I’m modeling a handle assembly that will be made of 3/4" thick wood. Because it would otherwise be prone to breaking along the grain at the ends, I put dowel pins through to give the wood more strength.
I will have the ends where the dowels penetrate rounded in the final product. I cannot figure out how to draw this. I can put the dowels in before using the Push/Pull tool to show the rounding, but it stops at the first point it encounters geometry for the dowels. I can’t put the dowels in after using the Push/Pull tool because I can’t figure out how to show the cylinder geometry through a non-planer face.
The attached file shows putting the dowel geometry in before rounding with Push/Pull. The surfaces shown in red highlight the problem. I couldn’t draw the other option because I don’t know how.
Can anyone show and old man what’s wrong with his thinking?
Push/Pull stops because it’s running into other geometry. I would create the shape of the handle with the radiused ends. Then create cylinders as “drills” and use Intersect Faces to create the holes. You can use copies of the cylinders as the dowels and cut them off in a similar way with a curved surface that matches the radius of the handle. This whole process would be easier to manage with a style that shows the edges and with no materials applied.
This would be much easier and less work with Bool Tools 2 which will work in SketchUp Make.
There are many ways to tackle this. As your SketchUp use gets more sophisticated and you embrace using groups and components to separate parts of your assembly the methods you use will change. Starting with where you are at, all raw geometry and focused on the push/pull tool I’ll offer this method. If you press the modifier key while using push pull, rather than moving the selected face, SketchUp will leave the selected face in place and push/pull a copy of the face, dragging new faces through any geometry it encounters. Then you can erase un-needed geometry. Selecting the cylinder walls and intersecting with newly created curved wall will divide the cylinder along those planes, then again you can erase un-needed geometry.
There are better, quicker methods using components or a solid tool approach like Bool Tools. But modified push pull is an important concept to grasp.
I spent some time trying to digest what you guys told me.
@DaveR: I tried doing what you showed in the video clip without success. Here’s what I did after pushing the ‘dowel pins’ out beyond the curved edge of the ‘handle’ where the model is already defined as Make Group.
Placed the cursor over the model and right clicked and got a menu with Intersect Faces - Model choice (only). No joys.
Selected the model and chose Edit Group then right clicked and got a menu with Intersect Faces - Model/Context choices. No joys.
Selected the model, chose Edit Group, then triple clicked to select the entire model (again) then right clicked and got Intersect Faces - Model/Context/With_Selection choices but swiping as you demonstrated did not remove the ‘dowels’ only highlighted the ends of the geometry.
Is there a modifier key I should have used or something besides ‘swiping?’
UPDATE: I no sooner finished this post when I realized I might not have deleted after swiping left to right. Doing so removed the ‘dowels’ except for the circles that had been the outer ends in the geometry. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time.
I’m still working on the information given by endlessfix. I’ll report later.
Charlie_v: I don’t understand what you mean by ‘equidistant flip along’ but I appreciate the bonus points.
@endlessfix:
I went back to my model before rounding the ends off but after inserting the dowels. The model was/is defined as Group. I chose to Edit Group them used the Push/Pull tool to select the rounding off surface on the top. The modifier key message is shown in the screenshot. Choosing CTL only pushed the surface all the way through without cutting the selected geometry away.
Charlie_v, I learned about Flip Along thanks to duckduckgo and YouTube; but I don’t understand the equidistant hint. Are you suggesting that I just do half the model them flip it to get the other half drawn?
You need to first select all of the geometry like I did. THEN run Intersect Faces.
Notice in my video that the pull isn’t a group or component at the point when I ran Intersect Faces. There’s no reason to make it a group or component yet.
You have to press Delete after selecting the geometry. Listen to what I said in the video. Swiping across it only selects the geometry.
No. You just have to press the Delete key after you’ve selected the stuff you want to get rid of.
