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Bowl Leader
Bowl Leader
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Pretty slick. My wife is remodeling our guest bathroom, and I’ve been conscripted into service to create a bench and wall cabinet. I made a 3d model of the room, and even managed to find the manufacturer’s model of the vanity she purchased.
Then, I designed the bench and cabinet. The program then generated a cut list based on the materials I used.
I’ll be honest, I don’t get it either. She tells me it is to make it easier for us to bathe the kids. (Gives us a place to sit?).
I hope we are done with this “bathing kids” task inside of 2 years though...
Really cool
Still need to put a backboard on the wall over the bench, and put some trim around the sides, but this project wrapped up nicely. And using Sketchup was a game changer
Bowl Leader
I love using Sketchup. Being able to see the scale of a projext, change it in the fly, and have a super accurate cut list? Game changer indeed. Completely worth the initial learning curve.
Did you actually purchase a full annual license for Sketchup, I can feel myself becoming addicted to this program, but $300/yr is tough to swallow as a hobbiest.
I watched a couple of videos at first, but some of them just confused me more than anything. Like, I found a video that walked through how to create a box, where the author made a rectangle, then used the “inset” tool to inset the rectangle by 3/4” to account for material thickness, then used the “push/pull” tool to drag the rectangle from a 2d shape to a 3D box... It was a useful video to orient myself with how you interact with sketch up, but I am still confused as to how I would break that down into individual component pieces.
What I ended up doing (and I’m not sure if it’s the right approach) is build each individual piece and then assemble them in sketchup. And that was tedious, but worked well.
So, for example, I’m building a mud room bench. I made the actual boards and braces for the carcass (defining them as components as I went so that I could reuse like pieces by dragging them from my component tray). Then, once the carcass was designed, I face framed it with an additional round of components.
This lets let define what will be made of plywood, and what will be made with lumber (for the cut list). And I can resize the components as I go to make changes.
I’d actually really like to hear how the BowlLeader uses it, as I feel he/she has quite a bit of experience. Am I doing this right?
As a side note, the absolutely most useful thing I learned are the keyboard shortcuts to toggle between tools. There are about 5-6 different ones that are super useful (pan, orient, draw rectangle, push, select). Just learning those was the biggest win.
Appreciate the detailed responses. I’ll check out the YouTube channel. I trust that it’ll be much more efficient than pen and paper once I get past the learning curve!
You had me at optimized cut diagram
Onwards
It has come a long way from when it first was release that is for sure.
I’ve been meaning to do it, ugh
How/what did you do to learn? It’s taking me so long to be precise
Bowl Leader
Why YouTube videos of course!
I forget what channel I watched most but if you search for “Sketchup for woodworking” there are a ton. Those helped me immensely. It also gets much easier, at least I found, once I learned some of the shortcut keys.
I’m curious, which version do you use?
I built those plans using the free trial of the current desktop one. But based on an earlier recommendation, I’ve switched over to the free 2017 version. Seems to do everything I need