SU Stopped Chamfers -- for Noddy

[SketchUp Guru]

Noddy asked in his bench thread about drawing stopped chamfers. He'd like to do it without construction lines (now called guides). It could be done and I'll post an example shortly. I guess I don't mind using guides for this kind of thing so here's a quick way with guides first.

From left to right:

1. Layout guides to indicate the limits of the chamfer. Trace along and between guides to draw out the edges of the chamfer. Also draw lines between the corners at the lower edge of the "stop".

2. Delete the single line on the corner and you have a stopped chamfer.

3. Rather than repeating all that for the rest of the corners, copy the first chamfer around the leg. Drag a left to right selection box around only the geometry for the chamfer. Choose the Rotate tool and hit the Ctrl key to get the little plus sign next to the cursor. Set the tool at the center of the end of the leg using either predrawn guides or inferencing. Copy and rotate the chamfer 90°, hit Enter, type *3 Enter to make 3 copies each at 90° from the previous one. Delete the edges on the three sides to clear the waste and end up with the one on the right.

This last step works for a square piece. You can still make copies of the chamfer and move them into place on pieces that aren't square in section but it would require the use of the Move tool and maybe rotating or using the scale tool.

I'll make a second post for the version of the chamfer without guides. It will be a bit more difficult to see some of what's being drawn though.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Stopped chamfers without guides. For this I turned on endpoints so you can maybe see where some of the initial drawing was done.

Again from left to right.

1,2. I traced down the edge from the top corner and entered the desired distance. In this case 2". Then I traced from that end point another 1/4". I can explain the 1/4" if you need but it might be clear by the time I'm finished. I repeated that for the bottom working up from the bottom corner. All that resulted in splitting the edge into 5 segments. Then I drew one each adjoining face. I drew over 1/4" and then parallel to the edge and back 1/4". I ended up with the two skinny rectangles on the faces.

3. I connect the corners of the skinny rectangles up to the edge at the end of the 'stop' and also drew across between those corners.

4. I delete all the lines that I don't need and I have the chamfer. In this case there are some reversed faces that need to be corrected.

5. After fixing those faces.

After all that, the first chamfer can be copied around the leg as needed.

I prefer the first method because I am not splitting the edge into shorter segments but that's not really a big deal. I also have a shortcut set for Edit/Delete Guides so a single keystroke eliminates them.

 

[noddy67]

Thanks Dave. Very helpful. It was not so much that I didn't want to use the guide lines, more that I didn't want to repeat myself 8 times. Your rotate tool (that I haven't used up till now) method would solve that problem.
Thanks again.