be problematic if you want to use a CutList extension for board sizes.
To use, open a board for editing, and drag one of the components from the Component Browser into the board, placing its origin (marked by a guide point) on the edge of the board. It will glue to the face over which the cursor is hovering when you click to complete the insertion. You need to be careful not to move so far from the edge as to lose the Edge inference.
Rotate about the guide point, in the plane of the board surface to align the hole correctly if necessary.
The first type can be exploded to merge the geometry into the board. This should not affect the bounding box or component listings in a CutList plugin. But you will need to set the options in CutList to show Kreg* as a Fixing or equivalent.
It works more easily in Open CutList from the Extension Warehouse than in the CutList 4.1 also found there. The latter only lists the lowest level in the component heirarchy, and so won’t list a board with subcomponents in it. In the latter plugin, exploding the hole, and merging its geometry with the board will work, if you also move the screw head and screw shanks outside the parent board.
Here are the SU models of the two types, saved back to an older version 2014 to make them more widely usable. These versions are revised from the original post to correct various minor size errors pointed out helpfully by Claire Z (@EosDawn) (see below).
Kreg pocket holes and screwheads v2014.skp (271.6 KB)
Kreg pocket holes and screws DC v2014.skp (303.4 KB)
And here are images of the two types inserted into a board in v2014.
Type 1 - no screw shanks
Type 2 - with screw shanks, default length appropriate for board thickness
To use these components in v2014, you will need to update the built in Dynamic Components extension to at least v1.5 (it shipped with v1.3). If you don’t do that, after inserting a Kreg component, double clicking to open anything for editing will trigger two successive errors
Search older topics in this forum for how to install extensions manually.
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