{
If you don't want to cut up the base "shelves" kind of part and you have some long pillars that you want to be sliced up, for that you would not want to do merge, but instead pick all the pillars and then do boolean difference and use the shelf as the cutting object.
}

Thats the answer with the copy and paste part.

I dont have somthing specific to give you, It's just exercising MoI to figure it out. It's just a box with shelving and an array of the pillars through it to acheive the chopped up pillars and the best practices for MoI.

Thanks for the help, I've grown a bit!

Child of MoI,
Burr