SketchUp - missing command?

[RogerS]

I know.. a bit presumptious of me. :wink:

Think of a tall outside door with a tall single pane of glass. Simple construction. Two rails. Two stiles.

The way I'd go about doing this is to draw a rectangle and enter the door outer dimensions...say, 2000, 700. Then I'd draw some guide lines to give me the width of my stiles and top rail (assume that they are all the same). Everything so far has been done with real measurements.

Then I'd Offset to match the guide lines. Now all that is left is to increase the height of the bottom rail and therein lies the rub. If I select the inner rectangle and Scale then I can raise the bottom line and so increase the height of the bottom rail but I can't do it to any 'firm' dimension. I could put a dimension line out that indicated the height of the bottom rail but that takes multiple steps. As I see it I have to draw a new line up the outer dge and give it the length of the height of my bottom rail. Then select dimension and draw out the dimension. But then when you use the scale tool it jumps between values...eg 0.95 and 0.96 which could easily straddle the line that you want. And then you're faced with guessing what it might be. 0.955 maybe. Not enough. 0.956 then.

ideally I would type in the height of the bottom rail..and job done.

Or make the door from four recatangles - two rails and two stiles - and size to suit. Then faff around removing the extra lines etc but that seems a long way round.

Steve M suggested FredoScale but I've not had time to play around with that. It just seems to me that what I'm wanting to do seems so basic and yet so difficult to achieve simply.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Roger, if I understand what you want to do, you can do it quite simply. First, you don't need the guidelines if you'll be using Offset. Just use the Offset tool and enter the width of the stiles.

Next, say you want to add 200mm to the width of the bottom rail, drag a selection box (left to right) around the top edge of the bottom rail. then use the Move tool to move the selection up 200mm.

I can show you quickly if it would help.

This resizing method would also work in essence if you drew the rails and stiles as separate components. Suppose you've drawn in the groove or rebate for the glass as well as whatever profile you have on the inner edge of the rail. You would open that rail component for editing, drag a left to right selection box round the top edge of the rail including all the geometry for the rebate/groove/edge treatment and the use the Move tool to move it the desired distance.

 

[RogerS]

Brill...thanks, Dave. I knew there must be a simpler way.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Roger, here's an example of resizing using the Move tool. You can watch me change a little fern stand into a bench. Hopefully this will give you some ideas.

 

[RogerS]

Thanks, Dave. All clear now.

One thing...watching the bench video, did you work out how far to put the vertical guideline at the RH end so that the diamond panels in the slats were a whole number multiple to fit in or does SU automatically resize when you asked for a multiple copy ?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

I figured out the spacing ahead of time. SU won't automatically determine that. The length I added to make the bench was a multiple of the slat width.