Its interesting to see these solutions in sketchup, but this kind of thing is so much easier in rhino where there are dedicated tools for these sort of transformations.
For example, this took less than a minute in rhino using twist and fillet...
Personally, i find rhino and sketchup to be an excellent combination - rhino can read and write sketchup files, so it is very easy to simply import things from rhino into your sketchup model.
cheers
rabbit
twist&fillet.jpg