"Marty" wrote in message
...

I have been using Sketchup for a few months now to design several projects
and am generally very happy with it.

I say generally, because "out of the box" it is time consuming and even at
times difficult to create the detailed drawings needed to build a
woodworking project. In several instances multiple files needed to be
created for a project.

With anything worth learning it takes time, your mileage may vary. I came
from AutoCAD LT, thought it was easy to learn but learning Sketchup was damn
easy. It all depends on your drafting and CAD background. I have quite a
bit of experience with several CAD and CAD style programs, Sketch us
definately worth learning.




My comments are about the free version because, after looking
at what the "pro" version feature set is, it doesn't seem have features
that I would find useful. Besides which, I also don't have that kind of
money lying around.

I bought a Dummies guide to Sketchup which helped a lot with the mechanics
of using the program, but much
of the book wrote about the pro version which did does not seem to help
with building a woodworking project directly from the Sketchup drawings.

I have two projects on the drawing board now that require
two separate drawings for each, one showing the as built design and
another showing an exploded view (manually exploded since I can't find a
way for the program to explode a project) where I can add dimensions and
other notations that I can build from.

If you properly make each part of the project into a component, exploding
takes little time. I typically can manually explode a 100 + part project in
a couple of minutes. Keep in mind that you do no have to dimension you
parts to understand their actual sizes. There are numerous plugins for
Sketchup that will determine the number of pieces and the sizes each needs
to be, I use Cutlist 4.0 as that plugin and that will give you what you
need to know. However I take it a step farther and use Cutlist 4.0 to creat
an import file for Cutlist Plus for determined cut lists and cost and sale
reports.
You need not explode a project for Cutlist 4.0 to do it's magic.




For example, these projects each have a face frame with multiple
components, each of which needs dimensions added, so the face frame needs
to be separated from the carcass. Then the carcass needs to "taken apart"
and details of the design (dado', rabbit' etc) annotated and add
dimensions. Then doors need to be exploded and design details and
dimensions added. I could go on but you get the idea.

See above



At the very least I wish the program had the ability to add pages to the
drawing so all of the design for a project would be in one file. I could
then copy sub-assemblies (like doors, drawers, face frames etc) from one
page to another, take apart the sub-assembly and annotate as needed. Also
the ability to take apart a sub-assembly in a consistent manner would be
nice. Are you listening Sketchup program designers?

You do not need seperate files, you simply need to copy what you want, to
another area of the drawing. You have an infinite drawing area with each
file.



I have added a cut list plug-in that helps with the cut list, but it
is also requires some manipulation to get the results I need to buy
materials and machine the parts.

See above, what manipulations are you talking about?

It does help to give each component a material name to seperate components
make of different materials.