Custom Cabinet Design Software

Helping you sell your next job.

Perhaps these are just new year’s resolutions.  I’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of custom cabinet design software training session over the past few weeks.  Training sessions consist of connecting with one or more users over the Internet and answering questions, explaining how to do things with SketchList 3D, and actually tackling design projects.   While we can see each others screen we were also talking together over the telephone line.

It seems to me after doing these training sessions four nearly 10 years about 60 to 90 minutes is the optimal length of time.  Many times it can take me 15 or 20 minutes just to understand the essence of the project the user wants to sign.  What I have seen in this last couple of sessions is that more questions about overall layout of a project and how to use assemblies are being asked.

The other thing – getting back to resolutions – is that everybody  I talked to during the sessions told the they are “Done drawing on graph paper”.

I certainly hope that more and more people are making this resolution this time.  Of course it would help my business — but more importantly it will help their business for sure.

This video shows [CLICK ME TO SEE VIDEO] the essence of a conversation I had with a person last week.  There was some confusion as to how to relate two cabinets and washer and dryer in a laundry area.   Even though the example may seem trivial the exercise proved a good opportunity to review relationship between projects and assemblies along with doors and drawers.  The time together proved a good review of the various design tools and SketchList 3D, most significantly the use of red dots and blue dots to size and locate assemblies.

At the end of the time together I was able to export the project from SketchList put it in my drop box and provide the link to this customer.  From that he was able to generate the high quality 3D photo renderings he needed to show his perspective client.

If you are in the business custom woodworking, custom cabinet making, or remodeling you will benefit by having this design capability.  I am committed to help you get started using my cabinet building software in your business.  If if you’d like to find out more drop me an email.

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Get an email from a user this week asking about the way one would provide dimensions to the detail of a rabbet.

“Message: I have created a rabbet on a board edge. How can I print a shop drawing of the dimensions? ”

I thought that maybe more than Peter might have an interest in the answer.   So as I often do I put together a YouTube video posted it so that you can see exactly how the SketchList 3D woodworking software allows you to dimension detail like a rabbet.

You can see that video here.

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I received an email asking about tapered legs.  I thought more than one person might be interested in how to make a tapered leg in SketchList 3D so I put a video onto YouTube.  I just noticed that John was asking a more specific question and my answer is more generic.

Near the end of the video I show how I set the taper to go the whole length of the board by changing the top and bottom ‘shoulders’ of the board to zero.  You can set them as anything.  Also the amount of taper is set in degrees and the overall location is a function of the number of degrees and the length of the leg.  You can taper one, two, three, or four edges.  The important thing to get this to work is to pick the orientation of board which has the board surfaces facing top and bottom.  That way all the edges become sides and you can apply the contours accordingly.

Experiment applying different contours – like a bull nose.   At the board detail level select the surface and click Shape.  Turn the square into a circle and you have a round leg – which can be tapered    Also once the leg is created try stretching and shrinking it by dragging the red dots.  Surprises abound!

Any questions shoot me an email.

The post Tapered legs video for furniture and cabinet designs appeared first on SketchList3D.

Re-sizing cabinet designs – one size can indeed fit all.

In this week’s webinar we had an opportunity to discuss and use the cabinet re-sizing capability within sketch list 3-D. The users had questions about what would happen to a shape or to a data placed on a board when that board was stretched or shrunk in a cabinet resize.   We experimented back and forth re-sizing cabinet designs.   I’d say that people were very impressed with the power of SketchList to resize all of a cabinet and even selected parts of different cabinets. One person said that it was an extremely powerful capability and would enable him to design a very small number of cabinets and just pull those in as standards and resize them as needed in his job.

Re-sizing cabinet designs is one of those features that is extremely powerful, very useful, and all in all very easy to use. It is also, unfortunately, one of those features that probably a lot of users both old and new just don’t fully appreciate.  So as I often do I thought I would put together a quick video and posted to YouTube to further explore this powerful capability.

The re-sizing can be accomplished using the red dots. If you’ve seen the red dot video you know that you right-click a red dot and can type in a new value for the location of that edge or size of the assembly and SketchList 3-D resizes automatically. That is the default way of using the re-sizing feature.  It has the advantage of being easy to use and very fast. In order to keep things from becoming more complicated the necessary SketchList assumes that the place where the re-sizing will occur (re-sizing plane or “pink box”) is at the center of the assembly. This means that any boards that fall across the center of the assembly will be stretched from that point. Most of the time this works.  It doesn’t work if by chance that center re-size plane falls on something like a toe kick, a drawer, or a shape that you do not want to resize.  For that reason we’ve implemented the ability to move the re-size plane (which appears in your assembly as a pink plane or box when you right-click the red dot).

You can be very selective about exactly where you position the re-size plane.  Anything touched by the plane has its size changed according to the amount you drag the red dot. Any objects between the plane and the direction your dragging the red dot will be moved.

This is one of those things that is much easier to understand when you see it.   So here’s a video click on it and think about how you might be able to use this capability to speed your work when re-sizing cabinet designs.

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Project

The project is the overall container for your designs — everything including materials information are stored in the project.  This way you can easily exchange projects or move them from computer to computer by exporting and importing project files.  [Unless of course you implement our new shared database features!  Then all machines running SketchList 3D anywhere can share the same project file.]

This video explores the use of projects within SketchList 3D in a fair amount of detail.  From setting up a project, to understanding how assemblies fit and don’t fit in — there is a lot of information on this video.   The video is about 4 minutes long and is a must see for new SketchList 3D users.  More experienced users want to review it as well since some of the thing I cover came from phone calls or email questions from users.

As always if you have any questions or comments PLEASE let me know.  If you find a mistake – help me fix it by describing and with the approximate time it shows up in the video.

This is the first installment.

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