Very fast design of bookcase with face frame.

Quick to learn – quicker to use – emphasis on rapid  design of bookcase with face frame.

There is a lot of emphasis these days on rapid prototyping.   Bringing a sample to the market, to a business partner, or to a prospective customer in the fastest possible of times is a premium.  In this post and video I show how to design an bookcase with face frame in less than five minutes.

Several months ago I took a weekend workshop to learn more about using CNC machines in woodworking. The person who led the workshop was an engineer – woodworker – metalworker – 3-D printer expert. Believe it or not he had a PhD in a thing called rapid prototyping.  I must say he really knew his stuff.

One of the things I’ve noticed over the past six months as we keep improving SketchList 3D to make it easier to use is that people  are only willing to invest the smallest amount of time to learn it.  They want instant productivity and expertise.

At the same time designing in three dimensions while trying to a work with things like doors, drawers, hardware – – the stuff of woodworking — is a bit complex.

Instant experrtise is hard to achieve.

Shift gears a bit with me….

I was surfing through a technical webpage where they were talking about the evolution of spreadsheets – yep your old Excel like interface.  The new idea was you manipulated your data simply by sliding your finger across the computer screen.  This new software is really designed for a tablet or phone.  I thought immediately how this will help SketchList 3D  users.  This approach would mean that they get started designing quicker and achieve their designs in a shorter amount of time.

So I put together a video showing you my idea.

Basically what I did was create three boards and saved them as standard. One board is a shelf. One board is a sideboard. The other board is a back.  Using this format and dragging boards into the design I was able to desgin a bookcase with face frame in less then 5 minutes.  Using the red dots and blue dots help a great deal in locating the rails and stiles of the face frame.

I set up my screen making the standards form always open and the show boards checkbox checked. You can do this by clicking the standard tab, clicking the little checkmark in the upper right, then moving that form to the upper right side of the SketchList main screen.  Then go under set up main menu item, click layout, and enter a name for this new layout of your main screen.

(If you’ve installed your SketchList 3D software very  recently you will find three boards defined as standards that you can simply drag into an assembly to begin you’re designing. If not CLICK HERE.   There is a video on that post that will show you how to create the three boards necessary. )

Now just drag the board you need into your design. Use the red dots and blue dots to size and locate the boards to make whatever you are designing.

Watch this video:

By the way – this would work for drawers and doors also.

Dave