Hello All,

I'm modeling my deck at home for the future task of putting on an extension to the existing one and having it in SW for illustration.  Still learning SW so this is good practice for me.  I never used the lofting feature but I have the attached pic of the railing post caps and I think that the loft feature is the correct one to use in this case.  My question is whether several different sketches need to be used along with the two separate lofts I've created.  I initially made two different planes (to go from outside corner to outside corner basically 45 degrees rotated from front and right planes) with one sketch on each originally (for the upper outside profile curve and the lower inside profile curve) but when I went ahead and created the upper loft, the sketch for the inner curves at base disappeared.  So I figured I needed to created the same planes again and new lower sketches only showing the inner curve for the profile curve all over again.  This is where I'm at now.  Any suggestions on an easier way would be great.  I would have thought when I created the upper loft, the lower sketch stuff wouldn't have disappeared.  Maybe this is because when I created the first upper loft, I shouldn't have left "merge result" selected?  Thanks.

P.S.  I see that I missed the lower 1" long straight vertical sides.  Can I just do a simple extrude to get this by making a new sketch at the base and extruding downward?  I guess I have to delete the shell feature first, then sketch/extrude then shell it again?