A good friend of mine was recently tasked with building a coffin for another friend. The coffin was to be a simple, rustic pine box assembled with trunnels. It was to have rope handles instead of traditional metal or wooden ones. Since he had little time to work with, he made a quick SketchUp model of the coffin to show his friend. He wanted to show the rope handles and asked me how to model them. After I showed him how I’d do it, he suggested I make a video and do a blog post. So here it is.
There could be a number of other applications for this sort of thing. Twisted wire drawer pulls and rope molding come to mind.
There are a few extensions used in this process. The links to them are below.
TIG-Weld — There are other tools for welding edges and SketchUp 2021 has a native Weld Edges feature.
Bezier Spline — You could also use FredoSpline.
Give it a try and see what you can come up with.
–Dave