i believe i may have found the solutions.. sketchup automatically converts my numbers which is actually in mm and i was stupid enough to put them as 280.mm which makes it numeric 280 mm and thus it becomes 11.8 inches,, which is where i have been getting the 0.00032.. i think going here was the best thing i did today http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/numeric.html#to_mm thank you very much Marnen and Jesus regards Mahadev -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.