I am modeling a treehouse and i have 4 knee braces that are made out of 4x6 material.
I modeled a 3.5" x 5.5" beam and rotated it 50 degrees. I think the rotation threw off the calculation somewhere. Is there a way to fix this? I tried adjusting the precision down to 1/2" (which i don’t want to do at all) and it’s still complaining, but this time with a 5.501".
It sounds like either you drew the beam slightly off size, perhaps due to having length snapping turned on, or maybe you got the bounding box slightly askew during edit. If you share the skp file we will be able to say for sure.
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Select the beam, Edit and Push/Pull to correct size. Often, when I need to adjust by a few thou, I draw a quideline offset to 5.5 and Push Pull to the guide.
Length Snapping if turned on and set to maybe 1/8" for carpentry framing may have prevented this 5.011.
I would guess you set Display Precision to 1/2". I dont think that would affect the actual beam size.
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Here’s the model I have right now. The specific part that’s an issue is “Knee Brace”
TreeHouse.skp (295.0 KB)
Also, feel free to criticize how I am putting this together. I am always willing to learn.
The cutlist is showing it the way you modeled it. Very likely the fact you have Length Snapping enabled contributed to it. As @slbaumgartner suggested, turning it off would help.
How did you go about drawing the brace in the first place?
I will try redrawing the beam. The way I drew this, was draw a rough rectangle, but then manually typed in 5.5", 3.5". I then extruded the beam about 10 feet, rotated the entire thing 50 degrees, lined it up with the rim joist, and cut our the section for the bird mouth.
Try without Length Snapping enabled.
It might also be that the geometry got distorted as you were making the cuts at the ends.
I redid the knee braces and had no trtouble with getting the section dimensions correct. I did use Trim from BoolTools 2 to trim the ends. You would find that a useful set of tools.
Thanks everyone for you help. I unchecked that box, and redrew the beam and it worked. I will look into BoolTools, because cutting that bird mouth by hand was a pain.
The birdsmouth end should actually be easy enough. Cutting the other end to match the tree trunk is the harder one.
That’s exactly how I cut the birdmouth. I am not at all worried about getting the bottom of the knee brace to follow the tree. I am mainly making this in sketchup to get an idea of how much lumber to get and to visualize the construction process.
With Length Snapping disabled it should be much easier to do.
Dave - what are you using to get that dialog box reporting the component size? I need this, and then I need to get all my clients and engineers to load it so that we can speed up our work…
It’s an ancient plugin by Jim F called Get Dimensions. I’m not sure if it is still available but I’ll look when I get a moment. Jim pulled his plugins some years ago. I have a keyboard shortcut set for it so it’s quick and easy.
Thanks Dave! I’ll see what I can find. I feel like I may have had that once upon a time…
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