I had already checked the normals and removed all but the bevel modifier, so it wasn’t those things. But I went back to a previous save and did that section over and it worked well the second time.
I encountered another very bizarre behaviour with the screws later on. I made a small cylinder to make holes (otherwise the groove in the screw was getting filled with the console body). I was adding a boolean modifier in the locations I wanted and then applying it so that I didn’t have to create a set of holes to use and hide. The very last hole caused the front of the console body to “grow” a massive section out to one side. I then noticed there was some “warping” in the rendered result of the front of the body, artifacts of the n-gon. I added some edges to create quads in the areas where the warping was happening and the warping went away. And when I applied that last boolean there was no longer a big extra piece appearing from the front of the console. That’s some very weird behaviour since the area that was “growing” when I applied the boolean earlier didn’t seem linked to where the hole was being made, but perhaps it was somehow linked to the area where I added the quads on the front to reduce the warping. Hopefully I’ll learn more when I go through the modifiers video on CGCookie and the fundamentals of mesh modeling videos.
