Hi, hope I can explain what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to bend (make into an arc) a line that is made up of a lot of segments joined by lots of nodes, so when I grab a piece of it, it only bends that little section of the line (between the two closest nodes), instead of the entire thing.

Hopefully a picture will make it clear, I want to bend the line with all the 'cups' to match to profile of the curve to the right.
[img]ebcustomknives.com/temp/curve.jpg[/img] [url]ebcustomknives.com/temp/curve.jpg[/url]

I'm really struggling with putting those little cups into lines and have it look nice and gave filleted corners, so I'm doing a bunch of manual steps to make it happen. Just doing that straight line took my over an hour - so any tips there would be welcomed as well!

Thanks much!

Welcome aboard!

You can use bend and pattern along path live path effects, and the pattern along path extension, to draw a close match.
If those parts are combined together before (Ctrl+K).

Drawing that single line, as one continuous path would be a better idea for the drawing.
With your current paths being combined together, you would have a compound path with double nodes in many places.
To draw a continuous path from it, would need to connect unconnected nodes and delete unnecessary ones.
So maybe it would be easier if you combine only the "cups" and connect the unconnected nodes.


There are more ways of doing that from the beginning that requires less manual work.

One option, is to draw a circle with the ellipse tool, convert it to a path (Ctrl+C),
then use the node editor tool to open one of it's left segments and delete the left node, then
duplicate it a few times (Ctrl+D),
then use the align and distribute panel (Shift+Ctrl+A) to place them into position.
After that, combine them together, and use the node editor tool to connect unconnected nodes and delete two circles at the end.

Another way would be using the tiled clones option on a half circle.

You could also use only the pen tool with snapping enabled, if guide lines were set right before.