This is my first post! I am a mere beginner of Sketch up trying to run before i can walk it seems, however i have committed to producing an animation so will have to persevere......I am trying to animate/rotate a thermal wheel and I tried to do this by:
Creating the wheel as a component. There are a set of diagramatic arrows above the wheel which i also made a component. Then I selected the componants and made them cylinders from the shape menu. After I inserted a hinge central to the underside and moved it down on the z plane. After I clicked on the UI button on the hinge and gave the accelerator value 10 and the dampening field a value of 5. Leaving the max and min values as zero.....what these do I don't know.......I ticked the ignore box and unticked the static box and left everything else unticked.

Then I selected the connect hinges button and first selected the hinge and pressing the left ctrl button selected the wheel and arrow components respectively I checked the properties of the wheel and the arrows and the box stated they were connected to the hinge.

It did not move when I pressed play. I then tried to make the lot a group and when I pressed play they all fell down the z axis. When I undid the group I made them all a component and they all fell down the z axis.

I tried a basic model with a cube created directly from the sketchy solids toolbar and did exactly the same as above and it worked. so i'm really scratching my head on this one......I have the latest version of sketchy physics aswell (i downloaded 3.2, and when i went to install it said now installing version 3.1, which was already installed).....

Am I missing something really obvious?

heeeelp (bangs head on desk).