New to woodworking in sketchup, but not sketchup..

[Marmotjr]

I consider myself fairly skilled in Sketchup, I do a lot of modelling in it for 3d printing and general prototyping/fabrication.   I am not very well versed in it for woodworking.   Any of the tutorials I have found are either for absolute beginners and have little new to offer me (but usually have a few little refreshers in them) , or are for people who are familiar with techniques commonly used in sketchup for woodwoorking, but I find myself missing some background info. 

So with that in mind, what resources are good for what I'm looking for?   What plugins do you frequently use?  Common techniques for laying out a design using wood instead of "manifold volumes" as I'm used to?

 

Thanks in advance

[Tom Crawford]

I struggled with Sketchup until I found Bob Lang's book.  http://readwatchdo.com. Highly recommend it.  It is specifically for woodworking.

[xxdabroxx]

I model mostly houses and commercial buildings at work.  In woodwork models I've found that making each piece of wood either a component or a group helps a lot.  Really sucks when your model welds itself together on ya.  So far I have only used it for rough design, I print it out and mark actual dimensions on the piece.  IE, I use 3/4" dimension for my sketchup model but the actual plywood is a little thinner. 

[minorhero]

If you can create things in sketchup then you pretty much are there as far as woodworking is concerned. Woodworking in sketchup can be pretty basic and frankly usually is for most users. It is just a way creating a piece in advance so you know what joints you will need and how thick your stock has to be etc, and also a way of being able to see the finished piece so you don't create something that has legs that are too tall or odly shaped etc.

[Marmotjr]

I figured doing something like making a bunch of small pieces with the crossectional size of the pieces you'll use, and then just copy/paste/extruding to length from there. 

[minorhero]

37 minutes ago, Marmotjr said:

I figured doing something like making a bunch of small pieces with the crossectional size of the pieces you'll use, and then just copy/paste/extruding to length from there. 

Ahh, this might be where you are running into trouble. I might have spoken too soon. So in woodworking you will definitely want to make every single item its own component. Because most designs are symmetrical this will save you some time when you copy and paste the same 'leg', or 'drawer' over and over. 

This means however that each piece pretty much needs to be made to order (unless its a duplicate of an existing piece that can be just flipped around). Its not a big deal to make them to order though since you can use the keyboard numbers to just set whatever size you need pretty much instantly. 

[Marmotjr]

That's kinda what I meant.  Except I always have issues with components, so I use groups instead.   So yes, if let's say I'm going to use a bunch of 1"x6"x24" pieces to make a 24"x24" panel, I'd:

1) Make a 1x6x2 nub as it's own group.

2) Make a 1x6x24 piece, as it's own group, copied from that nub

3) use the x command under ctrl-move to make 4 of em side by side.  Leaving each board as a group, I'd make one bigger group for the panel. 

 

Tell me why I should be using components instead of groups? 

[xxdabroxx]

Components will change globally if you change one.  Say you had 4 legs that are the same on each corner of a table and decided you want to revise the joint on all of them for a new apron design.  You change one and they all change equally. 

If I were making a panel I wouldn't bother modeling the individual pieces in sketchup, I'd just make a box the overall size of the glued up piece.  But yes, that would similar to how I would make a group of glued up boards. 

I also wouldn't bother with your nub group.  I'd just draw a rectangle the shape of the end of a piece and extrude it, then make it it's own group or component as applicable. 

[Bankstick]

Never used Sketchup as I go back to pencil, triangles, French curves, etc.  OK, maybe I need to upgrade now.  I'm sure I can download it but are there tutorials to help out an old timer from the Slide Rule era?

For the younger members, your homework is to google Slide Rule.

[xxdabroxx]

Yeah, the program is free and sketchup has good tutorial videos.

 

http://www.sketchup.com/learn/videos/58

 

[Marmotjr]

Along with the video tutorials, there's a few books out there that are pretty good.   The Sketchup for Dummies book is pretty damn good.   I had a passable Parthenon within a day or so while reading that one. 
 

Quote

Components will change globally if you change one.  Say you had 4 legs that are the same on each corner of a table and decided you want to revise the joint on all of them for a new apron design.  You change one and they all change equally. 

 

 

Well %&#$ me sideways, that would have saved me a LOT of time in the past.  I got fed up with the component file system I tried to learn a while back and said forget it and stuck with groups.   This is good to know.  

 

How about plugins?  I saw something about cut list.  Most of my plugins are for rounding edges down to the tenth of a millimeter or exporting file types, making sure an object is manifold and doesn't have extra geometry ( A woodworking style drawing would have overlapping faces, in 3d prinitng, that type of extra geometry can lead to some bad juju  when it gets turned into gcode), etc. 

[Bankstick]

Thanks, Dave.  Saved it as a Bookmark.