Oh, okay! That sounds potentially very useful. By “repair edges”, does that mean join any that are not already joined and have no reason not being joined?
Yes @Saul if you have not checked out some of the stunning work that @TDahl has done on the Viking spacecraft you are in for a treat. Given what I’ve seen of your tank thread I think you will appreciate it.
I use Eneroth Auto Weld, running in the background. It’s been installed so long, silently doing its awesome job that I have forgotten one could ever have problems with the follow me tool. I weld manually for pathways and in some rare instance to make curves deform in a controlled way with the scale tool, as in when making onion dome shapes.
2 Likes
I can remember requesting a welding function (before “welding” was a commonly used term in SU) and finally Todd Burch of Smustard created the plugin (I believe that was the first or second year after SU was able to use plugins). For quite a long while it is was my most commonly used plugin.
I use weld quite often, usually for the reasons DaveR listed above.
If dealing with complex overlapping objects, exploding groups, or when doing Boolean operations to “curved” geometry a lot of segmented non-smooth edges can be generated. So, I may select and weld edge-sequences before doing Booleans and/or afterwards; that way future selection of edges will likely be easier and faster.
1 Like
You mentioned in your original post that you use weld to keep your geometry together when push/pulling lines. I would suspect you not using groups correctly.
Are you using grouping?
Welding before using Push/Pull makes sense.
What happens for me often if I don’t pre-weld before pushing/pulling a circle, say, is I get circumference lines between surfaces, linking the segment joins. Welding before pushing/pulling prevents this. It doesn’t happen all the time when pushing/pulling a surface, but often enough that I’m always mindful of the issue.
I asked if you are grouping geometry.
From all you state, it seems you need to weld geometry to keep the geometry together. I rarely use weld. Others have also said they rarely use weld.
Do you draw a rectangle and then select the rectangle, and then make it a group? That is how geometry is held together, not welding.
Welding in sketchup is when you join segments together, it is not related to grouping.
The only time I use weld is when I’m pushing/pulling things with broken edges or surfaces, and when I have to work with some long and often complex edge (so I don’t always have to do the “shift click click click click click…” thing.) Other than that, almost never.
And yes, I use groups. Once I’ve completed a piece of the model I create a group. At first I never bothered, but I soon learned the folly of that! Thus a lot of tedious de-construction followed and then group creation. Also, I discovered the hard way that gigantic and complex monolithic models do weird things when you re-orient them, and they take a loooonnnng time to do these weird things. 
Sauls first question was “do you weld edges all the time?”.
No one has answered that question. I believe the answer is “no you do not need to weld edges all the time.”
I asked Saul if he ever uses GROUP command. If he is not using grouping he will have a mess when he uses push/pull.
I can’t imagine welding geometry all the time makes any sense.
Usually I only have to weld for push/pull actions less than half the time. Sometimes a circle (eg.) will dissolve itself into non-connected segments. I don’t know why, but then I don’t really understand a lot about any of this stuff.
Follow me will explode circles and arcs. Being too small will tend to explode circles and arcs. There can be a variety of reasons why edges get exploded, so the answer is basically, weld as needed.
1 Like
Ah! Okay. I do use Follow Me quite a lot.
I answered. I rarely weld.
All of us read this as a personal “you”, not a general one, because there is no general stance on this one, unlike grouping for example. Everyone agrees that grouping is life, and that not grouping is a nightmare.
no consensus on welding, so you have all our individual answers.
3 Likes
I will pose the question without the ,you,.
Do edges need to be welded all the time?
Does a cube constructed of individualy drawn edges need to be welded all the time?
Or would grouping be more correct?
The answer then is… “all the time” NO.
I am unable to state my question in an understandable way.
I guess my question was really about welding edges and segments that were, for whatever reason, not continuous.
Such as, “When you’ve completed a drawing, do you weld the whole thing into one continuous edge (so to speak)?”
This is an example of a push pull with and without welded edges
before push pull (notice the edges unwelded)
afert push pull (notice the vertical lines)
I answered that one too.
No, there is no consensus on welding. Some people might tell you to weld all the things you can, some other will tell you to forget about welding.
I’ll answer like Rtches, No. No they don’t NEED to be welded all the time. Because welding is something you do BEFORE the action, but you could soften / smooth after the action, or even delete the extra lines (looking at the example Rtches provided)
in some specific cases welding is really useful, but in most cases, it will just bring a visual result that can be achieved later while modelling and therefore don’t require any preparation in advance.