Sketup Question

[Jack Stein]

No, but you never miss an opportunity to point out it's limitations, and most of the time, in spite of pointing out SU is not supposed to be a heavy duty CAD program, someone, usually Swingman, shows you SU can do what you said it can't. Of course there should be things a simple, free, sketching program cannot do, but those limitations are pretty moot to most woodworkers.

I don't know of any software that can build a house? Swing used SU to design a house he is building. That means SU can be used to design a house. I guess if you have no clue how to build a house, SU probably will not help you design one either.

Yes, but seems we are talking about the softwares abilities and limitations, personal abilities, other than ability to use SU, aside.

I doubt SU is adequate for many things, perhaps designing a NASA launch pad, but for most woodworkers in small shops it is more than adequate.

Not sure, but seems much of the planet is starting to interface with SU, probably because of it's enormous popularity. The fact Swingman was able to draw up something and send it to a fabricator to make with out a problem is rather telling. Still, not something a lot of woodworkers care about.

On paper and in digital

So, your pissed off you spent all that time and money and now people are getting most of the capability free and free tutorials to boot? That's how it sounds, true or not...

No more than it will help you build a better boat.

[Robatoy]

Well, Jack, seeing as you show a keen interest in what it is I do, allow me to tell you a bit about my building of countertops.

When a client orders a countertop, say a Hanstone Quartz top, and that client wants an undermounted Franke sink, my job then includes getting a file from the sink manufacturer and creating a toolpath for a CNC router. In the case of Quartz, I do not have the capability to cut that material as I have not invested the millions it takes to do that properly and competetively, but it is 40% of my business.

So I send a file (pictured, as I doubt you could open the actual file) (There are now hundreds of these kinds of sinks)

these guys: who then plunge their $ 3000.00 worth of diamond bits into multiples of thousands of dollars worth of Quartz slabs and them make it all pretty and send it to me all finished for me and my guys to install it. The files I send them, also include a scribed set of complex curves for any back-wall aberrations , the sink-file location co-ordinates etc.

Average cost of the jobs range between $3K and $9K. Sometimes more.

I then install the sink(s) under the very accurately cut hole and presto, happy customer, Rob gets big cheque.

In the meantime, I now feed those sink files via my CNC into my Corian slabs, here at my shop, and do the same things for other clients.

I then install the sink(s) under the very accurately cut hole and presto, happy customer, Rob gets big cheque. Again.

..are you still with me, Jack??

Is that really a job for SU? Do my clients, such as the nation-wide chains like Rona, Home Hardware and IKEA open SU files? Jack?

But you're right. I fabricate countertops.

[Lee Michaels]

Well, Jack, seeing as you show a keen interest in what it is I do, allow me to tell you a bit about my building of countertops.

When a client orders a countertop, say a Hanstone Quartz top, and that client wants an undermounted Franke sink, my job then includes getting a file from the sink manufacturer and creating a toolpath for a CNC router. In the case of Quartz, I do not have the capability to cut that material as I have not invested the millions it takes to do that properly and competetively, but it is 40% of my business.

So I send a file (pictured, as I doubt you could open the actual file) (There are now hundreds of these kinds of sinks)

these guys: who then plunge their $ 3000.00 worth of diamond bits into multiples of thousands of dollars worth of Quartz slabs and them make it all pretty and send it to me all finished for me and my guys to install it. The files I send them, also include a scribed set of complex curves for any back-wall aberrations , the sink-file location co-ordinates etc.

Average cost of the jobs range between $3K and $9K. Sometimes more.

I then install the sink(s) under the very accurately cut hole and presto, happy customer, Rob gets big cheque.

In the meantime, I now feed those sink files via my CNC into my Corian slabs, here at my shop, and do the same things for other clients.

I then install the sink(s) under the very accurately cut hole and presto, happy customer, Rob gets big cheque. Again.

..are you still with me, Jack??

Is that really a job for SU? Do my clients, such as the nation-wide chains like Rona, Home Hardware and IKEA open SU files? Jack?

But you're right. I fabricate countertops. =================================================

Whaaaaat????

I thought you just took a hamnmer and chisel to it and carved out the sink hole caveman style!!! LOL

There IS an advantage to being a tool snob. It allows you to do many things that others can not. As you pointed out above. Besides, if you weren't getting some checks (cheques) out of this, you couldn't afford to buy big, fancy routers!

I am also a tool snob. A financially challenged tool snob, mind you. But still a tool snob. But tool snobs do play an important role in this world of ours.

I applaud google for putting a software tool out there that people can use to build things for a very good price. I am concerned that it is part of the overall effect of the world wide web dumbing things down in general. It raises the abilities of many. But also degrades expectations and abilities of many as well. There are those who will do many things well with this tool. But like anything, many will not.

[Swingman]

"Lee Michaels" wrote

As with a hammer ...

[Swingman]

"Robatoy" wrote

LOL ... it ain't like you never heard it before. :)

[Robatoy]

Actually...? No.

[Morris Dovey]

A happy thought for tool snobs: SketchUp is a tool available for the downloading and, among other things, can itself be a tool for imagineering and building tools that either one cannot afford to purchase - and/or that no one else has yet imagined.

And sometimes it's even necessary to come up with new tools in order to produce a never-before-seen new tool...

[MikeWhy]

So I send a file (pictured, as I doubt you could open the actual file) (There are now hundreds of these kinds of sinks)

users can look forward to a few hours of misery, frustration, and uncertainty trying to sketch that sink outline. Start to finish was 8 minutes using SolidWorks, all the tangents faired, dimensioned, fully contrained, with the selected controlling dimensions distinguishable from driven dimensions.

There is some ambiguity in the drawing, but maybe nothing major. It is over defined, and the resulting shape is different depending on which dimensions you take as defining, and which are reference. For example, the 576 1/2 came out to 576.41 by choosing the radius and 128 1/2 dimension as controlling. Overall, by prefering radius and tangency to the specified dimensions,

*most* center locations came out to less than 0.1 mm off the conflicting dimensions, easily within the implied tolerance. There are some notable exceptions. One was the 209 dimension. It becomes 204.83 if you let the 373 dimension drive it. Using the 209 as the driving dimension, the 373 becomes 372.95. The largest difference was the 110 1/2. It came to 122.64, a half inch difference, if I let the other dimensions drive it.

What's the relevance to SU? For that matter, what is your comfort level with ACAD LT or TurboCAD for something like this? Simply that there is a difference between SU and the full CAD systems. One of the major differences is specifying design intent. What is the relationship between on object to the other, one arc to the next? One part to another? It doesn't matter much for the block shapes we typically work with. But there is a difference.

[Swingman]

"Morris Dovey" wrote

I love that word "imagineer" ... first time I heard/saw it was on the business card of Hondo Crouch of Luckenbach, Texas fame, almost 40 years ago. AAMOF, I was honored to be on his 'washer pitching' team at one point. :)

[Leon]

> ===========

Ok, I'll admit that this if the first time I have really tried doing this much with SU, using arcs and circles but it took me 44 minutes to draw the sink cut out diagram. I made a couple of silly mistakes that wasted time, I spent 20 minutes trying to draw the whole thing rather than 1/2 and mirroring the other half. But there was absolutely no misery or frustration. 8 minutes is certainly faster but I did it with a program that I have not been using very long and I have no investment in the software.

Agreed, a beginner with no drafting experience may indeed take a while doing this same drawing but I doubt that I could have done it any faster using AutoCAD LT.

[Robatoy]

8 minutes, eh? Not too shabby. *tips hat*

The dimensions are mostly illustrative, The 'meat' is in the .dxf file itself, that is the one that drives all the toys. As you know, when dimensioning anything with curvature, the beginning and end of a curve can be a difficult to grab accurately.

In most cases I strip the dimensioning layer off before sending the actual file off.

Call them a rough guide. The actual .dxf file will dimension more accurately. (The architects are a different crowd than CNC Mill operators )

r----> who has heard good things about Solidworks.

[MikeWhy]

8 minutes, eh? Not too shabby. *tips hat*

========= SW makes it easy. Toss on the tangent arcs, one after the other, and *then* nail them down with dimensions. They're color coded blue until you place enough dimensions to fully define them. The solver moves and resizes things as you do this. It beats blazes out of going the other way, the familiar drafting room way of finding the centers and tangent points and then drawing the arcs.

It certainly wasn't skill on my part; SW did all the work. It's been a few weeks since I even used it. To bring this around full circle, I've been using SU almost exclusively in that time. ;)

[MikeWhy]

>>> ===========

I'm sick enough to think this was a fun way to spend the afternoon. It's nothing against SU or ACAD. SW is a different class of tool, made specifically to excel at this sort of thing. You can see the progression in CAD capabilities in the evolution in car body shapes, from flat sided boxes in the 80's to the faired, used bar of soap shapes we have today. Your 20 minutes is rather impressive. I wouldn't even try this in SU.

(It didn't take the *whole* afternoon. I helped a friend buy a used bandsaw and cart it home in between.)

[MikeWhy]

Last night, I took a tour around Manhattan in Google Earth with the 3d buildings turned on. *That* is what SU excels at, the reason it exists, and why Google gives it away. Combined with a 3dconnexion mouse, the view was simply stunningly, the experience absolutely jaw dropping. Imagine now, everyone running around with their free CAD system, and doing the same with the rest of the countryside. That's the real gift, I think, even though SU by itself rightly earns its kudos.

[Leon]

Geez, Mike where do you live that the afternoon is 44 minutes long, the South Pole? LOL

I was just pointing out that Sketchup will do much more than many think it can do. Obviousely having a mechanical drawing back ground is helpful in solving some of the more complex situations when using SU. More expensive programs have short cuts for dealing with those common situations.

oooh !

[MikeWhy]

Preacher; choir. Regarding that last bit, though... I fear I'm belaboring it, and you have to be tired already of reading it, but it still needs to be said. The "smarts" in the 2d sketch is a generalization of the parametric solver, not just shortcuts for hard coded special, common situations. You nail down the things you care about, a size, or a distance, or some other relationship to some other part. This specifies your design intent. What isn't nailed down are implicitly the things the solver can adjust to maintain your intent when you later move things around or resize them. SU 7 Pro added the fledgling beginnings of this capability. I don't know much about it, since I don't have Pro to play around with, but I expect it to remain somewhat limited, simply because SU doesn't retain all that much history of how the parts are created. For example, it doesn't remember that you pulled a face X distance to create the part, so it can't later adjust that distance in its solution. We'll see how that turns out in subsequent SU versions. That should be an interesting area to watch.

[Leon]

Exactly. With all the attention that SU is getting I suspect that it will evolve into a piece of software with more talents and probably at a higher price. ;~(

[B A R R Y]

You should see it from an airplane... You do the entire loop around 900 feet up.

Here's an example:

It's even better at night!

[MikeWhy]

Yah. Done that. Made that podunk midwest cow town look insignificant; second city my hairy behind. Really, though. Try Manhattan in Google Earth with a

3dConnexion mouse. Get right in on top of Penn Station and the nearby penthouses. It's a different view, definitely a much richer level of detail compared to zooming past at 120 kts a few miles away, even given the crude resolution of the pasted on bitmap textures.

[Robatoy]

Can you still do that?