hi, plenty of excellent tips and ideas, thanks guys! both of you´re very much needed here, each one with a unique understanding and wisdom

Thanks TIG, this sounds great, I will give it a try.

Liking the new avatar TT - congrats on the new job!

Selecting problem areas and intersecting faces with models might get you part way there.

Maybe Fredo Scale by Fredo 6 is your friend ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPbb8PPGtVg

Make the dowel a component and set its origin and axis alignment so you can simply drop the components in to place. Did you use even spacing between holes? Could you either post the model or at least a screen shot in X-ray mode so we can see the arrangement of the holes??

you may want use our tool BackUp Prefs v1.12 (Win only) for saving/restoring the SU 8/7/6 prefs to a file (no malware, no adware, no installation). [update] version 1.14 updated for being compatible w/ SU v2013/2014 [/update] hth, Norbert

No, just on Windows...

that makes sense. Thanks

Perhaps my 'Fix Reversed Face Materials'... http://sketchucation.com/resources/pluginstore?pln=FixReversedFaceMaterials There are several permutations... put basically... if you have applied UV mapped textures onto the backs of faces that are actually looking in the direction that their fronts should have been , then simply reversing the faces also flips their materials with them: moving their textures to the now 'hidden' backsides: to save you... this tool reverses the faces so their fronts are in the direction they ought to be [looking 'out'], and at the same time it flips their material, so that the front faces now have the textures that were previously on the back, and their UV mapping is also replicated properly; the back material is turned to 'default'...

All, thanks for the posts/links. I will look into them.

thank you. i'm sorry that was such an easy one. i googled to no avail. i'm guilty, after a few years of playing with sketchup, of not sitting myself down to a top to bottom investigation of all the menu items and their purposes. i've learned as i go and sometimes the easy stuff just eludes me.

You can't apply multiple styles in a single scene in SketchUp but it wouldn't be difficult to combine different image exports using different styles in an image editor. In fact I do that quite frequently. There were three or four different styles used for this image if you count the shadows as a style. [image: 6743292439_e1e53c5165.jpg] Four different styles on this one, too. [image: 5601922220_e0c573092b.jpg]

That's the one. I owe you for that Massimo.

Invaluable even for this old timer....

Your description gives little to go on. Where are you trying to save the file? Any other info you can provide?

@renderiza said: Window >> Preferences >> Extensions >> Install Extension... [button] Recommend also to download the SketchUcation Plugin Store toolset, to make it easy to install and manage your plugins... cheers! Thank you Renderiza, That made life easier.....

Just changed the heading to 'SketchUp Troubleshoot [Plugin set up advice]' to make it more searchable Mike

Eric Lay shows how to create complex cable bundles here... http://sketchucation.com/all-news/catch-up/439-catchup-edition-18 Not too similar to your request but it gives you a foundation to work from

@dave r said: Open SU8 from the icon. After it loads you can close it. Then you should be able to open files in SU8 instead of SU7. Yeah, I seem to remember something about it opening in whatever version you used last. Tried that but it didn't work, so I just uninstalled SU 7, problem solved