Thanks Dave, I think I'll use your method from now on. It's the neatest way to make barrel springs.

Although the intersection method would allow someone to make more interesting profiles if they needed to, if they could tolerate the time it takes for SketchUp to calculate the new path and then follow it

@dave r said:

@mattarth said:

I would like to draw a barrel spring.

Thanks in advance,
Matt

Matt, how accurate does your barrel spring need to be? Would this one play for you?

This was easy enough with Draw Helix and Follow Me. I didn't bother with the ends but they would be trivial, too.

This is great, DrawHelix is exactly what I needed to know, thank you.

I've since tried to make it using a spiral road intersected with a barrel shape:

but it wouldn't follow the whole curve, only the upper or lower half (I was getting the "this does not appear to be a valid path" error when I tried to follow the curve as a whole).

This is great for making a helix, thank you.

Does anyone know of a way to make a helix with a radius that is a function of the distance along the original curve? I would like to draw a barrel spring (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=barrel+spring&hl=en) but I don't know how to make it in sketchup. The radius would be something like r=x*(1-x)+1 where x is distance along the curve. Alternatively I could calculate a list of coordinates myself and input them; is there a way to do that in sketchup?

Thanks in advance,
Matt