Sketchup BASICS for woodworkers. Follow along. | LOCKDOWN DAY 46

hey everybody welcome to my Sketchup for woodworkers tutorial it's my goal with this tutorial to give you kind of an overview of Sketchup if you've never used it before and show you all of the essential tools and features that you'll need to learn in order to design your own projects Sketchup is a really intuitive program and it kind of helps you out as you're building my suggestion to using this tutorial is to have two windows open just have a window of this video open and then right alongside of it open up Sketchup and then follow along with me as I build this project just pausing along the way to try out everything I do I think that's really the best way to learn Sketchup that's exactly how I learned Sketchup and what we're gonna be building is this drill press cabinet and it doesn't really matter that this is a drill press cabinet the the point here is that this is a pretty common cabinet that you might build for all different kinds of furniture projects so we get started I want to talk real briefly about Sketchup itself this is the Sketchup home page over at Sketchup comm Sketchup was a program originally developed by Google and it was always a free version and then a few years ago they sold it to Trimble and Trimble still offers a free online version that you can use as well as paid versions that have more features so when you go to their website here you can drop this down plans and pricing and go to personal use and you'll see three different versions the SketchUp Pro you won't need it all that is filled with features that are mostly for designing buildings and industrial products and things that you just won't need as it would worker Sketchup shop will be the one you will most likely want to purchase right now it's a hundred bucks a year and there's also the free version which has all of the features of the Sketchup shop except for a couple of key features that I think are pretty important but what Sketchup doesn't tell you is that they actually have their older SketchUp make that's the version I use here Sketch up make 2017 I think this was their last desktop version free desktop version but you can actually still get it if you go to this web I'll include this link down in the description or you just go to their help file and you'll see the downloading older versions and right here is the sketchup make 2017 and that's the version i'm gonna be using for this tutorial because I've been using it for a long time now I'm real familiar with it again it's identical to Sketchup free online version a couple of minor little changes to it but I want to briefly talk about the reasons why I'm still using this and I don't know how long they're gonna keep supporting this or not so I suppose eventually I'll have to go over to that hundred dollar a year version but let me compare the two I'll click over here to the free version and if you are new to Sketchup you can actually do like there's a 30-day free trial version that'll give you like the whole version and then after 30 days you'll scale it back so you'll lose some of the features and figure out what you're missing when you open up Sketchup for the first time you'll just hit the start modeling and it always opens up like this with a figure here and that's just to give you a sense of scale and I usually just click on that person using this arrow right here kind of defaults that arrow you just click on that and then you can delete her out of there but what I wanted to show you was this layout so over here you've got your toolbar of all of your tools that you'll be using and as you click them they expand out to kind of sub tools that are related to that tool and that's identical to my tool bar I've got over here on Sketchup make over on this side I've got my palettes and these have also different features of Sketchup some are more important than others some of them I really don't use it all but one thing that I use all the time is this right here this is the outliner and this lets me select individual pieces of the project like this right here is the right side of this cabinet so with it makes it really easy to keep things organized and that is about the only feature on all of these palettes that not that one this one here the outliner that you need to upgrade in order to get it so that's kind of a bummer and for me that would be a deal-breaker to using the online free version and kind of force me into the the next level up the other thing that this free version and I don't know if they've changed this I haven't looked at this in a while or if the pro or the paid versions offer this is a way to set shortcut keys on my mouse when I use me go back to my version for years I've gotten really used to have using the two side buttons on my mouse the front one switches to orbit like this and then the one behind that on the side of my mouse I clicked that and I get this pan tool so I can go side to side and I use the scroll wheel on my mouse for zooming in and out so those three tools on my mouse are super useful to have and allow me to work really quickly on the website version you still have of course all those tools but you'll just have to use the shortcut keys you know I guess as the program was originally intended I've just changed mine to use the mouse because I found it a lot easier so I think for like orbit it's probably oh yeah so that gives you the orbit key and then H is the shortcut key Oh H for hand okay so it's not that big of a deal it's just a big deal for me because I've gotten so used to using my mouse oh and it looks like you can use the zoom the scroll wheel on your mouse for zooming on here so that's that's good news so for the rest of this tutorial I'm going to be using Sketchup make 2017 just keep in mind that it's no different then the online version just might look a little bit different here and there but everything I'm going to be showing you is gonna be identical throughout this tutorial I may come back to this completed version of the cabinet for reference but I'm gonna start building it from the ground up and a new document and when you open up a new project you'll have this kind of landscape view and the first thing I like to do is get rid of that so if you go over to this right pallet there's one called styles oops I just clicked it away styles and it lets you choose different kind of views of how you're building and there's actually one called woodworking style so I just use that and it just gives you a clean gray background what you're looking at here are the three axes and with nothing in here built yet it's kind of difficult to imagine how these work but you can imagine that of course the blue is up and down the red one goes right to left and then the green axis runs front to back so you're always thinking in three dimensions I want to start by showing you the most common features that you're going to be using all the time and I'll start that by just drawing a rectangle or we're just going to make a basic board so I'll go up here onto your tool box and select the rectangle tool you just click on that and then we'll go down here to this origin point it'll snap to that a lot of things in Sketchup snap to where you want it to be and that's really helpful so we'll go to that origin and you just click once on it release the mouse button and then you can pull out you can see the rectangle it'll actually show you hints here like that little dotted line tells you that it's square there's also this right here is the golden ratio Fibonacci ratio and those can be useful tool but right now let's make this a 20 by 24 inch rectangle so what I can do is just pull this out to any dimension it doesn't really matter say right there and I've got a rectangle so now down in this corner you'll see what the dimension of that rectangle R which is nowhere close to what I want so as long as I'm not touching anything else once I've drawn that rectangle I can actually type in the dimensions I want it to be so I'm going to go 20 comma 24 and then that pulls it up to the exact size I want and it's important to know also that of course you can work in different excuse me different units by going to model info it's probably also in preferences so here you can pick if you want to use decimals or millimeters if you're using metric centimeters and you can get it down to whatever precision you like I usually use the fractional inches and precision it doesn't need to be one 64th of an inch but I just leave it at that and that's usually fine once you have a rectangle made you can click on it and you'll see how it's I'm zooming in here and rotating it's got kind of all these little dots all over it so that's just showing you that that's like a face that you've made and this is also you can click on the edges there's one of the edges it highlights in blue edge so each of these is made up of four edges and then this plane so if I triple click it it selects all of that and then I can hit the delete button and delete it away so again common rectangle select a rectangle I'll just pull it out to whatever I want and then type in 24 comma 20 and there's my 20 by 24 inch rectangle but then we need to bring it in to three dimensions so what I want to do is use this is the push-pull tool this is also a really common tool it's P is the shortcut key so P is really helpful to know and then spacebar switches back to this selection tool the arrow so here I'm going to hit select P and then I can grab just click anywhere click and release and pull up on that so it's like pulling this into the third dimension and then once again I just pull it up to anywhere click off of it and then down in this lower right corner it shows you that I pulled it up to you know over almost five inches tall and I don't need that so I haven't clicked anything else so I can just type in 3/4 I want this 3/4 inch plywood here so it's just three slash quarter and then that brings it down to a 3/4 inch plywood you can also use decimals if you prefer you can interchange them so let me undo that let's say we're down here again I'm gonna go p4 push-pull I'm gonna pull this up click and then I'll just to 0.75 so that means it knows that it's 3/4 of an inch also 0.75 and that brings it down to a board probably the most important concept to use in Sketchup our components and this right now is just a series of faces you've got you know the front and the sides and the edges faces but there if I was to add another rectangle on here let's say I want to put one here and then P for push pull pull it up do that again pull it up to there now if you'll notice this is all one thing so I can't select this box on its own and pull it away from that it's joined to that first board we made so let's bring this back down eliminate those lines so whenever you make a part of a project or even one board turn it into a component and the way to do that is by selecting all of it there's a couple ways to do that I almost always triple click 3 clicks and that selects everything another way to select it is by dragging your cursor from the lower right up to the upper left and that will select everything that it's touching so here you can see that it's touching this face this face this face but it didn't select this face over here because I didn't extend it all the way over there so let's say I just wanted to select this one piece here this one edge and I can grab it by just touching it with that cursor that'll select it but I can also do it by dragging from the lower left to the right and what that does is it selects everything that the marquee is surrounding so here the only thing it surrounded was that so it's selected it didn't select this face or this face but if I went from the left to the right or from the right to the left like this then it selects everything that it touched and just keep that in mind because that's gonna be really handy when it comes to selecting parts of your project so for now what I want to do is hit spacebar so I've got that selection tool handy and I'm just going to triple click on this piece and then I'm going to hit G and that brings up create component you can also find it up here in the menu somewhere I'm not sure I've used the shortcut keys for so long but anyways triple click G create component and you give it a name if you want you know we can call this base and then create now what you notice is you don't see all those little dotted lines on everything so now whenever I touch this it selects the entire object it thinks that this is a single board not just all of these faces now for instance if I drew say I wanted to build a box on top of that one and did this now you can see it's got line all around so this is a separate thing from this so I could actually triple click this one create a component and now I have access to moving each of these things around independently that's just I can't stress how important it is to create a component of every bored that you made let's take a moment to play around with these two boards start with your orbit tool by pressing o or using the mouse button in my case and you'll be able to click and drag around and it'll give you a view of all parts of this in three dimensions and get used to using that in combination with the pan tool that's the hand or the shortcut key H so that'll drag it around this way so for instance I could switch to orbit I could get up to this view here and then zoom also so with my scroll wheel on my mouse I can zoom in to maybe just this piece and I need to say I want to get a better look at it all orbit around this way and then I noticed maybe it's going off the screen a little bit so I'll switch to the hand tool to bring it more in the center here so those three tools are gonna be used all the time and just get used to switching back and forth from them learn the shortcut keys if you have to use these tools every single to go to the tool bar every single time it'll just get real tedious and it'll just kind of take forever one of the things about using Sketchup is you're gonna constantly be looking at the model from all different directions try to avoid always looking at one direction or from one point of view the next tool that you're going to use frequently is the move tool and that's em on your keyboard is the shortcut or it's over here on your toolbar it's that one it shows the arrows in all four directions so if I want to move a component you can without anything selected I can hover over a component and you'll see how it turns into get those blue edges on it so that means I can click on that and I can move it around we hit escape anytime you start doing something and you're thinking oh I shouldn't have done that just hit escape before you click off of it and also keep in mind that you don't click and drag you don't have to click and drag that often in Sketchup usually you just undo single click on something and then it's stuck to your cursor and then you can move it around let me undo that so let's say I wanted to select this board that's on top here and I want to line it up with the edge and/or the corner of this board you could if you were to grab it say in the middle here and move it you might find it kind of confusing how am I gonna get it lined up with that corner well Sketchup does a lot of things to help you out with that and the main thing is snapping so if I grab this and I pull it over you can see where it gives me a hint on there says on green axis so I'm following along that green axis I showed you at the beginning this one right here so if you keep it going in that direction it'll stay in that direction but it might wander a little bit so to prevent that from wandering just hit the shift key down once you've got it following say the green axis hit shift and then it's locked into that direction only so if I wanted to do say the red axis going this way there it's got it I can hit shift and keep it going in that direction but we hit escape so that cancels everything out rarely do you want to grab something right on a face usually what you want to do is grab something on a corner or on an edge so in this case I want to grab just this corner right here okay so I've selected just that point so now I'll be able to follow it along this edge I don't really even have to hold down shift here because Sketchup knows okay I see what you're doing you wanted to go along this edge and then when I get to this I'm zooming in when I get to this point boom it'll snap right to there and so it automatically kind of lines that up for you but let's say that I need to put another board alongside of this one so I don't want this to be right along the edge I want it to be say a quarter inch inset I want to bring it back this way just a quarter of an inch so what I can do is kind of like what I was showing you before I'm just gonna grab this point I'm gonna slide it over anywhere it doesn't matter and I'm just going to type in 1/4 for a quarter inch and there it's moved it that quarter-inch over and keep in mind when I type in measurements I'm not coming down here and clicking on this box or anything you just type them in as long as it's your next action you can type in any dimensions that you want other things that are important to know is that when you are hovering over an object here and rice sliding my move tool along the edge you'll see that it'll snap right here at the midpoint so you'll know where the center of that is or say the center of this edge if I come down here boom it snaps to midpoint it gives you that little clue so if I wanted to have that exactly in the center of this board I could go down grab the midpoint slide it over and then it'll find the center of that lower board too right there boom so now if I orbit around here you'll see how that's right in the center a couple other things that are useful is understanding the tape measure tool that would be T pulls that up and if you want to measure something you can grab a corner to corner and without clicking it'll tell you exactly how long it is that one I didn't make any specific size so let's do the sports I can click here pull it over to here and it tells me that's 24 inches or I can bring it back up to this side and it tells me I've got 20 inches but where the tape measure tool is really handy is setting guides so if I want this top board to be say 10 inches long and right now it's sitting at some you know really weird measurement 18 and 37 64 something that's totally useless but let's say I want to make that 10 inches long so what I could do is find a center of this edge you can't do it from the end point so you've got to find just a spot somewhere along the center there click on that and then when you do that it just creates this guide select anything else I'll just bring it out to about here and then I'll type in 10 10 inches and there's my 10 inch mark so now I can come back to moot to change this component to adjust it triple click it so that opens it back up to all of its phases then I can go p4 push-pull and you can see how I can either push pull this way which I don't want to do escape or hey let's grab this end one here use the push/pull tool I'm gonna start bringing this down and it's going to stop when I get to that right there it'll snap to that dotted line I made let's see if I get a different angle might show you a little bit better okay so okay so here you can see that dotted line so let's say I've got the push-pull tool push pull bring this around and think even though my tool is way up here I've still got that selected so it's gonna snap right to that dotted line so now I'm gonna hit spacebar to select click away from this now I can go back to my tape measure tool measure this and you'll see that I've got this down to exactly ten inches okay so let's continue on with this project if we got the base built here and let's get rid of this that was just a demonstration so I'll click on it just a single click and then I can just hit delete and it's gone and I don't want this guide here anymore but you can select the guide with the selection tool it might be you have to just click on it exactly and you'll see it turns blue and you can delete it usually what I do is just select it from the lower right to the left and then it's gone notice these guides are infinite so it just goes on and on forever and so that's why I can't select from the left to the right if I try to draw a mark here around that it won't turn it blue because there's no way I can go all the way around it it's infinite so I always just go from the right to the left like that and that selects it again you can also just touch it and select it so I'll just select that and just delete it I like to try to keep my projects clean from the those guides they can get a little bit overwhelming really quick let's go back to my finished drawing here and you can see that this is that base piece that we're working on the 20 by 24 the actual top to the cabinet is gonna be a little bit bigger it's gonna overhang but let me pull this out and show you what it looks like again I'm selecting em and I'm gonna just slide this out I'm holding down shift so it stays on that red axis what this has is it's got a rabbet on two ends and then a dado running right through the center on this side let me spin it around here and it's got a thin rabbet on the back because this back panel of the cabinet is only quarter-inch plywood so everything in this project is going to be well most of it is gonna be 3/4 inch plywood except for that back to find that Center I'm gonna use my tape measure tool again t4 tape measure or use the tool bar over here I'm gonna grab this edge of this component somewhere in here as long as it's not on one of those snapping points again it can't be on the end point so I'll click release and then drag this out and then I'm gonna keep my tool itself down here on the bottom until it finds that Center there's the center so I can just click again and establish that guide but I want the dado to be in the middle that's the middle of the dado so what I want to do is draw another guide from that again I'm gonna click somewhere in here and I'm just going to go over 3/8 of an inch so it's it's half the thickness of a board so I'll just type in 3/8 yeah and then I can do the same thing this way 3/8 3/8 of an inch so that's the thickness of that dado and I won't need this Center guide anymore so I can just hit spacebar to select I'll tap on it click on it and delete that so there's going to be my dado now if I try to make a dado just by drawing a rectangle here that won't work because remember this is a component so it thinks I'm building a new component on it I don't want to do that what I want to do is work on this board so I want to basically cut this board you can use your right mouse button and click on and it'll bring up a menu for edit component and then that opens it up or just triple click it and that also opens it up like this now there's my two guides I'll select the rectangle I'm going to start up here at this intersection it'll snap right to that and then I'm going to pull this rectangle down click once and pull the rectangle down to the end over here and it'll snap to that edge like that so now I've got a rectangle on this component I can use my push-pull tool P and I don't want to select this part but I could and I don't want to select this part but I could I want this middle one because I want to create that dado so what I want to do is push this down half the thickness I always make my dedos half the thickness of the wood so you know I could grab it let's say grab it towards the edge over here and I could find where that halfway point is by finding this edge way over here that finds the midpoint but it still works and click on it and there's the date Oh another way to do it would be to just push it down a little ways and type in 3/8 of an inch which would be half of 3/4 of an inch either way works out fine and I'm gonna hit the selection tools spacebar and one thing you'll notice is I can't select these guides now that's because those guides weren't created in this component like click away now the component is separate so these guides exist out here and that's something that may get you confused if you make a guide while a component is open up let's say let's say I made a guide right here and click on it and then I click away so I'm gonna select these two and delete those and all of a sudden wait I select this one and the odd the component itself is also selected so if I just wanted to delete this line like that and I click delete everything would be gone and that'll probably freak you out and so you don't want to do that just be aware that if you create a guide within a component you'll need to open up that component or right click Edit component and then you can select that guide and just get rid of it so if you having trouble selecting something it might be because it's part of a component the next thing I want to do is make three quarter-inch rabbits on both sides or both edges so you know there's a couple different ways to do this again I'm going to open this up I'm gonna grab my rectangle tool and probably in this case the easiest way to do it would be to start over here come down to the midpoint so I've clicked once released it'll snap at that midpoint I'm gonna click again now I'm making this rectangle and you can see it coming all along here and then it's gonna snap right at this edge at this midpoint click again so now I've got another face on there so I can switch to my P tool push pull and grab just that you can see how the faces are highlighted when you hover over them so I'm just gonna click and release there push I don't want my rabbit that big but it doesn't matter because I can click anywhere and then I'll just type in 3/4 and there's my three quarter-inch rabbit now I'm gonna rotate and do the same thing on this side and the other way you could do this is by going up here and drawing a rectangle this way that way would require me to go 20 comma 3/4 like that so that drew that rectangle on the top face then I could push pull halfway down by going 3/8 of an inch like that but the other way is probably easier you just kind of have to you know each situation is gonna be a little bit different so I'm just selecting off of everything and orbiting just taking a look at my model it's looking pretty good okay so we know this is the front here so I need to come around to the back and I need to make that quarter-inch rabbet for the back panel all I need to do is draw a line between this point and this point so that's what I'll use this this line tool it just looks like a pencil so I can start at this point and just click release and then click down here and you can see that now I've got a new face there so I'll use push/pull tool P P and push this back just a quarter-inch I can go point to five and I'll need to do the same thing on this side line tool connect these two push-pull P and I don't have to type in a quarter inch by one I can push it down but just while I'm pushing in that direction grab that end point I might have a little hard time figuring this one out at first but if you're pushing it back grab that and so it knows it's gonna be in line with that edge you might have to move it around a little bit get kind of a better view again push-pull I'm going to snap it to that edge of course you can type in quarter-inch here again but that's just a little bit easier that way and then one thing you if you want you can clean up your drawing by these two little pieces right here aren't necessary anymore there's a kind of artifacts I guess left over if you want you could select one I'm gonna hold down shift and select both of them and then just hit delete it just makes it look a little nicer but you know it doesn't really matter especially if it's just for your own use so I like to clean those up though it just makes me feel better delete alright now we've got the base of the cabinet all made I want to show you some of the beauty of using components so here's our bottom piece here the base and I know I want the top piece to be twenty five and a half inches tall that'll be the top of the the cabinet's carcass so what I want to do is first use the tape measure tool I'm just going to go straight up here and remember to always be following that guide you'll see that blue line shows up when I'm on an axis if I'm not on an axis you won't see that or even though it kind of looks like it's going up here you can see the green line is showing up so I'm actually going along that green axis that way so you want to make sure your snapped to that blue axis once you have it locked in you can hold down shift just to make sure it doesn't go anywhere so I'm gonna come up here I'm gonna click off of it and I'm gonna type in twenty five point five so that's twenty five and a half inches high so there's where I want that top cabinet to bank so instead of making that kind of from scratch like I did the base what I can do is just copy this base so I'll use my move tool M grab this point down here and I'll start sliding it up that blue axis and you can see that it's moving but to make a copy just hit ctrl just click on ctrl while you're moving it and you're making a duplicate so I'm gonna hold down shift so I'm staying on that axis and I can't go anywhere else I'm gonna slide it all the way up to here until it snaps on to that guide that I made but you can see that the component is facing the opposite direction so I need to flip it around and there's a couple ways to do that one way would be to use this rotate tool and use that you would grab a face so I don't want to grab this top face I would have to grab this front here and I would grab it right here at that midpoint it'll snap to that midpoint I'll click on it and then I can come over here and just start flipping it around and I could stop anywhere and type in say 180 I want to flip it 180 degrees and flip it around that way let me undo that another way to do it would be to click on it and then Sketchup will stop at common angle so there's a 30-degree one it snaps to 45 or 60 degree angle snaps to there it'll snap at 90 and it'll snap at 180 degrees so that would be one way to do it we undo that the third way to do it would be to use your selection tool and then you right click on you're using your mouse right click pulls up this menu and there's a flip a long option so here I'd flip along the components blue axis and gets it going that way so however you want to do it is fine but you notice right now it's too high because I want the top of this component to be even with that guide so I'll use my move tool and then slide it down again I'm using that shift key a lot whenever I move things on an axis I almost always click that shift key so it doesn't stray and then click there so you know if you want you could just double check grab the tape measure tool and come straight down here and you can see what it says 25 and a half inches but the neatest thing about components is that now that both of these are the same component on the same object whatever I do to one will happen to the other so let's say for instance I decided I wanted to put in a divider over here I wanted to add another dado so I could open this one up and I'll just stick it right here for now make a dado like that push-pull I'm going to drag it down to that where it stops and there and if you'll notice it did the exact same thing in this one so it saves you a lot of time in dealing with components that mirror each other the exact same but I don't want to do that in this case I'm gonna back out of that with control Z but on this particular project here's that top and here's the bottom panel and we move these out so you can see them these aren't duplicates of each other because I've got this drawer in here and I've got this extra divider here so while the two rabbits on the two sides and then the rabbit in the back are the same the dado in the center doesn't exist in this top one so I need to fix that on our drawing but again I can't fix the dado on this one because it would change it on this one so now that I've got these here I need to make this its own component so I'll have to right-click on it and then there's an option for make unique so I'm just going to make this its own component by clicking on that and this would probably be a good time to show you the outliner and this panel over here is what you won't be able to get on the free version online and what this does is it compiles a list of all of the components in your in your model obviously we've only got two components here so if I click on base that was what we called that one and then when I made this one a unique component it just called it base one otherwise it would also be called base but these are really handy because you can you know click on them I could hide a component I could unhide it or if I'm in my model I could select a component and then right-click on it and hide it that way and then come back over here to the outliner and unhide having that outliner makes things really organized but let's get back to filling in that dado I won't be able to let me open this up and I won't be able to use my push-pull tool because watch what happens it's bringing those rabbits down too and the reason why let me go to this back side is because I got rid of those lines remember those two lines that were on there if I had left those on there I would have been able to pull just that face out but I was eager to make it look nice but it doesn't really matter because it's easy enough to fill this in by just drawing a line I grabbed my line tool and I'll come from here to here and as soon as I connect that watch what happens let me zoom in here I grab from this point to this point click and then it fills in that face but that's only a 2-dimensional face so I've got a push-pull tool used to P and I'm gonna pull this all the way back and it'll stop when I grab this edge so you could keep going that wouldn't be very useful so I just want to stop it on that edge like that and it's filled in but it still leaves those lines in there and again I am no reason to keep those so I'm gonna click on those I'm selecting them all by holding down the shift key while I'm selecting each of these and then I'll just delete those and then I can go around to this back side and select those two selects select and delete just makes it a little bit cleaner so by making a duplicate component and then just fixing that top one it saved a lot of time rather than having to draw out each of these and I can get rid of this guide now by selecting it and deleting it now I need to make the two side panels that are gonna fit into those rabbits so those are also easy enough I'll just grab my rectangle tool and do it a couple different ways you could just make it here to here and pull pull it up this way would be one way to do it or you could use the rectangle tool and come from this point to this point and then push it over three quarters of an inch either way is fine don't forget to make that a component so I'm going to select off of it and triple click it click on G pulls up component I'm just gonna let it be called component 2 that's fine and then I'll just make a duplicate of that and bring it over to the left side so I'm going to use em and grab a point try not to just grab it in the middle there always try to grab a point because then you'll be able to snap it to another point so if I grab say this outside point I'm gonna bring it over I'm going to click control to make a duplicate I'm gonna hold down shift so that I stay on that axis and then it's gonna it's gonna snap right to that end point so now I've got two sides these two components are exactly the same next I want to make this top divider this horizontal divider here that the drawer will slide on since those two sides are the same component I could cut that dado now so I'll go back over here to my model and I know I want that drawer 3 inches high so I'm just going to use my tape measure tool and bring a guide down three inches I'll just type in 3 there now what I can do is make that dado all the way across so I'll open this up triple click that and then use my rectangle tool I'll start at that point where that arrogancy it bill better that way start at this point where you can see the guide and it intersects with that rear face and then I'll click once and then I've got my rectangle tool so I'll just bring it out until it touches this edge and click and now I just need to size that down now that it's there so I want to go Oh point seven five comma and 20 20 inches all right so there's my dado and let me push pull tool and I'm going to go half way through to the three-eighths of an inch in this case it's just gonna be easy enough to type in 3 or 3/8 3/8 of an inch now you notice what it's done here that since these since this was a copy of that side everything I do is the same obviously on this side so I need to flip this one around and rather than use that rotate tool I mostly like I prefer to use the right click flip along and sometimes I get confused which axis I'm on so I'll just have to try them so that one has seemed to work flip on read axis so now these two are facing each other and don't forget this is still the same component on both sides and I get rid of that guide now I can make that divider that shelf that goes in there again that's easy enough I can just draw a rectangle across this here and there I've got that two-dimensional face and then I'll use push/pull tool P and push this all the way back to that back edge again don't forget it'll snap on that always use those snaps click on it don't forget triple click G create component so just get in the habit of making a component every time you draw something otherwise you're just gonna have a world of problems as one thing starts to build upon another thing and then you can't separate it now I just need to make this dado in the underside of that shelf so that I can put this vertical divider that goes to that base make the way I want to do this is just take a measurement from this edge over to that dado it's 10 and 7/8 of an inch so I can just transfer that up here I'll to go over 10 space and then you do 7/8 that would be 10 and 7/8 so when you have a fraction like that just use the number a space and then the 7/8 and then to enter so there's where that edge will line up and all I could do is just draw a rectangle along that so again I need to open this and I'll grab my rectangle tool we'll start down here click up to here to that 20 inches and come over to 3/4 0.75 and push that up 3/8 or just come to the halfway point like that and get rid of the guide now I can make that divider that goes in there and again this is kind of the same thing as before click here make a rectangle and push it back to that end right there triple click G create component okay so there we've got kind of the basic carcass made now what I need to do is make these four shelves here they're actually drawer runners but instead of making just drawer runners on the sides they go all the way back here's what they look like like that and then they set in these dado so I need to create those dedos on the right side panel and that center divider for consistency I decided that these top three drawers on this side should also be 3 inches deep so I can take my tape measure tool and create a guide starting from up here and then just go down three inches and one thing you might notice is that it snapped to 3 inches SketchUp kind of knows what you're planning and so I guess it probably knows that I'd made this a three inch dimension and it's assuming that I'm going to want to repeat that over here so whenever you can kind of take advantage of those hints that's really handy so what I want to do is create the dado there but I did notice one thing is look back here I forgot that this shelf can't be 20 inches deep because I've got that quarter-inch rabbet in the back so I need to push this one back a little bit that's why it's always helpful to always be rotating your model and looking at it from all directions there now that back panel can fit in there and I I just realized one other thing is that I forgot to put the rabbits on these two side panels so so what I can do here is just open up this side panel and then I'll grab that halfway point I'll just draw a line straight through here all the way down okay so now I can push that back a quarter inch and I just line it up with that one quarter inch and this one will line up with that shelf also a quarter inch and you'll notice it did it for me automatically over on this side there okay so now we're all okay in the back so that means that these shelves in here are going to be 19 and 3/4 inches long because we don't want them the full 20 inches so what I can do is let me come back to the front here is I want to make these first three dedos three inches apart so I'm gonna take first I need to open this up and then this is where hiding this will be handy so let me just hide this side panel I'm gonna right click on it and hide okay so now I can get to this a little bit easier and see what I'm see what I'm working on here I'll open this up draw rectangle here this is gonna be 19 and a quarter 19 to 3/4 by 3/4 so it's 0.75 by 19 point 7 5 enter and that's there but rather than push this in yet since I've got others to make I can duplicate just this just like we do anything else I can copy it and move it down three inches so if I double click that it'll select just that face and the Edge's of that part now I can use my move tool and I'll move it down but I'm gonna click ctrl so that makes a copy I'm gonna move it down let's see that would be 3 and 3/4 3.75 3.75 inches so you have to account for the thickness of that wood so let me just double check that measurement should be 3 inches yeah between those so I can do the same thing one more time just AM affirm move and be careful when you're grabbing something that's part of that that you're not pulling it out that could be easy to do so you want to make sure I'm I want to make sure I'm going along that axis so I'm gonna move this one down 3 inches also control and then 3 ok so there's those well actually I need to go 3 and 3/4 so let me fix that I'll just go down another 3/4 0.75 okay so there's the 3 3 dedos for the top 3 drawers now I can push those in but before I do that I need to make them match on this right side panel so let me come over here and unhide that okay no it's on the hid now what I need to do is line these up exactly the same way so I could if these were not part of this component I could drag on and make a copy over here but since these are separate components I'd be a little bit more difficult to do so I'm just gonna repeat what I did here I guess and just come down 3 inches it's pretty quick to do it this way so I'll go make a guide coming down three inches oh I just happen to think of something look I've got both of these components and I don't want the dedos on this side so I got to remember I want to make this one unique so I'm right-clicking on it make unique okay so now these two are no longer gonna be the same I can work on this come over here and make a rectangle it's going to be 0.75 comma 19 space 3/4 so that's one way of doing that all right so I'm gonna copy and paste that just like I did before or double click that move tool em and I'm gonna move this straight down three points up five and I'll just do it again straight down 3.75 yeah just be careful when you're moving these things that you don't pull them out or they can weird things can happen there and if they start doing weird things just escape to pull out of it now I can push all of these in with my push-pull tool there's one will go to the halfway point there too you notice what I'm doing here I'm just pushing it and I'm just grabbing that corner of the next one down so that it knows where the halfway point is okay so I can come back to this come on open it up and do the same thing push halfway point push and push all right we get rid of these guides delete and delete there's going to be two board drawers which means I need to add one more shelf and this one is gonna be four and 1/8 inch down and that's just because I split the difference between here and here which ended up being a 9-inch measurement and then accounting for the 3/4 inch board so back over here I'm gonna go tape measure for space 1/8 4 and 1/8 and I can do the same thing over here while I'm at it for one eggs okay and sometimes it gets confusing it depending on the angle you're looking at you might see two of those guides and not know which one to use but you just angle it about right he'll be fine open that up rectangle and here 0.75 and push close that up and do the same over here okay I'll get rid of these guides all right so there's where the four shelves are going to go and those are all going to be identical so all I need to do on that is just make one and I'll just start here make a square and then push it back to that edge triple click G component and make that now I can do is copy that up move this upwards like this on that axis I'm going to hit control to make it copy and then just hold shift down so it's following the axis and then lock it in place and then I can do the same thing here and here okay so there's all the shelves for the drawer so it's basically the carcass is done and I can put in that back panel now if I want that's just going to be a quarter-inch plywood so you know it's gonna sit in back here from here to here and then I used a push-pull tool here you can't really see it I can I can just do it blindly but I'll hide this just so you can't see I'll push this back quarter inch point to five like that and of course triple-click gv8 component i can unhide that side okay like that and you know you might find it helpful some people don't but i like to color code everything i think you probably already aware that so i like to differentiate different parts and different components so like those vertical pieces maybe i might make them that reddish color and then i can grab this bluish color for say these horizontal pieces you know just to kind of distinguish them and then maybe the back since it's quarter-inch plywood which is completely different how about just make that yellow i mean it might look kind of funny seeing it colorful but i think it helps for me to visualize it a little bit better I guess I should point out how I'm using this paint tool this is over in this materials tray or pallet so if you drop this down you've got a further drop down menu that lets you select all different types of things you can add you know different metals even would add woodgrain like that or stone you know you texture things there's a lot of different options there but in general for plans I just like to keep it simple with just basic colors so to do that you will use that paint bucket tool over here in the tool box and then you just select whatever color you want and then if you're clicking on a component it'll color the entire component that color but if you're inside of a component you can select individual faces and just paint them alone and it won't color all of it or you could just do different colors of different faces you know whatever you want and there's a whole lot of options there for creating materials that you can add on here that I won't get into in this tutorial the project is about done I want to show you how to make one drawer and then you can kind of figure out how to make the rest of them after that so let's make this top drawer and the way the drawers I'm making on this cabinet work let me go back to the one that I've finished here is that they set back three quarters of an inch so that this custom-made handle on there is also flush with the face if you could from the side nothing sticks out and it's just kind of a way I like to make my shop cabinets so what I need to do is figure out how deep I want this to be and what I've done here let me remove this back is the drawers don't go all the way to the back I haven't stopped I just have a block here that prevents them from sliding all the way back because I think a full 20 inch drawer would just be too long and it would just be not very useful so let me pull this out this way and I can take a measurement here so that overall size of this is 15 and a half inches deep whenever I make drawers I always like to start with the face because that's the part that's gonna have the rabbit on it and you can wrap it's on both edges and that you can cut that to its exact size so what I'll do here is first I'm just gonna cover up this entire opening and that if I go down here to the bottom I can see that's 22 and a half inches by 3 inches and I'm just gonna pull this plywood piece out 3/4 of an inch point seven-five okay so there's the face of the drawer but the problem here is that you don't want drawers to fit that tight or you won't you wouldn't be able to push it in and out so what I like to do is take it down from the top a sixteenth of an inch so I'm gonna pull this down and 1/16 like that and then I'll take it in a sixteenth of an inch from each side but while I'm working on this it'll probably be easiest if one edge is lined up so what I'm going to do is pull this side in an eighth of an inch 1/8 and then when it's centered in there that'll be 1/16 of an inch gap on each side so let me triple click this and create a component okay so there's the drawer face and this will probably be easiest to work on if I pull it out so I'm gonna pull this straight on out this way and work on it over here all right so the next thing I want to do is create some rabbits for the sides to fit into and this is just like we did before we'll just make a little square here Center and when I come up 3/4 so that's 3/8 comma 3/4 all right and I'll push that all the way down so there's that rabbit whoops and I'll come over here and do the same thing okay so there's the face and making drawers is pretty easy and Sketchup because there's just two pieces you need to make there's the front and then the back we'll just make a copy of this and we're going to move it back fifteen and a half inches or whatever that was I don't have to check it again fifteen point five okay now I need to flip this around flip a long red don't last night at flip a long green that was it okay I'm just gonna draw a guide fifteen point five and move this in and remember I want to be following that guide so I'm using that I'm using the the shift key to keep it running in that direction and I'm just gonna snap it to that guide alright so there's the front and the back and then making the sides is just a piece of cake I just make a rectangle here and pull it out to here triple click it group and I'll copy it move it over to this side snap it in place okay so now all I need to do is cut a rabbet on all of these pieces on the bottom so open this one up draw a line a line push and when I just make it a quarter-inch 0.25 because I like to use quarter-inch plywood on the basis for my drawers and then same thing here I'm going to do half that distance the midpoint and push a different view here yeah okay and you notice this one here is backwards because it I didn't flip it yet so flip along blue no that wasn't it that flipped it the other wrong way okay so let's do undo flip along green no flip along right there we go I ended up doing that a lot alright so let's just put a base on this drawer this should be here to here and then I'm just going to push that up but only 0.25 inches so I don't really need to look at that triple click it and create a component okay so there is the drawer oh and I need to make the handle for it this is the way I like to make my drawer handles is I will make a rectangle and I like to have them stick out 3/4 of an inch and they're one inch one inch deep I guess so this case I want to go four inches wide so I'm going to type in 4 inches and then comma I want it one inch tall okay so there's the drawer handle now I could pull it out 3/4 0.75 it just makes it easy to cut 3/4 inch board and then at one and then just rip it one inch wide and then what I can do is take the midpoint here click that and now I'm going to come right down to this quarter not exactly sure what what that angle is but I can grab push and push this over until it stops it'll say offset limited to whatever and then that means you've gone all the way through so that's the simple way I like to make drawer handles for my shop and then I'll triple click that make that a component and then I'm just going to Center it on the drawer move tool grab the center of that at the midpoint and then I'm sliding this over holding shift down and I'm gonna find the mid pipe there's the midpoint of the drawer so I'll do is I'll grab this corner here and I'm gonna bring it straight down bring it to the midpoint right there let's see how that looks it looks about right okay now what I like to do with this component is you can either make a kind of a mega component by selecting all five pieces and then just do group again and it'll make another component which is comprised of those other components or the other thing you can do is select all of the pieces and right click and make group and it's sort of like a component but it just keeps everything together if I go over here to my outliner you can see with all of the components that make up that group are right in here so I could work on each one separately if I needed to but the group as a whole whenever I click it I can move it as a single unit so I can grab the M and push this back straight back on that green axis okay so now remember I had this lined up on this side so I'm gonna push this back till it stops there but I want this to go back another 3/4 of an inch so this handle doesn't stick out so I'm gonna go straight back and I could just constrain it to that point that's 3/4 of an inch there then what I need to do is I want to center that sixteenth of an inch over m and move it over one sixteenth whoops I didn't do it right one sixteenth of an inch so that's Center and there's the top drawer and since these are all grouped together if I wanted to I could color that drawer all at once everything in that drawer is gonna be the same color I don't usually do it that way but you know something you can think about before I put these last drawers in here it just occurred to me that I actually made this 2 inches wider than I was intending to that the top there's gonna be a top that goes over the carcass top is what's gonna be 24 inches wide and I made this 24 inches wide so actually I need to shrink this down by 2 inches so I thought this would be actually a good thing I could show you is how to fix things that happen because this kind of thing happens all the time so obviously I don't have to change anything here so I'm going to do is hide this side panel and I need to move each this side in one inch and then I'll need to move this side in one inch also just so that this will remain centered so all I'm going to do is select this shelf and push it one inch and then I can do these all at once because they're all components one inch and then these top and bottom pieces here all I got to do is adjust the rabbit so I'm going to move the rabbit in one inch and then the edge here one inch and same for the top one inch come over here and the exact same thing on this side okay now I've got it sized down to its proper size oh no it took a couple of minutes just make a few adjustments there here's the other five drawers I made them exactly the same way as I made that top one these three I just made one and copied it two more times and in here I made one and just copied it again now I can make that top for that and this what time see if I get this right it's gonna be 22 inches by 24 inches so I'll just make it here same as that come up point seven-five okay so there's the top and I know that right here I'm looking at 22 inches I want that to be 24 inches and this dimension is 20 inches I want that 22 so here again I can just pull 1 inch from each side and then that way I won't have to try to Center it on there it'll just be kind of automatically centered and finally on my model I added those casters and that those are 5 inch casters so that you know accounted for the overall height of this unit and I don't make components like that you can get those on the Sketchup website so in my case using Sketchup make I just go to window 3d warehouse and you'll see the 3d warehouse and it's really neat because anybody who creates anything in Sketchup can upload it on there and just share it with anybody so here you can just search for casters in fact let me just try see how I did this before five inch casters and yeah so you can see there's people have made just different versions of it so this is probably the one that I grabbed when I first did it you can click on it it'll give you a little bit of overview on it show you how many times it's been downloaded you know four thousand people have downloaded this you can like it and so it's a it's a really neat way to get pieces for your project that you don't want to have to spend the time making yourself so you can just download this and it'll load it directly into your model so I'll just say yes and boom there it is so I'll click here and I'll pull it down so the one thing I noticed about this one is that it wasn't five inches and so that posed a problem for me so let me show you what I did this is move it over here to make something this complicated I mean it's got a lot of different pieces to it to size it down to five inches the way to do that the way I do it is to use this tool this is the scale tool here and that lets you take all of the pieces for it and scale it down to whatever size you want and if you grab it on the corners here it'll scale it evenly you could grab it you know this way and stretch it way out what you probably don't want to do so what I need to do is make this five inches and you can't just size this down and you know type in five inches because it goes percentage scale so I guess you'd have to know the actual percentage size you need to make it so what I like to do is this I'll make a guide here I'm gonna come straight down on that blue axis five inches so I know that this is where the caster should be is along that line and then what I want to do is make kind of a floor or basically a plane down here let's see something like this and I'm just gonna push this down a little bit okay so you can imagine that this is the floor here and I'm just gonna stretch it out in a couple of different directions so you can see that's sinking into the floor so I'll grab that scale tool again and I'm gonna just start shrinking this down until it fits in there and I want to make sure that this is up to the top it's looking pretty good I need to come down a little bit more so I'll just sighs this until it looks like it's starting to sink into the floor they're right about like that okay so that's good enough and you know really if you're just designing a project for yourself you wouldn't really have to get that you know technical for it with that you could just make a square cube here a 5-inch cube to represent the caster but wait I just happen to think of something else I wanted to do I wanted to add some support strips underneath this cabinet to hold these screws that for these casters and let me move this out of the way and we hide the floor so I'm just going to cut some 3-inch strips of plywood I'll go 22:22 by three inches okay and 27:5 okay so there's one plywood strip and I'm going to move it copy it and move it back here and then I'll use this way this way then I can just push this back three inches three inches and group that copy that one over okay so now the base has a lot more support to it so one thing I like to do is I'd assume that kind of a presentation standpoint I'd rather have these brakes on the casters facing forward so I need to rotate this out here let me grab the rotate tool make it on that face and then I'll just rotate this 90 degrees and go m-move and move it back here and slide it back like that okay now I can just copy those move this over control to copy so I've got those two now what I can do is grab this one and that one and copy them both at the same time by control and then sliding this one over in this way yeah yeah that should be pretty good so the 3d warehouse is where I got the compressor and the drill press there's a lot of different versions on there that people have made so I like to put those on there just to kind of give me an idea of what it might look like and also on this version in addition to those cleats in the back when you're hired here in addition to this cleat and I'm gonna have to put other cleats back here I wanted to put this small little strip up here to prevent that compressor from moving forward it has a tendency to want to vibrate and it might slide off there so that'll that'll keep it in place and finally there's a couple other tools I want to show you that Sketchup has that you'll probably find useful the first one is this dimension tool that will let you label your parts of the dimensions of your parts so if you grab like this board here I can grab a point from here to here and then pull this over and it automatically tells you what the dimension of that board is here to here it only works from point to point so you can't just grab it won't let you grab a spot like in the middle of a board and that's real handy so that you can have two of all of your parts as you can take into your shop and follow another thing is is if you want to create a two-dimensional version of this you know that you can print out you can file export and then it allows you to export a 2d graphics I usually save them as a PNG a ping file and then from there I can bring them into another program to you know set up to make the entire set of plans one thing Sketchup doesn't do very well at all is print if you were trying to print this it would look it would come out really tiny on your sheet of paper the only the way this works in Sketchup is Sketchup prints based on your window size so you have to size this window down to you know about an eight and a half by eleven dimensions like this and then you could try to print that out I'm not sure if that's any different on the free web version or not but generally I never print directly from Sketchup I always create the 2d images and then I bring those into InDesign is how I do it and then from there I can create a PDF of all of the pieces a couple other tools you might find useful or the camera positions here you can look at it from the top gives you a straight down view or you know here's like the front on view and then you can also change the perspective I almost always work in perspective view and then some people like to use this parallel projection view and I think it just looks it makes everything really weird-looking but I think it comes from an architectural design kind of way of thinking and not exactly sure what it does here I think what happens is each opposite side is supposed to be parallel or something but I think it just looks weird and contorted so I never use that view of not really not really sure what it's for there's also the follow me tool here which people use when you're going to be made King say a roundover edge along the corner or some sort of like an OG profile you would use that follow me tool and I never use it because I don't really feel like my plans need that level of detail when I decide to make those profiles in furniture I'll just do that in this shop I don't really need to have that in my plans and then some of these other tools you probably won't use that often and hopefully those were the basics and enough to get you started so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial thanks for watching

Channel: Steve Ramsey - Woodworking for Mere Mortals

Views: 693,081

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking project, how-to, DIY, easy woodworking, steve ramsey, WWMM, Mere Mortals, The Weekend Woodworker, woodworking plans, Free plans, wood, making, building, makers, hobby, weekend projects, Weekend Woodworker, power tools

Id: r2K6gmcc_jA

Length: 82min 15sec (4935 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020