SketchUp Component question

I use Dado & Rabbet joints for drawer construction and made std components for a drawer sized at 10 x 10 x 4 then for a project I bring these in and resize by P/P or Move to meet the project requiremets.

Now the question I have is as I bring these components in to the current drawing I rename them and inside the drawing the new name is used but using cutlist I get the origional component name plus a number. I have even tried a copy and make unique then deleting the origional and cutlist still uses the origional name plus a number.

Is there an way to get cutlist to use the new name for the component?

Keith, I sent you an e-mail about this.

I want more details.

FWIW, Keith sent me a file or two that illustrate the problem. Seeing what Keith was seeing made it fairly simple to diagnose the problem. On the off chance this will help someone else, here's the text of my e-mail back to him.

Eureka! I see the problem. Don't worry. I won't run through the streets naked like Archimedes.

Nested components.That's the problem. Look at CutListTest.skp. Your components are coming in as nested. It's like they have two component 'wrappers' and you've only changed the Definition Name of the outside wrapper. the CutList plugin drills through to the lowest level components to get the right dimensions and so on. Drilling down is good because if you make a 'super' component, say from the drawer parts, the plugin won't give you a block the size of the drawer box. It'll still tell you what the parts are.

So, how are saving the components when you make them? My guess is that your method of saving them might be creating the the nesting. At least for the moment, you can check your components for nesting and explode the outer wrapper to get rid of it. To check for nesting you can either look at the Outliner. If there's a + to the left of the component name, it is nested. A nested component usually consists of other components so you might see a drawer component and when you click on the plus sign you'll see the sides, fron, back and bottom listed. In the case of your model, you just have the single component listed.

The other way to check is to double click on the component in question. If you get the black dashed line bounding box and another blue bounding box, it's nested.

How's that?

And still more thanks to Dave the Answer Man. Dave's intimate knowledge of the SU app allows me to remain a product 'user' and sure saves me from having to go into a deep learning curve on the application. Thanks again!

I thought it would also be helpful to confess how I got into the nested component problem in the first place.

What was happening was that when I made the standard drawer parts to save as components I made them components thinking that to import them they needed to be components before saving.

To correct my problem I opened all components (one at a time) and exploded the component then purged and re saved. Now when I make a drawing and import drawer parts and change the def name cutlist uses the new name.

Thanks to Dave problem solved.

Keith

Glad to help Keith.

Keith's idea of creating components for later use is a good one. Why draw the same thing over and over? Once you've made the components, open the Components browser and open its secondary window. Set the first window to In Model and the second one to the folder where you'll store the components. Then just drag the In Model components to the destination. That way you won't end up with nested components when you bring them in to another model.