You may be asking why this project was paused for so long. I had extreme difficulty making the handlebars. They bend in a very strange way in three directions and doing this in SketchUp is not an easy task. Last week I had an idea to make compound recesses in SketchUp using a dummy object. Basically you do not edit the mesh but work with a new 3D object which you edit and shape separately. Then, when you are pleased with the result, you move the dummy object onto the main object and merge the two for further editing. I tested this on the hand guards of the bike - with success. So I thought about a new way to approach the handlebars.
The most difficult part of that was to create a beam with a perfectly circular cross section. Making two or three round beams meet at the angled points is not easy and if you further manipulate the direction of the sections leads to distorted results with more or less oval cross sections. I thought construction could be done using the follow me tool but I had no idea how to start. Then, two days ago, I had an idea.
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I drew a line with three sections on the "floor".
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Then I rotated the segments a bit to make the shape askew.
The next step required to make a circle follow that path but up to then it was uncertain where that circle had to be positioned. Then it struck me: The only place where the circle could be aligned correctly was the center of the handlebar. And the center began as a straight line along the red axis. So I drew a circle there:
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and made it follow the path:
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This was exactly what I needed!!!
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A quick test mount proved that this idea finally lead to a pleasing result. I rotated the bar an bit and prolongued the handles so that everything matched the original pretty well.
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