Hi Leonard,

> There is a center hole surrounded by a hexagonal
> group (6) and then hexagonal-based concentric rings
> of holes thereafter with a wedge of holes in the left
> over spaces.

It's a bit hard to follow this just from a text description, do you possibly have a drawing or sketch or something that you could post to illustrate?


> Of course these holes follow the surface of the shallow bowl.

Normally to make an array of holes, you would make an array of circles, using any of the Transform/Array commands, then do a boolean command and pick the circles as the cutting objects.

However, it sounds like you want these holes to not be aligned to a single direction and instead change orientation to hug the contours of a surface?

If so then that is a lot more difficult, MoI does not currently have any specialized tool to replicate an object along a surface while changing orientation. Depending on what you need, you may be able to project some curves on to the surface and then use the Array curve command, there is a sample of that method here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2262.6

Otherwise if there is no automatic array command that does what you need you will need to place each hole individually by rotating it into place.


> 2/ These holes, on the handle side, have eased (convexed) edges. So,
> whatever is used to boole the holes, should flair out to ease the edges.

You might approach this by doing a chamfer operation on the top edge of the hole after you cut it.

That produces an effect like this:



Or if you want a rounded piece in there then you do the same thing but with the Fillet command instead of Chamfer.

- Michael