Carving software in cabinets

Carving software for your custom woodworking?

A few days ago I was speaking to someone who said you really couldn’t do anything other than boxes with the cabinet design software on the market.  He was an “outside of the box thinker” and wanted to have a great deal of flexibility in his designs.  Well most of us want flexibility when we need it.

So that caused me, in part, to spend some time looking about the internet to see what other software packages might offer in terms of drawing up details.  I landed on a site promoting carving software that would interface to a router / CNC machine and cut (I think anyway)  really cool designs.  I guess there are really times when you want to carve a tree on the front of your cabinet.

I thought a bit about how to present details in SketchList 3D as a bit of a carving design tool or at least semi-carving package.  I started experimenting with a sort of fluted column by shaping a board then putting a bull nose on the front of the curved shape.  I fooled a bit with different thicknesses using the red dot resizing function in SketchList 3D.  Well I got carried away for sure.

Next I cloned [clone and space fixed amount of zero] the board 4 times and stacked the resulting boards against each other left to right.  Then I pulled out the center board towards the front and those next to moved to the front by just a bit.  It looked so much like a podium – well I added a foot and a top(slanted backwards)  to hold the notes!  As as an outside of the box thinker – put on that  bulb-like thing near the bottom.

Now that I had a podium – well seats popped into my mind!  Put together some benches and low and behold – look what resulted.  I was going to put the rug out – but with the snow we’ve had….

Is it time to pass the hat?

My point is that there are many ways to explore and be creative with SketchList 3D.  The tools make it easy – once you start poking about with them.

Carving software – cabinet software – furniture software?   You have the tools and the imagination needed – take a bit and stretch them both a bit.