Splines in Sketchup

So I'm trying to draw splines and having some difficulty. My setup is a basic single girt housed into a post at either end. The through tenon is mortised through the post into the girt and held with 3 pegs at one end and wedged with three pins on the "open" end to keep it all together. Creating the shoulders on the girt and having them cut into the posts at each end works fine. However, when I slide in the 2x8x24 spline into position, I loose all of the joinery created by the shoulders in the posts and the spline does not appear to "cut". Is it possible to use a component to cut into a component? I moved one of the splines out from the frame on Clarks example frame and the spline it appears to have no structure on the center portion which cuts through the post.

Could you email me what you have, and I'll take a shot at correcting it, and posting the solution for everyone. If you want to send just a subset of your frame, that's fine. CB.

Anthony:

Here's how I fixed your spline:

Note that a spline is a top-level component, like any other timber, and it has sub-components to cut joints. Any part of the spline that's normally visible is not a joint - it's just part of the body of this timber. There are 3 joints: One cuts the slot in the beam, one cuts the front side of the through mortise in the post, and one cuts the back side of the through mortise.

See also this thread on thru-mortises

CB.

PS: Not sure why the picture is so small. Some kind of issue on the forum. Right click and dowload to your desktop if you want to be able to read the notes.