(Beginner question) How to make a wheel, say

Roman_K2

Branching off from Wee John's demonstration of how to construct a tubular object using circle pieces and lines, I wanted to go back to the primitive cylinder to make a wheel. No particular reason except I liked how, if you do it this way, some 90-degree sharp edges are included.

Ok so I began by extruding the bottom loop from a very short cylinder horizontally, and then I went upwards (see red arrows in my "cutaway" illustration below). At this point I made myself an extra copy of the washer-shaped bottom of the the wheel and I saved it separately in .OBJ format - I was thinking ahead a bit, and I thought I would need to weld or otherwise stick some sort of top or side-wall, of the wheel, onto my shape.

Is the best way to finish this type of wheel-like shape to drop the "top" down onto the main object (green arrows) or should I continue extruding back horizontally (blue arrow)? Regardless of which way might be the best way, how do you "seal" the final joining up?  I was thinking the Weld function??

Wee Dangerous John

Hope I understand what you are trying to do. This is how I would go about making the shape -

https://youtu.be/nwyuS1JmckM

In your above example, you could also use the Symmetry tool (the one in Vertex modelling tab) to mirror the bottom half then weld both halves together.

Hermit Crab

Another way to do this is to:

1  create the cylinder with open ends

2  go to the 'surface Modeling' tab and choose the Thickness tool.

You can choose to put the thickness either around the outside of the cylinder or inside of it.

In one of the few models I've completed, I made Alloy wheels by creating two cylinders, one inside the other and both open-ended.  I selected both cylinders then went into face selection mode.  I then bridged alternate faces to form spokes. 

Roman_K2

F-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c, thanks! I'm not there yet re: symmetry tool but seeing W.D. John apply the sweep tool was an eye-opener and I was able to make major progress.

There's always something that comes up of course - like how do you break apart or otherwise deal with cloned objects? What I am seeing is two objects, both identical but that INCLUDES the name of the object. And tweaking or otherwise modifying one object repeats the action on all other clones??!

Sometimes it's good to modify all the clones at the same time, but you also might want to have each object be different, like this crude attempt at a boilerplate object that I made; notice how I tried to make each "rivet" in the steel shell be unique or at least positioned differently.