You’re pulling our chain, surely?
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Use a toolbar that has it. Have you edited your toolbar. SketchUp has had a rectangle tool all the time I have used it, since version 3, 18 years ago,
Here it is with all faces.
Each section is a group and you don’t need to explode them to work on them, simply double click to open for editing.
These are still awkward to work with because of the extreme number of edges created by the circles. Personally I would delete them all and use a single component, but…
Please take some time to learn the basics. Your hundreds of models in 5 years could be thousands.
Carriage.skp (3.2 MB)
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Sorry guys I have no idea where the toolbars are and when I drop down “tools” there is no rectangle in there. I see now it is under draw. I rarely use any of that stuff.
Also it is hard to learn when the answers to my question give me more questions. Maybe I’ll just buy a book on it. I was just trying to figure out how to get around the small radius limits in Sketchup. As that seemed to be the root of the rivet problem.
I just use Sketchup to get what I want, I don’t use it for work or anything like that. Tons of the stuff shown in these photos was drawn by me in AutoCAD and imported into Sketchup to turn into stl files… all without rectangles. https://goo.gl/photos/7y7vsMLuKt2Q7o6T7
You can see a lot of it has rivets, just not as many as this particular model.
Thanks for all the help.
Box,
Is there a way to save that as a before 2019 version?
Thanks for all your time.
Chris
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Carriage_v2017.skp (12.6 MB)
You can e.g. start here
Customizing Your Workspace | SketchUp Help
As well as the left side “links” of this page there are additional basic things you can read… 
Thanks again I can work with that! In a few days I’ll come back a share a photo of the first print.
Chris
Glad to see that you are getting answers that are helping you! Based in the questions that you are asking I would highly recommend you take @Box ’s advice and spend a few hours taking the Fundamentals course on learn.SketchUp.com
I know it sounds painful to stop producing and go to class, but take the rectangle tool for example… just learning how to use that one tool will mean you are 4 times as productive versus using the line tool!
It’s hard to realize that there are other ways to do something when you learn to use a tool in a vacuum, but if you follow the advice to learn the basics, you could be exponentially more effective as a modeler in very little time!
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As an aside I have to say the level of work Chris is doing with one or two hands tied behind his back is pretty amazing.
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Although this file is working and I’m making progress. I have no idea how you guys can do this stuff quickly. My Sketchup is running so slow on this file that everything I do with my mouse as a 4-5 second lag to appear on the screen. This is similar to my original problem.
Here is the file as it is now. It is far from finished. But can anyone open it and suggest why it is running so slow?Long Island boxcab FORUM.skp (14.9 MB)
I don’t need to open it to know that it is the circles, each has 96 edges and now you are extruding them so you are doubling the number of edges, plus adding faces.
Someone once said something about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different.
Here is an example of what you could be working with given a bit of effort to learn.
All those rivets are one component.
Check the model and see how slow it is now.
I haven’t done it here but they could all be assigned to a layer which can be turned off and on as needed.
Rivets.skp (557.2 KB)
Have no idea if I should reply. I don’t understand how a domed rivet is less information than an extruded cylinder. A dome should have many more faces and edges than a cylinder. I don’t understand the group thing either. Did you have to select each circle one at a time (holding down ctrl the whole time) to be able to group them all together? And opening that last drawing all of the rivets are solid underneath them, they should be hollow. But when I try to select the circle under them a blue box pops up around the rivet. All of that would show up in Netfabb later as errors. Also how did you even get the rivet that small? Further above you said I had to work in full size to do that as when I tried the follow me tool would just make the 1/4 circle disappear.
I appreciate the help, but I doubt I would understand any of this unless it was all listed somewhere step by step. If I can’t even make a single rivet there is no way I could make 2 of them into a group. At the small size I work in an extruded cylinder looks like a rivet even under x10 magnification.
I watched a video on groups and components and I really do not understand it any better now. If I take 3 circles and make them a component, then if I extrude one, all 3 should extrude, but they didn’t. It is like how you showed me to make a rivet, but when I tried it didn’t work.
This is at the heart of your issue.
You acknowledge that a cylinder is good enough to look like a rivet, but earlier argued that you needed incredible detail and therefore had to use such highly segmented circles.
Reduce the segmentation of your circles and your model will immediately become more workable.
I already suggested that you model and print a row of rivets with different circle segment counts to your N scale. Using 96 segments on a small detail exceeds your printer resolution maybe tens of times. Assuming an exaggerated rivet at 2" diameter, one segment to N scale would be about 0.0004 inches, maybe ten times smaller than the capacity of your printer.
Before I figured out to just scale a model up bigger to get Sketchup to work I would use small rotated squares (diamonds?) as rivets and they would print OK. I used the squares because if I imported a drawing with small circles they would disappear in Sketchup. Sketchup doesn’t like small radiuses.
An item like a curved roof needs to have many segments so it doesn’t turn out like a stop sign. Those steam locomotive boilers and domes need high segments, but rivets do not.
I have no way to change the rivet circle segment amounts in AutoCAD. Simple items with just a few circles I will redraw in Sketchup, but thousands of rivets would be crazy to redraw. That and in Sketchup it is very hard to get it to find the center of a circle for a basepoint. In the videos I watch it says to hover over the circle and the center point will show. But the majority of the time this doesn’t work. This makes copy and paste very difficult. Very simple in CAD. I could redraw 1 rivet circle in Sketchup and keep copying it over and over if the center point thing would work.
The diameter and height of the rivets I’m drawing here have already been proven to work on my printer. This photo is the model from the last time my Sketchup slowed down.
You can’t blame the software if you continue to refuse to learn how to use it.
I created all those rivets in exactly the places you put them with a few clicks and an understanding of the software.
Asking why you are having problems then refusing to accept the answers is not a way forward.
And certainly something I don’t want to spend any more time on.
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