Hello, There is several DXF plugins for SU. A little search in the Pluginstore should answer your question.

If that's your only reason for using SU7 I would suggest you upgrade. Jim's DXF importer is available in the plugin store http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=186621#p186621

Tom, if you have an earlier pro version, it would cost you $95 dollars to upgrade to SU8 Pro.

Your first solution worked like a charm, and I'll be trying the plugin for SU8 soon. Many thanks!

Luca, you are right. I'll look for you on Sunday.

I found it in one of the help forums (fora?). In the model, click on the "G" on the bottom left of the screen, log out, and log back in. Go figure.

Great job. I just made one myself recently. I bought a couple of hold downs from Rockler; I'm sure you could make some easily enough.

It was probably the image file to begin with. This past spring, one of the woodworking magazines did an article on SketchUp and offered as an "online extra" some wood grain images. They were nice images but way too large to use as is. Use one or two of them in your model and the file size would jump considerably. Glad you got it sorted.

that plugin looks to be just what I'm looking for to make some videos, to walk through how to fit a staircase! Ill post a video when I get round to it! Thanks, Tom.

Thanks again to all who responded. To anyone else who wants to learn about layers and scenes in woodworking design, I recommend Joe Zeh's Beginner's SketchUp Tutorial Series http://www.srww.com/google-sketchup.htm and especially his "Rules for 3D Drawing Using SketchUp," found in Part 1. There's also a good description of converting JPG files to textures, and orienting and aligning them to components properly, in Part 8.