3dsMax: Make Planar coming out crooked

Incomitatum

I am making a fire hydrant. I have the join where one cylinder meets another and as such those verts are not planar. As I make loops in that section and try to Make Planar via Y or X, then it flattens them but is crooked to the model. The Orientation of the object is straight on in world space.

I have also tried changing my pivots to World, View, Parent, ect.

This crooked planar is costing me time. How can I avoid this, I haven't come across this issue before.

I have even disconnected this part, to its own element, and then collapsed my stack, it persists. The Z axis (straight down) is the only one that seems to work worth a darn.

Incomitatum

I may have solved whit with a Reset XForm, I have to jet to dinner and will check when I get back. Fundamentally what does Reset XForm DO? Why is IT the solution for so many things and why does it -get- messed up to begin with?

Xenobond

If you use any of the transform(i.e.:xform) tools (Move, Rotate, Scale, Mirror, some others) these affect the object at a higher level than if you were to go into sub-object mode and move/rotate/scale and do it inside there.

So you rotated and squished the model, this changes the orientation and scale bounds of the object. When you do an align to the x axis, it's going to go by the x axis of the object (not the scene axis).

Hopefully this makes sense.