Ever since my original copy of Micrgrapx Designer dies, I’ve been bereft of a tool to make up plans with. Not, conquer the world plans, I make them up in my head. Plans for gizmos and gadgets, and boxes. I really like making boxes.
Box making runs in my family. My great great grandfather owned the Bosworth Box and Casket factory in Bristol, Vt., and my grandfather, who claimed that his being an orthopedic surgeon was just another way of saying carpenter, loved knocking things together out of plywood. So did Frank Lloyd Wright, by the way, and so do I
Fine woodworking isn’t lost on me, exactly, but give me a few carefully cut sheets of ply, my right anble clamps box clamps and I’ll make you something useful, if not truely wonderful.
Complicated stuff requires real planning and I used to use a graphics program that made drawing dimensioned plans pretty easy…until it died in the relentless march of computer upgrades.
24’x72″ Windowseat with Storage, created in SketchUp by Ernest Lilley
A while back Google had put out a free 3-D drawing program called SketchUp, and I’d given it a few tries but always found myself spinning around some axis not sure which was was up and really frustrated. But the other day EJ took leave of her senses and suggested that if I wanted, I might make a windowseat for the top of the stairs, as long as I made it look like real furniture.
Oh boy. Suddenly I needed to plan like a pro. Back to another round of beating my head against SketchUp. Actually, I gave it a shot with Adobe Illustrator first, but came away pretty certain that was a bad idea. So, I downloaded SketchUp, now owned by Trimble, but still free, unless you want the “Pro” version, and fired it up. In no time at all I was hopelessly lost.
OK, not hopelessly lost. In fact I’d managed to beat it into snarling submission, if not actual cooperation, but clearly I was doing it the hard way. So I went looking for videos on cabinetmaking and SketchUp, and found some great resources. At least I think they’re great, but since I only watched the first two videos on any given site before smacking my head and going, “Doh!” it’s hard to be sure.
The good news is that I’m now pretty proficient with this, as witnessed by the image of the not-yet-realized-in-actual-wood windowseat in the picture above. I even used the program to map the actual texture of the woven storage boxes from a catalog image onto the 3D blocks.
Now all I have to do is get up the courage to actually buy some materials and start cutting.
By the way, it’s not just about my box making mania, 3D printing is just around the corner, and SketchUp is just the tool you need to created shapes for that. Which I’m sure I’ll be doing before long.
Links / References
- Timble SketchUp: http://www.sketchup.com/
- SketchUp for Woodworkers: http://sketchupforwoodworkers.com/