Plugins
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I've read of sketchup in woodworking magizines and intend to use it for blueprints cut lists etc. In those articals it mentioned the need of plugins but didn't name them. Can you give a list of the required plugins? I have windows 7.
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Dwain, there are all sorts of plugins available for SketchUp. You kind of need to choose the ones that do what you need to do. There are no required plugins, however. There is a Cut List plugin available that will probably help you out. What sort of projects are you planning to make blue prints of?
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I build furniture as a hobby and am soon retiring, and am used to reverse engineering. This works well on "one offs" but having more time in the shop it would be nice to have cut lists to duplicate a project. This first project I'm intending to do this way is a crib that will morph into a toddler bed, then into a double as the child grows. This is for the second grand child, the first got a similar setup but thankfully the parents wanted this one not to be a duplicate.
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Dwain, that sounds like an excellent project.
I do some reverse engineering too and find that SketchUp makes it fairly easy to do. There aren't very many plugins that are "must haves" in order to draw furniture. In fact other than the CutList plugin, you can draw most things with the native tools. For drawing non-circular curves the BZ Spline tools would be handy. The Wudworx suite definitely speeds up drawing joinery. There are some basic plugins like Weld and PurgeAll that are useful for any sort of drawing work.
Where are you on the SketchUp learning curve? If you are sort of at the apprentice level, I think it would be wise to learn to handle the native tools well before adding a bunch of plugins.
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