Overlap? I don't think so!

Can someone please tell me why ACAD cannot extrude this shape. I did my best to be sure all the lines and curves were trimmed properly. But when I try to extrude it, ACAD says:

Cannot sweep or extrude a self-intersecting curve

OverlapErr.dwg

Not sure why, but if you use the BOUNDARY command to create a Polyline u can extrude that no problem. Also converting it into a region will work.

sorry i cant open it at home. select your shape and zoom in to all the snap points. it has to overlap somewhere even if when you select it, everything highlights. You can use pedit>close and that may help.

You had an overlap in the first or last segment.

See what happens when you close the pline:

Thanks again everyone, this forum is a great source for information and I really appreciate the other users ideas and knowledge.

When I created this shape, I drew the left half of it first and then mirrored the other half. A radius was added at the very top of it to finish the shape.What I don't understand is that if one side of it had the overlap, then why didn't the other side have it as well?

It took a couple of tries but I finally seem to have it fixed so there is no overlap. I have been noticing that my ACAD 2009 progam is a hit or miss when doing pedits. Even with a simple four sided shape. Sometimes it closes on the first try, other times it won't. These are simple squares and rectangles, not complex shapes like this one. I'm beginning to belive that the substandard video card in this computer could be some of the source. But for sure, there have been several instances in just the last 24 hours where I could not close a pedit shape without closing it manually.

UPDATE: Found the trouble was there were a few extra lines left over when I created the shape. The lines were hidden behind the others so seeing them was something easily done. I have it now. But I'm noticing there is another copy of this shape in my drawing. I cannot select it unless I do Ctrl+A. Then it get's selected. But without being able to select it I don't know how I can delete it. Fencing left or right around it, clicking it, nothing works. I suspect the video card is the trouble.

im not finding any extra lines in the drawing you posted

i went ahead and played with it for a min. i exploded your drawing and added a line at the midpoint. deleted the upper arc and extended your top line to my vertical line intersection. deleted the right half of your drawing and used pedit>join on the left half(excluding the vertical line. To get my screen shot below. then i mirror this, pedit>join and it extruded fine. There was an issue with the bottom right part but i cant tell you for sure where it came from.

if i am going to draw something like this and mirror it I will draw the left half of it and use pedit>join then use close. if there are no issues at that point, there should be no issue later on.

....I have been noticing that my ACAD 2009 progam is a hit or miss when doing pedits. Even with a simple four sided shape. Sometimes it closes on the first try, other times it won't. .

If you do a PE (pedit) and Join, I think you'll see the option Close aferwords if it's not closed. If the option is Open, then it's allready closed.

You were unable to extrude your polyline because there are lines on top of each other. To prove my point, Explode your polyline object and erase your line one by one.I mean, Plick and erase to see for yourself.

To save yourself of trouble like this the next time around, do an OVERKILL first before joining your entities.

Thanks again to everyone for your replies. I have resolved the issue now and extruding this shape is working.

But then I thought what happens when the client changes their mind on which profile they want. Will there be an easy way to simply change out one profile for another.

So I thought about it and made a new drawing of this shape all on it's own. I then inserted it as a block into a new drawing. All went well until I tried to extrude it. I guess you cannot extrude blocks or XRefs like this one.

This is a handrail cap and it would be very nice to be able to swap out one profile for another very quickly so I was hoping there is a way to do this.

Not in AutoCAD :-)

There is no history.