Hi Jeff, so I'm having some difficulty following along with your steps.

In your first post in this thread here, you posted this:




But even with showing all the hidden objects in the file you posted, I can't seem to find those objects - the closest things seem to be these?




Is it possible for you to post the model file that matches the screenshots that you posted? That would make it much more feasible for me to attempt to follow along with the steps that you are talking about in your question and to try and understand what you were doing.

When I can't get at the actual 3DM model file that goes along with your screenshots, it makes it much more difficult for me to understand, sorry.

So when I was talking about surface trimming, what I meant was something more along the lines of taking this long fillet surface here:



And trimming it by the edge of this smaller custom sweep piece that you made here:




Instead of doing a boolean to combine things together, you can also work with things at the surface level, trimming away parts of surfaces that you don't want to keep and then using the Edit > Join command to glue the surface pieces together back into a solid.

I guess you are doing something more like trimming each piece with a common line?

> Is this referring to #2 where I should use the "trim" command
> instead of Boolean DIFF?

It's more like - if you want to build a custom surface by a sweep for one piece of the model, to then splice this new surface into place you may want to use the Trim command to cut the original long fillet at the place where your custom piece starts so that will make an empty area for it to fill in.

That's a kind of surface modeling workflow where you can work with individual surfaces for a while instead of doing booleans. To do the surface modeling type workflow you generally use the Trim command to cut the surfaces up instead of booleans - booleans are more for operating on solids.


I am still pretty confused about your question though - I can't find the models to match your screenshots and I have not actually even seen where the zig-zag is located yet. So that's making it difficult for me to give you the best advice since I don't fully understand your construction method yet.

- Michael