I have been able to make a bit of progress on the cabinet over the past 11 days. Not as much as I would have liked to have made, but some. The Holidays were just too busy. Out of 11 days off, I only got to spend a couple of hours on the Friday after Christmas, most of New Year's Eve, and a few hours on New Year's Day in the shop.
I am in the process of writing & organizing posts about what I've accomplished. These will be posted in the next few days. In the interim, I just wanted to wish everyone a happy and healthy new year!
5 comments:
Hi Tony
I found your blog through the Wood Whisperer and I am enjoying it a lot.
I particularly liked your comments on using Google Sketchup. I am also using/learning it as I designe projects for our new house. On your suggestion I got bothe exim and cutlistplus. However, I am not having much success using them.
The exim plugin doesn't appear and the Cutlistplus doesn't recognize the material in my project .
I wonder if you might be willing to write about the mechanics of using those programs.
Richard
Richard:
Glad to hear you're enjoying my blog! I've gotten very little feedback from any readers, so I really am working in the dark. It's nice to know that someone appreciates it.
I will try to put something together soon with more information about using SketchUp & CutListPlus.
However, for the time being, you should be aware that if you want Cut List to recognize the material names you use in SketchUp, you have to use identically spelled material names. That is, you should call it "white oak" in both programs. Computers are very literal things & can't determine that "Oak, white" and "White oak" are the same thing.
I don't know if that's your problem or not, but as a computer programmer, it's the kind of thing I've seen new users do enough times that I felt I should bring it up.
Tony
Tony
Thanks for the info. I will look forward to your article.
It sounds like I have to "educate" cutlist plus as to what materials I will use but in Eketchup I am not clear where to name the material for a component.
Also I am not able to get the exim explode plugin to load into sketchup plugins like the cutlist generator
Richard
Richard:
Yes, you have to tell Cut List what raw materials you use. In Cut List, go to the Raw Materials tab. You will see a list of different kinds of materials, things like "Rough Lumber", "Dimensional Lumber", "Sheets Goods", etc. Expand each kind & under that you'll see a list of default species. You can add new species or edit the data for the existing species.
For each species, you can specify a list of sizes & the cost for that size. For example, in my copy of Cut List, under Red Oak, I have an entry for a board that is 4/4 thick x 5 3/4" wide x 60" long. It has a lineal cost of $2.44 a lineal foot. Cut List uses this information to determine what size boards you should buy & to estimate what the piece will cost.
All of this is in the Cut List help documentation, by the way.
In SketchUp, you need use the Materials feature. You need to define a material called "Red Oak". You need to have an image of red oak grain to import,and then you "paint" the parts with the red oak material. The Cut List Ruby Script will export the material into the CSV file.
Again, this is in the SketchUp help.
Generally, I don't bother assigning materials in SketchUp. I load the CSV into Excel after generating it & enter the material choices in there. I usually use two special values that CutList Plus knows called "Primary Material" and "Secondary Material". Cut List has special properties that map these values to any species you care for. That lets you easily generate an estimate for the project using different species simply by changing these properties.
Once more, all of this is explained in the Cut List Plus help.
Regarding the Explode script, it's hard for me to debug what might be wrong from here without more information. I'd start by reading any documentation for the plug in. If that didn't help, I'd read the SketchUp help regarding plug ins & go from there.
Tony
Hi Tony
My ignorance is showing.
I found the Exim in the context menu as explode/implode and I am working with the help file to get it right.
I like your idea of defining the materials in the Excel file and not bothering with Sketchup (I tend to forget to "paint" the material any way.
Keep up the good work
Richard
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