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I'm making a project that involves a solid-spoked wheel, much like many car wheels are today without hub caps. To cut down on the modeling I used some lathing and duplicate techniques. I based my lathe outline on a rotoscope diagram. I used two CPs at every corner to make a sharpish but still-beveled edge... This wheel has 8 spokes (with 8 holes in between) and a bump on each spoke. The easiest way to model a round bump or hole is to stitch it in on splines between two other splines. That means a minimum of four splines across for each instance of a hole and a spoke with a bump... To support 8 holes/spokes, i need to do a 32 cross section lathe. (You set that at Tools>Options>Modeling)... However, the five-pointers around holes and bumps prefer not to be stretched very far or around large turns. I'll need extra splineage where I've drawn it in... To create those spline I put some extra CPs in the lathe outline where i wouldn't normally need them for a straight spline. I broke up one spline crossing and spread the edge splines apart to start the pie-shaped hole... Connect the front and back edge splines... The corners are 6-points and need to be split into two 5-pointers. I add a CP to the middle of each front-back spline with the Y key and stitch in a middle spline... The five pointer patches are still visibly wrinkled from having to turn a large angle. I stitch in a new spline around the hole between the middle spline and the old square edges and hook in a new radial spline at each corner at the wide end of the hole... Now the 5-pointers don't have to do much curve work. I stitch in the oval spline for the bump on the spoke and that gets me one finished hole and spoke... I could do this seven more time around the wheel, but there is an easier way... I cut out the 5 lathe sections that contain this new modeling and deleted one lathe section on the edge to leave hanging splines... I grouped that, set its Pivot to 0,0,0, the copied, pasted and rotated the pasted part 45°... I connected each hanging spline to its immediate neighbor in the old section. This new quarter section gets copied, pasted, rotated 90° and connected to make a half section. The new half section gets copied, pasted, rotated 180° and connected to make a complete wheel.

Hey Wally, This is a common glitch in the Mac version. The workaround is to switch to another app and then back to A:M. I use CMD-TAB to open the app switcher and I usually go to Mail, since it's usually open and seems to work every time. Once I'm in Mail, I do the same thing to go back to A:M and you'll find that it's not greyed out anymore. I almost do it out of second nature these days.