Looking for an extension to make a box with box joints
-
Hi,
I have been looking without success for an extension that helps me make boxes with box joints (square joints), using make 2017.
I was thinking of a button that will open a dialog asking for the following:
- Box dimensions (I work in mm but could be inches as well to help other people), W/L/H.
Number of joints in each dimension (I use odd number of joints so 3,5,7,9,11, etc, but if you could input a number that would be great, again for W/L/H separately.
Material thickness.
Option to have the box with or without lids (so option for 6 faces, 5 faces, or 4 faces), 6 faces is full box, 5 faces is box without a single lid, and box with 4 faces is just the walls of the box without both lids.
All walls and lids are a different group or component, so they don't merge all lines.
As a special requirement:
For lids: The lids with odd odd number of joints always have the corners without sockets, (don't start the lid with a socket on the corner, only the inside of the lid wall have sockets).
For walls: On a rectangular box the small largest wall segments always have the corners without sockets, and the small segments always have corners with sockets.
example (you cannot see on the example which wall is larger or not, but just believe the annotations
)Thanks for you help,
Winsrp
-
Box joints are simple enough to make with the native Move and Push/Pull but if you feel you need an extension, you could use the Dovetail extension from Wudworx. It'll do double duty for you for drawing dovetail joints, too.
Click on the picture if it doesn't move.
-
It's like magic XD, thanks, I'll try it out.
-
oh you have to buy that one.... =(... not doing any payed job so, paying for an extension to just test it out, is out of the question, thanks anyway.
-
You don't need to test it out. I showed you that it works.
The Move tool and Push/Pull are included in SketchUp for free. Making box joints with them is trivial. Learn to do that.
-
I know how to to them, I'm making some prototypes for something I would like to laser cut, but I need to make LOTS of these little boxes, and scaling makes a mess with the walls, and my OCD wants all fitting to be of precise length XD, normally I make a prototype a day (cus I change my mind a lot about how to sort things), and have to fill like 8/9 of these boxes with lots of joints, so I was thinking of speeding up things a little bit.
I found a couple of plugins that kind of do the same thing as the one you showed, but all seem to need me inputting measurements, which by my math require tons of decimal places that seem to destroy the programs, or measures are so small that the program just didn't know what to do. I'll see if I can get some cash to but the plugin.
Thanks for you help.
Advertisement