On Sun, 05 Jul 2020 19:03:16 -0700, pyotr filipivich
wrote:

on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 18:46:45 -0400 typed in
rec.woodworking the following:

It's a lot easier to move a mouse than to move a jointer!

Yep. Although I'm old school. Shapes (to scale) cut from graph
paper, moved around a drawing of the room/space.

Of late, I have done the "furniture/object" is N inches (round
up), and that adds up to (punch Calculator) __ leaving enough room for
that to fit there, and gappage between things because you never know.
Then draft them up on the Rotring board. Yeah, some day I will have
to learn Sketchup or equivalent. OTOH, for me, I don't need precise
drawings, just some idea of what it is I intend to do.

Sketchup is a must. It's overkill for laying out a room, though I
recently used it for laying out (really, thinking though) a beam to
put a hoist on in my shop. It's 13' between walls, which makes the
beam layout[*] a bit important (The Sagulator helped a lot too ;-)

Sketchup is a must have for woodworking, IMO.

[*] Twin double 2x8s bolted together with the hoist suspended on a
couple of pieces of 2x2x3/16" angle iron spanning the top of the
beams.

When I get to the point I need something serious detailed, then
some CAD will be in the works. As I said when I started the
retraining program: last time I was 'drafting' it was all pencil and
paper. "Computer Aided Drafting" was SCi-Fi and probably meant we'd
have robots doing the final inking.

Sketchup is not CAD. It's a modeling program. If you go into it
thinking it's CAD, you'll *never* pick it up. The process is
backwards.

The advantage to CAD is revisions. I don't have to redraw the
entire plan just to move a hole an inch.

Huh? You do know the 'C' is for "computer", right?