Furniture design program- adding doors.

 Furniture design program provides flexibility to modify designs.

We are continuing our furniture design program project  introduced in an earlier post.  [link]
Once the concept of the project has been developed and approved we moved on to providing the details. 
There were several areas that had to be finished off before the cut list, shop drawings, and sheet goods lay out reports could be generated.  This post and the video included will demonstrate several aspects of detailing the project in our free furniture design software.

We’ll make a list of these details.

1.       The most obvious that doors need to be created, size and located as needed in the design.
2.       Each lower base unit will have a drawer added.
3.       The upper cabinets that merged to 18 inch wide cabinets into one 36 inch wide cabinet needs work.

• Merging the two cabinets just cloned and “stuck” them together.  Because of this the right boards from one cabinet and the left boards from the other cabinet repeat. Go into the cabinet at the assembly level and delete one of those redundant board pairs.
• The center dividing board (vertical) along with its stile must be centered it in the cabinet
• All horizontal boards must be examined to make sure they butt against the two side boards and fit under the center divider.
• This new merged cabinet will be cloned and moved, replacing the other merged cabinets.

Making adjustments to the merged cabinets best shows how to use the red dot in the line tool in our furniture design program.

Follow these steps.

• First select the cabinet and click assembly level in the hierarchical level form.
• Then click on one center style and delete it.
• Click on that Stiles vertical divider and delete that.
• Click on the backboard and with your mouse drag the right board to the left edge of the right side of the cabinet drag the right side of the cabinet.  Check that the right side edge of the backboard is equal to the left side edge of the right side.  (This is where the video will help.)
• Now click the backboard and holding down the shift key on your keyboard click the divider board.  In the upper right area of the sketch list main screen click the alignment button and click the icon at the left top.  That will center the style in the cabinet
• Repeat that step centering the divider board.
• For the top and bottom of the cabinet, the boards to the right of the cabinet. The SketchList 3D cabinet making software allows you to use a red dot method of shift drag [hold down the shift key and drag a red dot] to change the size of the top and bottom boards.  This way they fit between the left and right-side boards.
• Final check is to make sure that the center divider sits on top of the bottom board and underneath the top board.  

At this point will put in the door using our furniture design program. 

1. Drag the door icon into the assembly.
2. Using the form at the top right enter a depth of three quarters and click the button back.
3. Click the bottom shelf and noticed that the top value is 3 and three quarters. 
4. Click and using the form change its value for bottom from 0 to 3 ¾.  Then click the button labeled top.
5. Change the left value of the door from zero to ¾.  
6. Change the top value for the door to 20.25.   This is the bottom value of that middle shelf.  Click the button labeled top.
7. Finally change the right side of the drawer to the value of the left edge of the right side board.  In the case of this example it’s 35 ¼. 
8. Realizing that that is a very wide board were going to go into the with text box in the form and multiply that value by .5   I’ll show you how to do that in the video showing the use of my furniture design program.  The resulting new width of the door is 17 5/8. 

Break time!  The container for the door is all set.  Now we insert the needed boards.

1. At this point go  to the door level and insert the boards necessary to build your door.   Simply drag the board icon from the top of the sketch list screen into the door.  You can use the red dots to change the size of the board so that it completely occupies the door container.   That would be for a flat panel door.   To create a raised panel or five-part door you would adjust the sizes needed to make the board into the Stiles. Then you would locate one style on each side of the door.  Really the clone and mirror button works very well here.
2. Insert another board for the lower rail. Use red dots, form, or spreadsheet to size that rail.  Remember you can use the red dot while holding down the shift key method to drag and snap the rail to fit between the styles.
3. Clone the lower rail and use the slider bar to move it to the top of the door.
4. Drag in one more board for the center panel.   It’s easiest to use the shift key red dot drag method to place the center panel between the rails and the styles.
5. Finishing the left door, click on the clone and space button.  At the bottom of the form check fixed space and enter the value of zero. Make sure the left direction is selected and click okay. (For the purposes of this demonstration I’ve ignored door and drawer overlay or inset values.)

Perhaps this is a lot of information to consume in written format.  For that reason I’m including this video showing all the above using our furniture design program – SketchList 3D.