On 7/1/2013 8:38 PM, Leon wrote:
On 7/1/2013 3:04 PM, Greg Guarino wrote:
On 7/1/2013 3:00 PM, SonomaProducts.com wrote:

I am not sure why you have the two pieces so close along the bottom.

The other bookshelves sit on a set of cubbyhole units, and have 1x3
maple as the bottom of the face frame. I intend to carry this same
"design" over for the "bridge", but the bottom of the bridge will be
above eye height and will thus be seen. So the bottom piece of ply is to
make the bottom of the unit flush with the face frame. The pieces above
that will hold books and bric-a-brac flush with the top of the face
frame 1x3.

Leon has suggested that this is not necessary, that the face frame can
hang down below the actual bottom shelf. So far I don't think I like the
(imagined) look of that. But at this point I may redesign the whole
thing a few times before I build it anyway.

That's one benefit of having no spare time; you get to devote a lot of
thinking to the project before there's an opportunity to build it.

Now if you would learn to use Sketchup you would not have to imagine how
anything would look. You could see exactly, at any angle, how it would
look.

With my (so far) simple designs, I think my ability to visualize is
pretty decent. Having said that, I have done some Sketchup drawings of
various things, and this design would be within my Sketchup skills. But
after having built the main bookcases in the same style, I felt that 2D
CAD would be more straightforward for sussing out the dadoes.

Maybe there's an easier way I haven't discovered yet, but the 3D nature
of Sketchup forces it to "guess" which plane I want to move a component
in, and it guesses wrong all too often.

Just last night I was trying to do a sketch of a simple open shelf with
wooden (kind-of trapezoidal) uprights at each end. I drew one end piece,
with the dado that would accept the shelf. Then I copied it, scaled it
to "-1" to make a mirror image piece (there's probably a more sensible
way) and attempted to fit the piece onto the other end of the shelf.
That must have required four or five rotations of view, zooms and
aborted attempts before I could get the component in the vicinity of the
right location. Sketchup seems to take a perverse pleasure in moving the
piece further and further from where I want it to go.

When 2D will do, I tend to use it.