Trouble with push

I’m trying to make a mortise and tenon in my model for a table. The tenons are fine, but I’m having trouble getting the mortises. I’m making an outline with the tape measure, tracing over that with the line tool, then selecting the push/pull tool and trying to push it. Pulling works fine, but since this is a mortise I need pushing to work. When I push, I can see the depth changing in the measurements box, but visually nothing changes. I managed to get it to work once, but I have not been able to replicate it the 10 other times I’ve tried.

Is the leg a component or group? Did you open it for editing before drawing the rectangle for the mortise?

It is a component. I’m new to this so I don’t know what opening for editing is.

Either double click on the component with the Select tool or right click on it and choose Edit Component.

Part of the reason for making a component of the parts is to protect them from being modified by other geometry. Think of it as putting a wrapper around the geometry. In order to make a change to the geometry in the component, you need to open its wrapper first. kind of like adding tomatoes to a sandwich wrapped in Saranwrap.

That worked! Thank you! As a follow-on question, is it possible for me to rotate a component? I have the 4 legs already, but because the mortises all face different directions I will have to redo this whole process on the other three legs. If I could simply copy this one that’s complete and then rotate the copies that would be much easier.

You can rotate them but it would be better to use Flip Along and create mirrored copies. I’ll hunt up a tutorial thing I did a while back that should give you an idea.