What is the end result you are after? If as you said earlier it is a part of a motorcycle swing arm that you want to work out, you could have made 10 of them by now. It’s 3 pipes, one of them bent. You could make it out of toilet roll or paper towel tubes and a bit of cardboard. Even in steal with tak welds.
Even if you manage to model this correctly and hollow it will still cost about 250 dollars to print from most places, so you print it, get it back, it doesn’t fit, you spend another 40 hours remodelling it, pay for another print wait for it to arrive in the mail…
If the final swing arm was going to be made of titanium and would be ridden on the first trip to mars it might be cost effective.
As for your current model I really don’t know what to tell you. You don’t seem to understand the concept of groups separating geometry. The model should be 3 groups that you can pull apart and each should be a solid. None are solids.
Here’s one of your earlier ones cleaned up and made hollow along the pipes. SwingarmBox.skp (263.9 KB)
The end result I am after is to learn how to use this program to make patterns for fabrication. These motorcycles were handbuilt and there are no drawings. If I am able to make patterns I can share them so a set of pattens exist.
Making them out of toilet paper roll would not accomplish this as it is difficult to email toilet paper rolls, steal, etc.
I just found out last night that I can print at my local library for 10 cent a gram of filament. I have no idea how heavy this model would be, but at 10 ounces thats 280 grams or $28. That is a far better deal than the online guys.
Cost effectiveness is irrelevent here. Its about learning the process. I realize that my skill level is low, and I learn this stuff slowly, but I’m much better at it than I was 10 days ago, and I do appreciate the help I have received from 3 or 4 people on the forum. The difficulty is wading through the criticism, negativity, opinions, etc, to get to what is going to help me learn what this program is doing.
For example, why are all my shapes hollow? I get the feeeling from comments that this is bad, but I don’t know why its bad, or why it happens. When I push/pull a face, should it be solid?
In you animation above (thank you, these have been very helpful) it appears that you used the move tool to separate what I thought were groups, and parts of them were left behind. I thought creating groups would avoid this, so apparently I did not create the groups properly, but I’m not sure. You mention none are solids, and they should be. Thats a great discovery but how do you make them solid? This is a theme in the responses I have received it that the mistakes or lack of knowledge is highlighted, but no solution is offered. I have not found a make solid tool and have no idea why all my shapes are hollow…
So here is a screen print of me trying to add some of the left out bits to a group. The bottom of this tube was somehow not included in the group, I highlighted the faces and lines and added it.
However, no matter what I do there are two horizontal lines they will not add. Dont know why, they just wont. How to fix?
Why did the upper edged of the “followme” arc stay attached to the upper tube group? This makes the arc look hollow…
You see where the purple circle is? I am trying to add that face (it seems “stuck” to the upper tube) to the arc group. Can’t find a way to do it. Can it be done? How? What mistake did I make that attached part of the arc to the upper tube?
I added the circle to the bottom group that must not have been selected when the group was made. Is it problematic that the where the bottom tube and the arc intersect there is no face?
