Hi Wheel,

> I didnt use the " Arc tangent " tool on those side profiles either,
> I just eyeballed it...oops .

Yeah, just eyeballing it tends to cause problems with filleting later on down the road. Filleting is pretty finicky about that.


But actually, Arc tangent is probably something to use more for special circumstances and not really so frequently.

A few things that can work a bit more easily are first all instead of manually drawing in arcs by hand, you can use the fillet command on a polyline to replace corners of the polyline with automatically calculated tangent arcs.

I mean like for example if you have a shape like this:



You can then select it and run Construct / Fillet - that will allow you to pick corners of the curve to fillet:



Then you pick a radius (same as filleting an edge of a solid), and that will create tangent arcs for you:



If you have something made up of lines and arcs this tends to be the best way, just draw all the lines first, get the pieces joined together into one curve and then fillet them.

Then you don't have to actually mess around with drawing any arcs manually at all.

However, in the case where you have a big arc piece like you did in your example that needs something slightly different.

With a big arc piece instead of a corner arc piece, I would actually draw the big arc first instead of the lines first, like this:



Then there are some straightforward lines that can be drawn - make sure you have "Straight Snap" enabled while drawing these so you can see them snap vertically or horizontally:



Now to draw the final line such that is matches up tangent to the arc, you would start it at the bottom point, then as you move up to the arc you can find a "Tan" object snap on it that will be the point where the line is tangent to that arc, like this:








So you can see there that I drew the arc a big bigger to start with on purpose, so that I could find that snap point on it later on. In fact you could draw in a full circle there instead of an arc if you wanted.

Then to finish, you select the arc, and use Edit/Trim to cut off the excess part:



Using Trim like this to clean off excess bits can make it easier to construct things rather than only working exclusively off of the very ends of things all the time which tends to require some more careful planning to make sure everything is all precise (for tangent arc pieces).


Hope this is useful!

- Michael