The other day I received an e-mail from a gentleman who asking for some SketchUp help. It seems he’d gotten so involved in drawing his model, he’d forgotten to make components as he progressed with the work. Due to the sticky nature of geometry in SketchUp, he now had a big lump of geometry for the face frame and the top of his cabinet. This was going to create a number of problems for him later and he wanted to know if he could avoid having to draw all those parts from scratch. There are several ways to do it. The following video shows the method I showed him. I think this is the easiest and least likely to cause errors.

Instead of using his model, I’ve setup the door on a model I created recently. I did originally draw the door as the five separate parts including the joinery. For this video I exploded the components and deleted all the internal edges and faces. In this model, I already had the door as a component but this method would work just as well with loose geometry.

There are cases in which you might intentionally draw a model without making components of the parts as you go and then later, you need to have the separate components. You can use this process to quickly make the conversion. If you have mode complex shapes such as profiled edges, you may need to copy them as well as the faces I show here.

In the next blog post I’ll go through adding the joinery to the door parts now that they are components.

–Dave