Why am I havig trouble making a surface

top.skp (24.7 KB) Both arcs were drawn with the 3 point tool.
Among the stuff I have learned, If I draw a line from point 1 to point 2 a piece of it will fill in. The rest of it becomes a nightmare. I have tried to increase the segments on the arcs to as high as 72. The item had to be drawn in place. It is a top for a desk I am copying. The heights of the other objects are all equal and I used a surface to base the desk. The first file is the top, the second is the rest of it.
Desk R1.skp (256.5 KB)

The edges are not coplanar which explains why the face won’t fill. Notice the tildes in the Z coordinates.

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You can also reuse your arc from below. Because these arcs from above are not covering your arcs from below.

You would probably find it easier to think about it the way you’d do it in the shop. Start with a rectangle larger than you need and draw the edges on it. Then trim away the waste.

Do you really want the back curve to bulge out behind the top shelves on the sides?

Ok Dave, teach me again. How do you make the co-ordinates display? How do I interpret them?
I like the idea of starting with a rectangle, will try asap.
As far as the curve out the back, I haven’t even looked at that yet, thanks for mentioning that.

Thanks

That was done with the Text tool in the Tools menu. You need to click on endpoints to get coordinates like that.

In this example you want all the edges to lie on the same horizontal plane. In orders, they should have the same Z value. So you don’t really care about the rest of the values in the coordinates, only the last numbers. If they were all in the same horizontal plane, they should all have the same Z value.

Obviously it gets trickier when the plane the points are supposed to be on is at an angle to the axes.

If you use a rectangle to draw on, you’ll find it’s much easier to stay on plane. Look for the “On Face” pop up message as you are drawing.

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