Boolean operations not working -both objects closed polysrf's

[Revel_Woodard]

Hi-

I am doing some more 3D printing, this time with an industrial SLS machine. I have shelled the objects to be printed and am interested in generating some hexagonal infill for a few of the pieces, and joining the whole thing into a closed polysurface-- similar to what my slicer will will do for hobbyist 3D printer .gcode files.

The honeycomb extrusion needs to be trimed at the socket as shown in the last photo and these two models need to be fused into one closed polysurface with no internal walls.

I have done this numerous times so far, and suddenly I cannot. title says it all-Boolean operations are not working even though both objects are closed polysurfaces. …I’m a recent Sketckup transplant, this kind of thing would not usually baffle me. too many 2d parallel plane intersections? I made the hexagon mesh with a boolean difference, that did bog the laptop for a bit. It seems to hang for quite a bit with some of these operations, and thats exactly what its doing with boolean operations now- for hours.

Whats a better way to do this?

Thanks,

-Rev

Rhino version 5.0.1
Hardware:MBP 2.7 ghz core i7, 16gb ram, osx 10.10.3

honeycomb.3dm (14.4 MB)

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[wim (Wim Dekeyser)]

@Revel_Woodard

Whats a better way to do this?

I would say by hand but that also takes some time…
I started looking at the parts around the socket and found an incomplete intersection that would get the boolean to fail:

At any rate… here is the final result. I didn’t make cavities below the socket interface and a few of the holes do get rather narrow when they pass the socket interface - check them with the clipping planes.
honeycomb - wd.3dm (12.5 MB)

[Revel_Woodard]

Very nice, thank you. Did the computer hang on you during this operation? The rear portion of that socket is indeed the problematic area, it would seem. Is there a way to get the infill in there too? in sketchup with this kind of problem we would scale up by a large factor…