Posts made by Sawduster

That link worked OK for me, and Dave was able to download it, I believe, but could be browser issue with the space in the sub-directory name. I loaded another copy of the skippy to another directory. Try this one.

http://www.sawdustersplace.com/Storage/KneeholeDesk.skp

I guess you probably mean other than figuring out where or how to get started on a new drawing.

Don't know if it was a struggle so much as maybe a best practice that took a bit of time to catch on to and use consistently, but making every single part into a component as soon as I have a 2D construction. Ganged components for drawers and door assemblies and the like make models much easier to use and understand. The next major advance for me was to start using layers which made getting inside a case etc to add drawer webs and other parts, or just to simplify the screen as it begins getting cluttered. For some time I thought the only way to use the Follow-Me tool was to click on the shape then drag it manually around the perimeter I wanted to extrude. Then I found a tutorial where they selected the path and then simply clicked the shape with the Follow-Me tool and voila, extruded all the way around without all the mouse acrobatics.

I've seen furniture pieces where each individual part is on its own layer. I don't go anywhere near that far, but when you do complete detailed drawings of all joinery and drawer webs and the like, being able to get stuff out of the picture while you work on it is extremely advantageous. It is also great for showing views of these internal parts. The Kneehole Desk I posted a bit ago is an example of how I generally work with layers.

Here's a knee hole desk model I recently completed.

And the Skippy can be got here: http://www.sawdustersplace.com/Sketchup%20files/KneeholeDesk.skp

That is pretty cool. I'm not sure what "Layout" does. From this I gather it can be used to add other graphics and such to a page which includes an export from SU.

I'd never even thought about exporting a SU drawing into a PDF, but just gave it a shot with a model using one of those free PDF creators and it worked great.

One of my fellow members of our Church council is an Architect. He has some very expensive software package that he uses at his office. A couple years ago I had just started playing around with SU as a tool to design furniture to make in my shop and asked him about it. He sort of scoffed and said he'd never heard of it, but that it couldn't be worth much if someone could get it for free.

Some time later I offered to build a prayer rail in the sanctuary and came in, took some measurements of the alter area and the wheel chair ramp up to the alter where we wanted to put the prayer rail. I then did up the plans in SU to use both to present to the council what it would look like and to use as measured working drawings. Keep in mind, I don't do renders, this was just the output of SU alone with some off the shelf textures. When I showed the JPG stills of a few angles of view, our architect member was impressed and asked what I had used for the drawings. He was still impressed after I told him it was the free Sketch program from Google.

Later he had occasion to use another drawing I did for some fencing we wanted to install, and again he was pretty impressed. Even more so when I told him it had only taken me about ten minutes to do a quick but accurate representation of the end of our building where the fencing was to be installed.

SU adds geometry to the layer you have selected to work on in the layers window. Even if you open a component on another layer, anything you do to that component will be placed on the active layer.

There is a bit of a weirdness, as far as I'm concerned anyway, with how some of the dimensioning works in SU. It doesn't like giving dimensions off of the three axis. What you might need to do is click on the first point drag to the second and slide along the line on which the second point resides to an intersection with another line and click, then move back to the second point. Sometimes that won't even work.

I think you would be a lot more successful if you added depth to the floors on both of the levels and made them components. On the second floor, you would be able to punch through for the stairwell by going into the floor component(double clicking to edit it), drawing in the shape of the opening, then push/pull through and voila, the opening is there and the rest of the floor remains intact.

Add walls by drawing the lines onto the surface of the "closed" component floor and you can tweak them since they don't glue themselves to the floor like they do if the floor is not a component. By adding depth to the second story floor, you have an accurate total rise for the stairs if the depth corresponds to the thickness of the construction from the first floor ceiling to the actual floor on the second story.

Even though you don't "need" a super accurate drawing for what ever your purpose is, the more accurate you make it, and the better procedures used will make the over all job much easier.

This sort of weird. My normal browser is Firefox, but when I click on the skp links in your post I get gobbeldy goop, butit seems to open the skippy when I switch over to IE. FF has worked fine otherwise.

Anyway, if the lines you're talking about are those on the "floor" of the drawing, the problem appears to be that the floor has no depth, i.e. it is just a two dimensional plane. All that stuff disappeared when I went under the house and used push/pull to creat depth. I'll leave the other stuff to folks who do architectural drawings. I just do planes for furniture for woodworking.

I finished this up yesterday morning and submitted it. It's from the Aug 07 issue. I plan on building one of these and had already started on the drawing when I found out about the deal with PWW.

Here's a link to the skippy:
http://www.sawdustersplace.com/Sketchup%20files/GrandfatherClock.skp

Here is a Neo-Queen Anne Tall Chest

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=86626522ac11ff5db5938fd07069cd50

@titmas said:

@unknownuser said:

Beautiful work!

thanks.
even though it was fun and challenging to build this unit i am somewhat burnt out on oak ever since the "oak n brass" era of the mid 80's.

Then I guess you wouldn't be interested in seeing the tool chest I just completed.

I'm a very serious hobby woodworker. Prior to getting into SU I had tried a number of different drawing programs but couldn't force myself to spend the time needed to learn them. I did woodworking projects on the fly. I would visualize what I wanted to make, maybe do a quick overall sort of to scale sketch to get overall dimensions that were pleasing, then start cutting wood. It was a very slow process because every step had to be analyzed in view of steps further down the line. Problems were addressed as they came up.

With SketchUp I make detailed drawings right to to the dovetails, come across problems in the design stage and work around them then. Having everything laid out on drawings of the individual pieces lets me get much more accomplished in my limited shop time.

I just got out the calipers and from one side to the other on a piece of "3/4" plywood, it measured 0.704 on one corner and 0.660 on the other. I don't know where it was made.

Exactly why I can not understand folks spending money on the "plywood" bits for the router. When I'm drawing stuff made of ply, I just use the nominal thickness, when using ply in the shop, if I'm housing the ply in a groove etc, I'll actually mark the groove onto the workpiece using the actual piece to be housed. Then I'll make the cut using a dado stack or router bit that undersized and make two passes.

About the only thing I draw in SketchUp is furniture I plan on making in my shop. Since I do very detailed drawings including all of the joinery involved, things can get crowded and it can get difficult to work on something if everything is on the same layer. What I do is to put things by type of component. For instance, I'll put all of the panels for a frame and panel construction onto its own layer, framing on another layer, the top on another. That way I can shut off a layer to get to other parts I need to work on. Also helps when printing up working drawings to see internal details.

Something that can be confusing in Sketchup is moving components from one layer to another. if you click on the Window tab at the top of the screen and then click on Layers it will open a Layers tool box. That is where you add layers and select the active layer. But if you create something on the 0 layer and want to move it to another layer you can't do it from there. For that you must go to the tool bar. There should be a Layer box on the tool bar. If it is not there, click on "View", then "Toolbars" then on "Layers" and this box will appear in the tool bar. Select the component you want to move to another layer, the click the arrow in the layer box and a list of existing layers will drop down. Select the layer you want to move the component to and it is now on that layer.

Ryan,
Another thing you want to do is to make the parts of the tables into components as soon as you can as you go along. Most of the time when I'm designing furniture I create a component from the very first geometric construction I make for a part. For example, to make a leg for a table I might start with a rectangle on the "floor". I will make that rectangle a component, double click it to edit it, then push/pull the rectangle to the height of the finished table leg. If all four legs will be the same except rotated for position, I'll copy the leg to the next location and rotate it 90 degrees to orient it properly. Then I'll copy that second leg and move it to the next location, again rotating it 90 degrees for proper orientation, and the same for the fourth leg. Now when I add a mortice to one of the legs, each of them will get a mortice on the proper face. For an apron, I will begin by drawing a rectangle at the proper location on one of the legs and (not while editing the leg) make that rectangle a component, double click to edit, and push/pull it to the next leg. The point is to make each piece into its own separate component early on. You table top, not being a component and therefore being "glued" to two of the aprons and other stuff is real hard to work on. Each piece of a drawer should be a component, and then the drawer components can be made into a component of components so you can move the drawer around as a whole entity, but you can also go in and make changes to parts of the drawer easier if need be.

On one of the woodworking forums there was a discussion about the proper method of adjusting a miter gauge for getting square cuts on a table saw. Some were argueing that one should set the gauge square to the blade, while others said the gauge should be set square to the bar on the gauge, and thus to the miter slot on the saw table. In a perfect world, the blade of the saw would be set perfectly parallel to the miter slot and therefore either technique should work since they are indexed to each other. But for very long miter cuts on wide pieces of stock, any small amount of error will be magnified, so which method would give you the most accurate cut allowing for some minute error between the blade and the miter slot?

While some are adept at working this type of thing out in their heads, I need visual representation and proof, so I created a SU model of a table saw table, blade, miter slot, miter gauge and even some scrap wood to test it out on. That model can be found here:

http://www.sawdustersplace.com/Storage/TSCut.skp

Using the model I tested both methods with the blade intentionally tilted 2 degrees out of parallel with the miter slot. First I squared the gauge face and scrap wood piece to the blade, created a group of the scrap board, gauge and bar and carefully slid the group, keeping the bar in the slot by keeping the move on the proper axis until the front edge of the blade contacted the leading edge of the wood. I marked both edges of the blade onto the wood, then coninued the move, stopping and marking both edges of the front and rear of the blade to both the leading and trailing edges of the board. I then copied the board and moved it off of the saw table and connected the corresponding marks on the leading and trailing edges of the board to each other with lines.

Here is the resulting still of the board. Note that the lines are all 2 degrees off from perpendicular, equal to the error induced in the blade to miter slot. Note also that the two outside lines would denote the kerf width of the cut which is quite wide.

I ungrouped the board, gauge and bar and adjusted the gauge and wood square to the bar, regrouped them and repeated the above, leaving the blade to miter slot error the same as the initial setup.

The results of this setup show again a wide kerf, but the lines of cut are at 90 degrees to the edges of the board.

The wide kerf in both instances is indicative of both a rough cut and a cut which would try to pull the workpiece along the gauge. Admittedly, 2 degrees is a huge amount of error between the blade alignment and the miter slots, but every setup has some degree of error regardless of the method used for adjusting the blade to the table and that error is magnified over the length of any cut made using the one to guide work through the other, so your best results are obtained by squaring the gauge to the slot as then you have only what error there is in blade rotation to contend with.

How is your compound miter saw for those small angle tolerances? Could be your calculator rounded off significant decimals that SU needed, also. Compound miter saws make compound miter cuts overly complex. The "ancients" new that if they tilted the workpiece at the needed angle they could cut the piece using the percieved miter angle setting and would get perfect fits. Tilting the work against the fence, one would cut the normal 45 miter angle as if it were flat work.

Here is a tutorial more along the way I would do it in actually making the pieces from wood. I would not use a compound miter saw, but do it the old fashioned way, tilting the pieces against the fence in the manner of their eventual orientation and make a 45 degree miter cut. This automatically gives you the required bevel angle as well as the actual miter relative to the board.

http://www.sawdustersplace.com/Storage/CompoundBox.skp

Tilting the piece in the skp then turning the cutting plane to the 45 degree angle represents the actual method on the saw.

If you are just wanting to move one object over next to another and have them become a single object, there are a couple ways of doing that.

If the objects have not been made into components, simply select one, turn on the move tool, grasp the object at a place that will index it to another specific place on the second object and drag it into place. Once it is released in contact with the other object, they are joined together.

If they are made into components, do the same and then select both items once they're together, select both items and make them into a single component.

I think it'll be cremation for me. Might even make my own cremains urn. I made the urns for my sister-in-law's and father-in-law's cremains. Very difficult but fulfilling tasks.