Tool Cabinet in Progress
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This is a tool cabinet I'm designing that is based on one I found at Popular Woodworking. I would like to make 3 of these. One with shelves, one with drawers and one maybe shallower for hanging tools inside. BTW I just received a new book by Bonnie Roskes on Layout: "Google SketchUp 7 Hands On: Layout 2.1". It might have been mentioned somewhere else on this forum. Jerry
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Looks good. Pretty fancy tool cabinet. White oak?
I made you a present. See attached. Extract it into a folder and open the cutlist.html file.
It's the output of a little project I'm working on. You'll notice the dimensions in the various columns are somewhat random.
Todd
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Todd,
That is pretty nice. Are you going to include the possibility to list materials too?
And, most important, when will we woodworkers be able to get our hands on it?
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Hi Chris.
There are a few kinks I want to work out. I don't know if you saw the thread I started about component axis, but that's a big annoyance right now (no standard for which axis is width, length or thickness, even for the people that pay attention to them). However, dims can pretty much be inferred for woodworking projects, plus, dhtml code can be provided with widgets to allow the viewer to swap values if inferences don't work.
And, as you pointed out, materials are missing. (And, depending on how the modeler paid attention to applying materials, dims can be worked out via the material - I still need to figure that one out.)
And, I'll add the ability to click on a thumbnail and show a larger (user chosen size) image. And, there are a few more bells and whistles that would be nice too, like a materials list for lumber and sheet goods, plus a way to categorize non-wood stuff like hardware and glass.
I'm finding the smarter it is made, the more it requires the user to be a partner in the drawing process so both can "agree" on how the model is defined (via names, attributes, axis, materials, etc.)
I don't mean to highjack this thread, so that's all I'll say here. If you want to start a new thread, let me know.
Todd
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Todd,
Thanks for the compliment. I'm not sure what I want to make it out of yet. I downloaded the zip and like it. As Chris mentioned, I would be interested in using it too. Is it similar to the Cutlist plugin or a modification of it? Here is a file of the basic cabinet.
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Todd, your cut list thing looks very interesting. Do you have any plans to work out any material optimization and layout stuff?
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Hi Dave. Do you mean stuff like nesting for CNCs, or just "80 square feet, so go buy 2.5 sheets" kind of optimization? (which might be spot on, or might really be 1/4 or 1/5 of what you actually need because each part takes up 51% of a sheet.)
I do have plans for calculating board feet for lumber and square feet for sheet goods.
But even then, it is involved, because, for instance, a total of 35 board feet of pine tells you nothing. So, it needs to be, again, for example, 20 linear feet of 8/4 x 6" wide pine. Thats what I'll be doing.
So, yes, I'll be summing linear feet for lumber, grouped by thickness and widths.
For sheet goods, it will be by thickness. It would be nice to calculate sheet good layout, but then a CNC kerf @ 1/2" versus a 1/8" tablesaw kerf needs to be taken into consideration. So, I'll be designing for that level of flexibility, and when that is all said and done, you'll have close to a nightmare of options for a user interface where everything is customizable. And confusing.
Then there are things like Moulding - which is just a linear feet sum. And for hardware, who cares about width, length and thickness for hardware?
So now there are all sorts of categories, and naming conventions, and profiles, and exceptions, and integration, and, and... what gets dimensions and counts? What just gets counts? What needs optimizations? Does the sheet good have a grain? Can it be flipped?
The project can reaches a point of not worth doing (on spec, or for free) to reach that level of flexibility.
What's a happy medium that would be both useful and flexible?
I have thumbnails. I plan to do "click thumbnail for larger image".
I'll most certainly have to add an option for reassigning (from my inferred choice) a length/width/thickness to every part since a lot of modelers don't take into consideration the axis of an object when drawing. I'll allow sorting of the tables (click a header column to sort). I could do a "click the part in the dialog to highlight it back in Sketchup" if that would be useful. Thumbnail size and large image sizes are both customizable.
And, others I can't recall right now too. -
Lots and lots of stuff to consider indeed.
I was mostly thinking of sheet goods optimization when I asked. The thing about lumber is kind of difficult due to potentials for waste-causing defects or laying out parts for nice grain patterns. Stuff you well know, of course. My feeling is that there's really not much point in trying to do layout and optimization for lumber but for sheet goods it would be nice.
I hadn't thought about having thumbnails of the components in a cut list but I can see how some folks might find that quite handy.
Sorting out molding would definitely be nice, too.
Keep up the good work.
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