Today’s problem is to muck with the grill design to fix a problem caused by a change to the inner profile of the grill. When assembled in CAD, the original grill design was found to bump into the latest body frame model, actually overlapping as “interference”, so its inner edge has to be moved. The original inner profile and the slightly moved new profile can be seen as two wavy horizontal lines along the lower edge close together. 

Each of the lines above marks the path of a particular grill tendril, which can have any kind of cross-section and even different at each end. Each tendril is designed as a two cross-sections with a -section sketches, one for each end of the tendril connected by a desired profile at either end. I prefer a triangle profile with rounded corners, and just scale it bigger or smaller wherever I use it.

Two of the three smaller “branch” tendrils have been moved to the new inner profile.  The one highlighted blue has not been corrected yet, but is about to be.  The right end of the tendril is still attached to the older lower profile line. It needs to be attached instead to the new upper profile like the two previous tendrils. The ends of the tendril are shown with blue arrows. The left end of this tendril doesn’t have to be moved and its local relationships can be seen in the two tiny green icons, which mean 1) make the tendril be tangent to the line it is branching to or from, and 2) the end point also ends at and attached to that branching line. The curvy shape of the line is known as a “spline curve”, whose shape is modified by moving around its “control points”, marked by the red arrows. When you move these control points, the curve moves but stays smooth in its new curvature. 

To move this tendril to the new lower profile, its two relationships at the right end are deleted by poking the little icons, then you grab the now-free end of the tendril and move it up to the new line. Once there, you tell it to be tangent to that new line, and also to have its end point on the new line, which are two different restraints. If you have done everything right, when you exit this line profile editor the tendril should now regenerate and snap to the new line.

DANG! WHERE IS MY NEW TENDRIL? And I can see four other goobers where tendrils don’t join smoothly.  Well, on the to-do list for mending tomorrow.