many times in your drawing you will need lines to be a little bit longer or a bit shorter you’ll also need your lines to abut up the other lines that’s where the trim and the extend commands come in I’ve combined these two commands together because they’re practically identical in function the trim command will shorten your objects by cutting them away from different parts and then the extend command will lengthen your lines to an extension line
let’s open up the trim and extend example file
here we just have a series of different lines and circles crossing each other in some not
if you draw some lines vertically like the ones shown here and then some horizontally so that they cross back and forth this way they’re intersecting or they possibly could intersect if they were extended or trimmed all the way so let’s start the trim command just type in trim or just TR
because that will give you text we don’t want that so we want TR for trim it’s also found in the modify panel on the ribbon
and it’s a flyout and you have the option of using either the trim command or the extend command we’re going to start off with trim
once you start the command you have to pick an object this is the cutting edge line so if we select this line here then press ENTER and you can pick more than one line now we’ve established our cutting line or the trimming edge anything we click that’s on one side of that line will disappear just as if we took a knife and cut these lines right where our trimming edge is so if I pick here that goes away
same with all of these
you can use all of your typical selection methods most of the time you’re going to find that a crossing window or just a single pick like I did there will be enough to remove the unwanted items I also find that the fence selection option is handy to make sure to pick the objects on the side of the line that you want to be removed on you know the parts that you want to disappear now let’s try trimming some of these others
as you can see these objects were not cut the line did not physically go through them now there is a way to get this cutting edge line to project all the way across your screen so that you can trim these other lines because right now if I try to click them they won’t do anything but if I use the edge option I can tell it to extend and now it will trim these lines and that’s great because a lot of times you’re going to find that you need to trim something or cut it away but you didn’t put in enough of a cutting edge line so that’s pretty handy and you can always turn that off if you don’t want it back on the extend command works exactly the same way it just makes the lines longer
type II x4 the extend command or the full word extend or again you can come up to the modify panel up here in the ribbon
if you can’t find the extend command it’s probably hidden underneath the trim command
so now let’s select some lines we’ll pick this one here press ENTER and again you have the same options you have your selection options here your fence and crossing and you have edge
we’ll tell it to extend and now I can pick all of these lines and they will automatically extend
now that’s a pretty cool feature you can see that you can create a lot of line work just with the trim or the extend now let’s take a look at the trim and extend commands up here
we have a series of circles that are concentric now let’s say that we need to create a keyhole before this here how can we go about doing that well we’re going to use the trim and extend commands and we’ll be able to create some items to it since we have most of what we need already we can just start by trimming press ENTER and let’s select everything because we can you can use a trimming edge or an extension line and trim it at the same time so if we want to cut out a little notch right here we can and we can start picking what we need
as you can see we can do a lot of different things
because each of these
mine’s
lines
and we can keep trimming until were done
now let’s select these and erase it so we’ve made a quite different set of lines here so use the trim command again this time select the outer circle now I can’t trim
lines because there’s nothing to cut but if I hold down the shift key while in the trim command
it becomes an extend command
and that’s pretty interesting so in theory I don’t even need the extend command I have the trim command available
so I can pick these lines but if I want to draw something back I hold down the shift key and it will extend my selected objects now the exact same thing is true for the extend command only in opposite form
extend something
or I can hold on the shift key and trim it
it’s up to you but that’s a neat little trick so if you’re trimming and you cut it too short and need to put it back and don’t stop the command and start a new one just hold down the shift key and pick your object and it will extend it back to the proper length that you need that’s a great time-saver if you make a mistake
Leave a Comment