pedrobedro
Man at Matalan
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I have a little book of cunning plans with sketches and measurements written down in it, fits in my back pocket very handy to remind me when I lose my thread.
- Thread starter Highway_Star
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I have a little book of cunning plans with sketches and measurements written down in it, fits in my back pocket very handy to remind me when I lose my thread.
Morrisman
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One great drawback of Sketchup is you can’t print an engineering style, dimensioned drawing from it, without lining up the model and doing a screen grab. I guess it is simply not designed for such things. Or it wasn’t when I was using it to do our house anyway, which was nigh on ten years ago.
Mr Roo
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I’m a big fan of autocad. did it in school, then never touched it for about 4 years - got straight back into it once i needed it again for 6months. Then never used it again for about 6 years and again, picked it straight back up.
have tried turbocad - hated it. sketchup is almost anti-intuitive (although i’ll admit finished products can look great). Revit is a great tool, but can get the hump if you forget something simple at the beginning.
need to do some more work on autocad soon; i’ve occasionally had great results with 3D work on it, but other times it’s like peeing in the wind...
have tried turbocad - hated it. sketchup is almost anti-intuitive (although i’ll admit finished products can look great). Revit is a great tool, but can get the hump if you forget something simple at the beginning.
need to do some more work on autocad soon; i’ve occasionally had great results with 3D work on it, but other times it’s like peeing in the wind...
Screwdriver
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Of course you can. Here's one I made earlier:
From: https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/trefoil-plans-wanted.89843/page-2
Axonometric, isometric, orthographic, if you can spell it, Sketchup can do it.
DAPPH
as dyslexik as I'm daft
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I found Sketchup incredibly simple to use, once I learmed the basic shortcuts hot keys and watched a couple of tutoring videos. I designed our whole house in the Philippines with it, to the millimetre and showed it to an american friend who is an architect, and was also our neighbour, and he admitted he actually used it himself to get a quick and simple drawing to show customers.
I added a few visual frills such as shadows etc to it, to make it look interesting, but I had a whole 3D model I could walk through and take x-ray sections of. The finished house came out great, one of my best adventures. Pity the wife got it in the divorce......
View attachment 272911
View attachment 272912
Are you going to design a curvey wealthy new wife in your next house design ......chainable to the sink or the bed? 
Screwdriver
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Remembering that Sketchup is more of an architectural design tool that you can "get away with" using for smaller parts.
It is the primary software design tool for a number of actually quite large high end architect companies.
I built my shed with it for example.
It is the primary software design tool for a number of actually quite large high end architect companies.
I built my shed with it for example.
lchris21
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I've dabbled on and off with autocad, solidworks and inventor over 30years......trouble I find is if you dont continue to use it after learning it quickly becomes harder and harder to pick up again. I last used inventor about 7 years ago....I'd struggle to draw a cube now
Also coming from a pencil drawing sketch background, to make something.... its quicker for me to just......make it! I also notice that people with no real engineering/machining/manufacturing knowledge pick it up quickly? Whereas when I'm drawing something using it I'm subconsciously going through the machining process to actually produce the part....which confuses my simple brain sometimes
Also coming from a pencil drawing sketch background, to make something.... its quicker for me to just......make it! I also notice that people with no real engineering/machining/manufacturing knowledge pick it up quickly? Whereas when I'm drawing something using it I'm subconsciously going through the machining process to actually produce the part....which confuses my simple brain sometimes
eLuSiVeMiTe
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Yup il agree with that
Suits me because I draw as I would build so the pull tool is my best friend
It's mainly for visuals customers and quantities for my benifit.
Hello its Freeware https://www.freecadweb.org/
Screwdriver
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I did start playing with freecad which is excellent (albeit with dodgy graphics). But I kept flitting back to fusion then couldn't make my mind up which one to commit to and stuck with Sketchup!
badabec
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Elastigirl from the Incredibles?
Tangledfeet
Knurling is my Nemesis.
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That be lovely
What's this, drawing with computers?
Then the 100s of hours spent on a board with A0 film, Rotring ink pens, 3rd angle projection, tolerance and material books was all a waste?
No - because you can look at a drawing and see the finished part.
And if you use a 3D CAD system, you will take advantage of the automatic drawing view creation, but realise pretty quickly that while the drawing frame claims to be third angle, the views its giving you are in first angle because the clown who just over-wrote the last decade of settings and tweaks to "standardise" settings for the new update doesn't understand a thing . . .
You will know how and where to put dimensions, where a section, a cut-away, a partial view will work and enhance the understanding of the drawing. You won't dimension to hidden detail, you won't put dimensions to one feature on separate views spread over three sheets, then actually say what it is on the fourth sheet, but instead try to make it clear in a concise and easy to read way. You won't put totally un-needed isometric views of a very simple part all over the place just to make it look pretty. And linked to that, you won't ring up the customer and ask for a 3D model of that same ridiculously simple part . . .
You won't throw too many decimal places into simple dimensions (fabrication to three decimal places anyone, meaning for us +/- 0.025mm when to the nearest 5mm would be perfect, you won't put totally unnecessary geometric tolerances on, insist on over-the-top surface finishes.
You won't spend a week trying to make a sheet-metal CAD model, including a flat pattern, when you have no idea of how to actually fold metal, where the tooling needs to go, or that you can't magic metal out of thin air when you've bent it somewhere else already, when a simple standard model would do and allow the chosen fabricator to make best use of his skills and equipment.
Or something like that anyway.
Can you tell we might have a few people who know how to use a CAD system, but no idea how to engineer?
Screwdriver
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Seems a bit harsh to criticise CAD for its ability to be "too accurate". Plus of course, once you have a sheet of paper in front of you, it needs to be scanned or copied and emailed or posted. Then the client says "can you shift this 1mm to the left" and you spend another day on another drawing instead of a single click on your parametric model. These days a client might even casually ask for a scale model or full size replica. You can't print a model from a drawing...
It is true to say that 3d modelling is so commonplace, it has ended up in the hands of amateurs so that you might get a "perfectly" produced CAD of an unrealisable part! But that is true in all walks of life and not a criticism of 3D CAD in particular.
I appreciate a decent drawing as much as the next person. Some of them are so nice they should be framed and hung on the wall but It is a dying art. Hand drawn graphics have been totally superseded by computer modelling. I sincerely hope engineering becomes a popular career path and R4 this morning suggests students are in fact leaving "Humanities" subjects in light of recent events to study something more useful and more desirable to employers.
It is true to say that 3d modelling is so commonplace, it has ended up in the hands of amateurs so that you might get a "perfectly" produced CAD of an unrealisable part! But that is true in all walks of life and not a criticism of 3D CAD in particular.
I appreciate a decent drawing as much as the next person. Some of them are so nice they should be framed and hung on the wall but It is a dying art. Hand drawn graphics have been totally superseded by computer modelling. I sincerely hope engineering becomes a popular career path and R4 this morning suggests students are in fact leaving "Humanities" subjects in light of recent events to study something more useful and more desirable to employers.
Morrisman
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Back in the day we would occasional receive ‘blueprints’ in the machine shop that were physically impossible to make. I remember one such farce, a lathe job, 4” round bar with the inside bored out to 3” ..... except the hole each end was only 3/4”.
The customers ’engineer’ simply could not understand it was impossible to get any sort of burning bar inside through the hole, that would open it up to 3” internally.
We needed up using heavy tube with profile cut ends welded on..... the finished project that was required was actually that crude.
And another who wanted a bunch of ACME threads on shouldered bar, like vice screws, but wanted an undercut at the end less than half the width of the thread pitch, demanded it, for god knows what reason. It took a lesson in screw cutting from me to persuade him it could not happen and wasn’t actually necessary.
My answer was to illustrate that the hours spent learning how to be a draughtsman are not wasted - your drawings will be so much better, easier to understand, thought out for their actual requirements, than someone simply using a CAD system with no knowledge or understanding of engineering. Many just do not understand, despite the tolerance/specifications in the drawing title box, what they are asking for by slapping many-decimal places on dimensions, simply because they can.
One of our contract guys, a bloke I have the greatest of respect for, unlike a lot of our passing through workers, has a saying something along the lines of "inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination" for those CAD drivers creating fantastical looking CAD constructions that require some much time and money to make them build them and then make them work . . . when you could have bought something off the shelf for 1/3 the price and time!
